Locating racism in the world / Ainsley LeSure.
| Author/creator | LeSure, Ainsley author. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication | New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2026] |
| Description | x, 191 pages ; 25 cm |
| Subjects |
| Contents | Assuming a world -- Reading Black Power phenomenologically -- Racial common sense as a political problem -- Putting the antiblack world in its place -- There is only one world, and we must share it. |
| Abstract | "Locating Racism in the World develops a phenomenological theory of racism that avoids the pitfalls of post-Civil Rights understandings of antiblack racism and Black studies' recent pessimism about politics as an effective means to pursue black freedom. I argue that racism is best understood as a reality-violating common sense generated and perfected through racist practices that produce a white, antiblack world. I develop this worldly understanding of racism by exploring how three central texts in political theory and black studies - Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton's Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and Hannah Arendt's infamous essay, "Reflections on Little Rock" - open up this phenomenological, worldly understanding of antiblack racism. These are the appropriate texts to consult because they foretell the racial catastrophes that await democratic countries that mistake the aesthetics of racial progress (black presidential candidates, amicable interracial relations, and the granting of liberal equality to the racially marginalized) for an effective strategy against the democratic threat racism has always posed. That we must travel back in time (to the 1950s and 60s) and across space (from the United States to the French Caribbean, through Western Europe and onto the continent of Africa) to understand why and how American democracy is confronting its greatest existential threat since the Civil War on the eve of its 250th anniversary, is a sign that, contrary to the racial progress narrative of the post-Civil Rights era, America's racial problems were never new, nor were they exceptional. This older way of understanding racism could have warned us that overt racism was never eliminable through shifts in consciousness alone, though it would have never conceded that a world historical event like chattel slavery made human action impotent in the fight for racial justice either. To get to the insights that this older approach to racism holds, the blinders that a post-Civil Rights approach puts on our understanding of racism must be removed and the political pessimism of critical black studies must be refused. Locating Racism in the World charts this path"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Issued in other form | Online version http://id.loc.gov/entities/relationships/onlineversion LeSure, Ainsley Locating racism in the world New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2026] 9780197833834 |
| LCCN | 2025050821 |
| ISBN | 9780197833827 |
| ISBN | 0197833829 paperback |
| ISBN | 9780197833865 hardcover |
| ISBN | 0197833861 hardcover |
| ISBN | electronic publication |
| ISBN | electronic book |
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