It takes courage to stick your neck out and push back against racism, whether it be to contest the use of racial epithets during a one-on-one conversation or to challenge institutional practices that produce racially disparate outcomes. Summoning courage is easier to do when you know that women, men, and children before you played their own part in resisting the racialized dehumanization of their day. In Antiracism: An Introduction, Alex Zamalin provides a primer on the history of those who pushed back against anti-Black racism, and identifies the theoretical ties that bind their myriad efforts, despite the variation of their ideologies and practices. Bridging the past with the present, Zamalin compels his readers to think about how they can carry on the antiracist tradition in this current phase of competing racial orders (see King and Smith Reference King and Smith2005).
Zamalin begins by recovering the radical meaning of antiracism from contemporary standards where one passes as antiracist by not being a bigot or in rejecting only the most intentional discrimination. Though he acknowledges that antiracism has no singular political ideology, he asserts, “Essential to the tradition is a direct and ongoing confrontation with the philosophy of racism, the individuals who embrace its ideas, and the structures and institutions that perpetuate it” (p. 7). His focus is on anti-Black racism and the Black historical figures who dedicated their lives to its erasure.
Elevating commonalities over tensions within antiracism, Zamalin dedicates the second chapter to illustrate antiracists’ shared conceptualization of racism. This overview reads as a theoretical treatise on “America's original sin,” emphasizing the contextual and systemic nature of racial oppression. The author explains how Black antiracists of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries attributed the sources of racism to the agency of human beings who exercised power and created hierarchies. Many of us today take for granted the idea that racial dominance is socially constructed and nefarious, but he reminds us that for much of U.S. history, white supremacy was understood by most whites to be a God-given right or a result of natural selection. Black antiracists rejected these claims outright and, in the process, forced one reckoning after another about the purposes of racism and the depraved lengths individuals and institutions would go to in order to secure their power and standing. He is keen to illustrate how antiracists were not solely concerned with the advocates of racist philosophy and practice, but also that they were suspicious and vocal about the role of white moderates. By highlighting the many ways that antiracists unmasked the farce of white innocence, Zamalin reminds readers that antiracism is radical and uncompromising.
In chapters 3 and 4, he summarizes antiracists’ response to racism by identifying hallmarks of their political theory and practice, respectively. These chapters are especially important for today's undergraduate students who arrive to college with an astonishing dearth of knowledge about historical collective resistance to racism, especially the modern Civil Rights Movement. Here the book situates the neophyte in a lineage of antiracism that they may otherwise have thought about as disjointed historical periods (e.g., abolitionism and Black labor radicalism). Alongside the household names of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, repeated mention of lesser-known figures like David Walker, Martin Delany, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, and Kwame Ture (formerly, Stokely Carmichael) will broaden the reader's understanding of what Black people have been up against in the United States and how they have agitated, organized, and inspired others to fight racial hierarchy. Tying in the world of Black art as a site of political expression, Zamalin's incorporation of Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Nina Simone, Alain Locke, and Spike Lee will help readers understand how politics and culture mirror one another and advance antiracist agendas.
The book's concluding chapter is as much a call to ingest the substantive legacy of antiracism in order to fuel resistance to today's racial dangers, as it is an effort to identify pitfalls of uncritical antiracism. In earlier chapters, we get a taste of Zamalin's own theoretical contributions, but here they are on fuller display. I appreciate how he complicates the trend of college campus dialogs that urge the acknowledgment of identity based privileges, not because they aren't useful in helping people understand their social location and agency, but because of their tendency to “moralize political problems and individualize collective problems” (p. 136), potentially distracting even well-intentioned people from keeping their eyes on the material dehumanization that undermines the well-being of Black people. In one of his more unexpected critiques, he makes a nuanced argument against framing issues like rape and sexual assault as evidence of “moral deviance”; they instead should be tackled as “structural power disparities.” Though other scholars have made this argument before, his rationale is distinctly antiracist because, as he argues, the bifurcation of people into discrete categories of good and bad ultimately “promotes a hierarchical worldview.” While some use the term “predator” to describe “powerful white men accused of sexual violence” (p. 143), the trappings of binary language end up being far more detrimental when used to describe people of color (i.e., Hillary Clinton's use of “superpredator” to argue the effectiveness of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act).
Antiracism’s ambition is sweeping, and like all introductory level texts, the book abbreviates some details in order to cover a lot of ground. Zamalin, however, is generous in planting seeds in the minds of curious readers who are motivated to continue their study of the specific individuals, organizations, efforts, and concepts that he weaves into his narrative. Few short books, for example, so effectively stich together such aims as Malcolm's vision for the Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU), King's concept of agape, the satirical insight of George Schuyler's Black No More, and Mamie Till's decision to have an open-casket funeral for her son, Emmett. I recommend Antiracism as a useful compendium for courses in American politics, political theory, social movements, and race and ethnic politics.
