The New Racial Regime

As Robin D.G. Kelley puts it, 'anti-wokeness is the perfect example of the functioning of the racial regime.' Taking the reader beyond the distracting framings of culture wars and moral panics, Alana Lentin shows how the attacks on Black, Indigenous and anticolonial thought and praxis reveal the processes through which racial colonial rule is ideologically resecured. Throughout the book, the often chaotic and contradictory restitching of the racial regime is traced through the attacks on Critical Race Theory; the 'whitelash' against the teaching of histories of slavery and colonialism; the counterinsurgent capture and institutionalization of antiracism, Indigeneity and decoloniality in the interests of Zionism, settler colonialism, and imperialism; and how the state mandated 'war on antisemitism' reforms white supremacism at an acute time of genocide. While the racial regime undergoes constant recalibration, its inherent instability is the consequence of continual resistance from below. Maintaining and deepening that resistance is vital at a time of rapidly mounting fascism.