‘Race’ is the same word in French and English, suggesting equivalency, portability, and mutual intelligibility of the term. Yet in the early twentieth century, the word did different work in each language depending on time and place, often creating misunderstandings between Francophone and Anglophone interlocutors on how to fight racism. One instance of such divergent ‘race’ histories was the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911. Organized by progressive philanthropists in Britain and the United States, the Congress attracted a global constellation of scholars, statesmen, diplomats, and activists to discuss how to diminish the inter-racial tensions internationally. Anglophone attendees spoke readily about the need to study ‘race relations’ scientifically to better manage conflicts between colonizer and colonized. French social scientists neither attended the Congress nor evinced interest in the very concept of ‘race’ contact. A comparison of English and French participation in London makes clear that modern colonialism produced different racial epistemologies in Francophone and Anglophone spaces, ones that only began to converge after decolonization.

In 1950 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) published the first of two Statements on race,The Race Concept. The document was intended to bring the full weight of scientific authority to the condemnation of racism, and specifically, the kind of racism that had characterised the National Socialist regime in Hitler’s Germany during the Second World War. Whilst many were enthusiastic about the unequivocal condemnation of racial thinking and racism contained in The Race Concept, others saw it as a threat to the principles underpinning the scientific disciplines of anthropology, ethnology and biology, and publicly attacked it. A second statement, The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry, was published by UNESCO in 1951 in an attempt to address these critiques. This chapter situates both statements and their reception within broader debates about the constitution of science and the responsibilities of scientists in the post‑war period. Rather than marking a decisive break from scientific racism, as has often been argued, the statements reveal the persistence of epistemic structures that positioned scientific thought itself as evidence of European civilizational superiority. In this light, UNESCO’s efforts illustrate how anti‑racist projects could simultaneously reinforce racialized power.

Social work’s fundamental roots in social justice and human rights have fostered an urgent call for social workers to actively engage in antiracist social work practice. However, social workers face the challenge of translating theoretical concepts into concrete antiracist practices and interventions. This chapter aims to provide one approach social workers may adopt to integrate Critical Race Theory (CRT) in clinical settings. Introducing the practice tool of CRT-informed “if-then” heuristics, we focus on translating three CRT tenets into antiracism praxis recommendations: Social Construction of Race, Racism as Ordinary, and Intersectionality. We briefly describe each tenet’s theoretical contributions, introduce its related heuristic, and propose its implications for clinical practice. We also include considerations for clinical supervision and antiracist organizational leadership. Presenting a table summary of the CRT-informed “if-then” heuristics, corresponding reflexive questions, and a case vignette activity, we offer social workers several practical tools to guide efforts toward an antiracism praxis.

This chapter places the Cuban experience in a broader, Afro-Latin American context. It highlights some similarities and differences with other Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on Brazil, where scholarship about artists of African descent is considerably more advanced. As we begin the difficult task of reconstructing the lives and contributions of artists of African descent across the region, new cartographies in the art history of Latin America emerge. For example, the historiographic project linked to San Alejandro appears to have been uniquely successful, as it is possible to identify larger numbers of artists of African descent in other countries during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the presence of Afro-Cuban artists in early twentieth-century Europe was not unique, although the Cubans were there in larger numbers. Many of these artists, like their Cuban peers, were excluded from the new “modern art” that emerged under European influences in the interwar period and were relegated to the corners of academic, “pre-modern,” art. The chapter highlights intriguing parallelisms between Cuba and Brazil, which persist even after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

According to the research, white teacher candidates may have negative attitudes towards urban students and schools (Bazemore-Bertrand & Porcher, 2020; Hampton et al., 2008). However, research also finds that carefully designed experiences outside of university classrooms can heighten learning and have a significant impact on preparing teacher candidates to teach in urban school settings (Bazemore-Bertrand & Handsfield, 2019; Porcher et al., 2020; Porcher, 2021). Partnerships between universities and urban schools offer chances to expose teacher candidates to teaching practices that are rooted in diversity, equity, and antiracism which in return prepares them to effectively teach not just in urban schools, but in all schools. In this chapter, the author shares the results of a School–University partnership (SUP) that centered around preparing teacher candidates to teach in urban schools. Specifically, the author described the benefits and challenges regarding designing a SUP with urban schools that center equity and antiracism.

