Against antiracism

Facile postracialism requires a parallel discourse that is aggressively antagonistic to antiracist movements: a kind of ‘contra-’ antiracism. Postracialism and contra-antiracism are symbiotic because if racism is supposed to have declined in social salience, then those who continue to campaign for racial justice must be treated with suspicion, as divisive voices, even as ‘reverse racists’. The ‘contra-’ position aims to delegitimise antiracism, not merely through a hopeful ‘moving on’ narrative but through a discourse of derision and, more seriously, through the machinery of the state. This ‘contra-’ discourse depicts antiracism not just as anachronistic but as actively dangerous and against fundamental British values and culture. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which, in 21st-century Britain, overtly racist and nationalistic discourses of past decades have been rearticulated in modes that are less directly racist but which aim instead to discredit belief in racial justice. In particular, this chapter focuses on the shift between pre-and post-George Floyd antagonisms. After summer 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, critics of antiracism and multiculturalism ‘gone-too-far’ sought new discursive spaces, urging moral panics against, for instance Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory and the Colston statue protests.