Race matters

Abstract

Why Race Still Matters is a persuasive and exhaustive study of how race pervades our societies. The author, Alana Lentin, has crafted this book in race critical scholarship with meticulous attention to the world around us. It begins with an urgent focus on the everyday violence faced by black and minority ethnic communities as they go about their daily lives, using the example of the Christchurch mosque killing of fifty-one Muslim people from South Asian and African diasporas by an ‘eco-fascist’ white Australian (15 March 2019). This massacre went on grimly to inspire further deadly attacks on vulnerable communities in several parts of the world: El Paso massacre (3 August 2019), Oslo shootings (10 August 2019) and Halle killings (9 October 2019). Lentin jolts our minds from the very first page to assert that race matters in our contemporary world, and always has, because the acts committed in its name are capable of revealing the ‘vulnerability to premature death’ of those deemed racially Other. In particular, the book is critical of the idea that calling out racism amounts to racism. Lentin builds a compelling case for the notion that race is a technology of modern rule, ‘the main goal of which is the production, reproduction, and maintenance of white supremacy on both a local and a planetary level’ (5). In the above characterization of race, she draws from the scholarship of Stuart Hall, Alexander Weheliye and Ruth Gilmore, among others. She provides a detailed discussion on how, despite being a social construct, race still gets enacted and lived through bodies and is constantly linked to practices of racism. The book is a clear exposition of how race has been made to appear insignificant in certain strands of scholarship and popular culture, and why this is dangerous and must be resisted at all costs. Lentin does this by dividing the book into four thematic chapters. She uses the first chapter entitled ‘Race beyond Social Constructionism’ to discuss snippets from public discourse, such as television interviews and developments in academic scholarship, to discredit resurgent efforts at ‘race realism’. While reiterating that race does not have a biological basis,