Discussions of contemporary white supremacy are seemingly everywhere: the election of Donald Trump and the January 6th insurrection, the murder of George Floyd, Brexit, the rise of the Alternative Right and white supremacist violence, and the coordinated efforts to deny racism and not educate children about the history and contemporary reality of race.
This blog captures some of the thoughts that struck me when I read Nasar Meer’s latest book – The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice. The book is a tour de force of concepts relating to the historical and its impact on the contemporary.
The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice guides us through a series of pertinent questions, not at all easy to answer but as Nasar Meer encourages us to think about, foundational to the legacy of anti-racist praxis past, present and future.
I recently attended a Political Theology seminar. This movement has emerged, largely, through the Liberationist Theologians who have created power from the margins as we have challenged everything from decoloniality (imposed power based on both race and ethnicity) to other forms of inequity.
After recently writing a blog on hegemonic whiteness in the higher education classroom, my CERES colleagues invited me to reflect further on ‘white backlash’, or ‘pushback’ particularly from those who would deem themselves pro-social justice.
There is currently revived interest across disciplines and educational institutions to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ (Arshad, 2020). There are many layers to this, from diversifying reading lists to unpacking racist underpinnings of key concepts, from deconstructing representations of history to hiring more Black and Minority Ethnic staff.
On 8th September 2021, a crowd gathered on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, USA, near the base of its iconic statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The atmosphere in the crowd was jubilant as workers positioned a crane, wrapped the statue in a harness, and finally–after an hour of preparation, a year of court cases, and 131 years of racial terror set in stone–pulled the statue down from its plinth.
In this critical moment of race relations in America, a sustainable black-white allyship in favour of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is already slipping away, as tracked by national polling data.
Media coverage of recent police killings of Black citizens, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the related Black Lives Matter protests, have reignited a long-smouldering national conversation about race in America.
For the past few months I have felt like I am in one elongated Zoom training, attempting to disentangle white feelings and embedded racist ideologies – including my own.
© 2023 All rights reserved | The University of Edinburgh
