Decline of Antiracism and the Future of Progressive Politics

Examining contemporary antiracism and its contributions to progressive politics, The Decline of Antiracism and the Future of Progressive Politics argues that contemporary antiracism has ignored the role of class and reduced social justice to symbolism and right-thinking.

Differing from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary civil rights movements are a product of academia, nonprofits, and even, for a time, corporate HR departments. Galvanized by Black Lives Matter after the killing of George Floyd, contemporary antiracism addressed police brutality against Black people to capture the imaginations of the educated classes that now dominate the Democratic Party. What has remained, however, is an identitarian way of thinking that has had little political staying power, as its stress on identity groupings makes it difficult to think in ways that speak to all Americans.

Facing an unprecedented new era with the return of the Trump administration, this book is a vital resource not only for students and instructors in sociology, social theory, race and ethnic studies, and American cultural studies but also to mobilize people to forge new movements of resistance.