Introduction: ‘no place in our society’

Chapter 1’s Introduction comprises an overview of contradictions between colour-coded racism and the contemporary postracial turn in Britain. This Introduction explains why this book takes Critical Race Theorist Derrick Bell’s ‘racial realism’ as the starting point for critiquing Britain’s postracialism. Bell’s anti-utopian critique of liberal race equality saw struggles for racial justice embedded in a permanent cycle of progress and regression: a cycle that would not be readily relinquished. Subsequent CRT analyses have argued that one of the most effective ways of maintaining racism as a means of structuring power is through colourblind, postracial discourses and policies that allow the simultaneous disavowal of crude racism and the rearticulation of racism in more subtle forms. This chapter discusses Britain’s attachment to facile models of postracialism and the dominant desire for the phenomenological disappearance of problems of race and racism. These have produced a contemporary state postracialism: a kind of ‘really existing postracialism’, in which ‘anything but racism’ explanations of social inequality dominate, and in which Britain’s non-racist self-image is a cover for minimising the lived experiences of communities of colour. The chapter argues that analyses of postracialism in Britain should draw upon lessons from Black Atlantic scholarship, including CRT.