Conclusion: Black futures

Chapter 7 concludes the book’s examination of ‘postracial’ rearticulations of race and class in Britain. It argues that, as an analytical framework, Critical Race Theory’s emphasis on racial realism contains both pragmatic and idealistic elements. CRT is often unwelcome in public debate precisely because it reveals that state postracialism does not resist racism but instead maintains racism at manageable levels. As such, state postracialism – a facile, conservative postracialism – has a critically important stabilising role and seeks to become permanent, to secure dominance. The delegitimisation of radical antiracism that parallels facile postracialism also seeks to be a permanent political feature. As such Britain’s culture wars, which have given discursive space to colourblindness, to ‘contra-’ antiracism and to the elimination of Black and Brown communities from Britain’s class matrix, should be recognised as a deadly serious political project to build and sustain conservative hegemony. New strains of Black Atlantic thought may offer spaces for an authentic and radical postracialism but, at present, we remain closer to the social world recognised by Bell and his CRT peers.