What Is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism By ArunKundnani, London: Verso. 2023. p. 304. £16.99. ISBN: 9781839762765

Abstract

At first glance, Arun Kundnani's latest book, What Is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism could be mistaken for yet another text of the kind that proliferated in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. Such internationally best-selling books-including Robin D'Angelo's White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism-were often written by academics yet pitched at general readers newly-engaged in questions of racism and what to do about it. Yet the analysis (or, rather, lack thereof) of racism popularised in these works is precisely what Kundnani's discussion takes aim at. In this sense, the pithy title and eye-catching front cover of What is Antiracism? belies its commitment to an alternative story of antiracism which, as I outline below, relies on a much more careful interrogation of racism's relationship to capitalism. The book's opening chapters chart the emergence of a liberal tradition of antiracism in Europe and the US in the wake of the Second World War. This was an antiracism narrowly preoccupied with 'individual racial attitudes, feelings and beliefs' (p. 40), perfectly compatible with the neocolonialism and imperialism of the post-war era and, as Kundnani's critique of D'Angelo's book in the Introduction demonstrates, one which continues to be eminently marketable. However, as Kundnani goes on to show, the spread of this liberal antiracism was matched by a radically different vision borne out in the struggles for decolonisation in the 'Third World'. In tracing the development of this alternative antiracism, Kundnani offers us an expansive, historically rigorous, yet wholly readable account of racism's entanglements with capitalism. Crucially, he does this through the thinking and organising of those who sought to grapple with them-the 'characters' of this other antiracism, to use Kundnani's term (p. 6). As such, the book approaches the question 'what is antiracism?' via the problem of what precisely we mean by racism, and more specifically structural racism. Theories of racial capitalism offer the most convincing answer to this dilemma according to the author, with Kundnani combining the work of various anti-colonial thinkers-from Kwame Nkrumah to Stuart Hall-to 'stretch' Marxist accounts of capitalist development, as per Frantz Fanon's dictum. Against the grain of liberal framings of antiracism, here racism is understood as fundamentally connected to the needs of capital. More than a mere ideological cover for capitalism, racism acquires its own material force.Such an analysis has various practical and theoretical implications for those working in the discipline of sociology, not least in relation to the content of our teaching on 'race' and racism, as well as what our antiracist practices look like within and beyond the academy. Perhaps the book's most valuable contribution, however, comes from its consideration of racisms in the context of neoliberalism. In later chapters, Kundnani extends seminal accounts of racial capitalism from the likes of Cedric Robinson...