I first became aware of Professor Lentin several years ago while watching a video of a Politics in the Pub session in inner Sydney devoted to racism. Apart from the turgid theorizing, I was struck by Lentin matter-of-factly describing the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri as a "racist murder", at a time when it was known definitively that it was nothing of the kind, a claim she repeated in a scholarly article.
Cootes' piece provides an excellent short overview of the kind of thinking exemplified in Lentin's book, Why Race Still Matters. It has some interesting twists, such as her rejection of that postmodern favorite, social constructionism, the idea that race is not in essence, about phenotypical differences like skin colour, but rather power and hierarchy. If so, why talk obsessively about "whiteness".
So what is the alternative? Lentin describes racism as a "technology for the management of human difference", and asks "what does race do?". She also juxtaposes "not racism", people denying that they bear no racial animus, with what she calls "anti-racism", which boils down to a specific kind of activism exemplified by BLM. Perhaps she should be asking "what does anti-racism do?" What has activism of the BLM type wrought? Disempowered police forces, an explosion in homicide rates in inner-urban black areas, innumerable destroyed livelihoods among the very people the ideology purports to champion.
Like all these works, the book under review, Alana Lentin’s Why Race Still Matters, is immitigably dreary, but in its own special way. Lentin, Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University, brings to the race debate a much heavier reliance on academic twaddle. The advantage, as I see it, is that this book is significantly more unreadable than the rest in the genre, and this places some welcome limits on its ability to influence anyone’s outlook.
I don’t want to be entirely negative, so I should add that the book offers a few laughs, although they are unintentional. Take, for example, this nice bit of throat-clearing in the introduction:
Today, as a privileged multiple migrant, having moved from Europe to Australia in 2012, I unwillingly perhaps, but unavoidably nevertheless, participate in the colonization of yet another unceded territory, the Gadigal country in otherwise named Sydney, Australia.
With that self-flagellating confession out of the way, Lentin moves to the big topics, one of which I also rather like: the attention she pays to the idea that race is a social construct, a mantra that has entered the public consciousness. The social construction of race, as those who read too much Foucault remind us, usually means that race has no real biological element; rather, it has meaning and hierarchy and whatnot assigned to it by those with power.
Interestingly, Lentin has also had enough with the social constructionists. Well, sort of. The problem seems to be one of strategy and persuasion. You see, all this social-construct talk doesn’t seem to convince many people, and through this failure, it may even lead them to think that race does have something to do with biology after all. Or perhaps—and Lentin really shudders at this thought—we should spend less time fixated on race, see each other as individuals with dignity, and ground that understanding in natural rights. Lentin finds this all very bothersome and just wants everybody to see race through the same extreme political lens as she does.