Edited by two Chicana lesbian feminists and formed through commitment to coalitional Third World feminist analysis and practice, This Bridge Called My Back urges us to attend to the conflicts and pleasures that emerge from the radical transformation of the self in relation to others as we struggle for liberation. In the forty years since the anthology’s original publication, we continue to bear witness to the destructive outcomes of neoliberalism and to those who are still consigned to disproportionately bear the brunt of modernity’s violence. We are compelled to address the betrayals of those spaces of solidarity and the use of violence to reclaim difference as an amenity of traditional power. Making domination “make sense” often occurs by recruiting representatives of subordinated populations into normative locations of institutional power. The tokenized investment in women of color as fixed symbols of progressive politics illustrates how even the celebration of racial difference can function as a technology of racist power. I argue that bridge building is also about place making or the radical vision of a space for new social relations and terms of recognition. Radical methodologies for creating art participate in this process of gathering political will to oppose racial power.

In the late 1960s, Angela Davis and other Black activists asserted that racism was a fundamental component of fascism, and thus fascism became term and framework that Black activists used to describe the federal and state policies and practices that fostered racial inequities or obstructed Black people from achieving justice and equality. Despite the term’s origins in Europe, Black activists, such as Davis, used terms such as “fascism” and “genocide” as both a rhetorical tool and analytical framework which they hoped would wake up and compel the American public to demand an end to policies, both within and outside the American federal and state governmental apparatus. This chapter explores the contours of Black of antiracism and antifascist activism in the 1960s to the 1980s – from struggles against white supremacist collusion with the FBI and local police to assassinate black activists to the fight against state policies, such as forced sterilization of poor Black and Latina women, or the “ghettoization” of Black people in the 1970s.

This chapter demonstrates ways in which Darwin challenged aspects of Enlightenment thought, including racial and sexual hierarchies, gendered stereotypes and androcentric perspectives. In doing so, he called into question Cartesian dualism—the separation of mind and body—and its colonial implications in configuring the body as unruly and in need of subjection to a scientific control that was masculine and European. Situating Darwin’s work in relation to contemporary political debates over race, slavery, and sex, it explores the forceful argument against innatism presented by Darwinian evolution, which undid biologistic arguments for biologically determined roles or behaviors, and shows that while he is often assumed to have occupied a separate and opposing camp to John Stuart Mill, which foregrounded biology rather than ethics, Darwin and Mill in fact shared notable common ground. It argues that, in a climate emergency and at a time of devastating and rising global poverty, Darwin’s strong sense of interdependence and interrelations counters authoritarian disregard for the vulnerable and disadvantaged.

This chapter considers the growth of what we characterise as a transitional public sphere that bridged the private domains of individual struggles against racial attacks, racist practice, and far-right politics with the public domain of mainstream politics. Struggles against racism have often shared an ongoing ambivalence about the imperative to raise profile and move from the margins to the centre of political debate. The need for political autonomy and agency sits, at times, in tension, with the need to build broad alliances and political efficacy. Campaigns demand profile but are always liable to charges of co-optation. The struggle for unity over racial dilemmas sits alongside recognition of the pluralities of intersectional struggles in gender, class, sexuality, diverse ethnicities, and religious faith that at times cross over with linked considerations of legal status of migrants and refugees. In this context, the emergence of a transitional public sphere of antiracism in the 1980s and 1990s is considered through a detailed analysis of this sphere of political action.

The through line of American history is a persistent trauma of dispossession epitomized in W. E. B. DuBois’s prescient words: “I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth, forever and forever, Amen!” This form of whiteness is also the defining feature of the contemporary maelstrom of racial unrest. To acquiesce to only one form of whiteness locks the racialized reader into a narrow, overdetermined praxis aligned with proprietary aggression. This book is, however, rooted in a creative and emancipatory set of antiracist possibilities. These alternate possibilities are assigned the term "forms of whiteness" as a re-imagining of the reader’s positionality in the culture and the world; a resolve to grapple with the multiple ways of disassociating from the malignant monopoly of systemic whiteness; and a determination to undo patterns and practices of denial and discrimination within literary studies. Building on the conclusions of Chapter 5, the Epilogue meditates more fully on scholarly practice within an ethics of coaction that translates research and pedagogic inquiry into lived experience and public life.