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Symposium: Alana Lentin's Why Race Still Matters

Why Race Still Matters as therapy

Pages 453-458 | Received 09 Feb 2021, Accepted 02 Mar 2021, Published online: 24 Mar 2021
 

ABSTRACT

Alana Lentin's Why Race Still Matters (2020) is a timely articulation of where we are at in current debates on race. The book lists, names and archives critical arguments, and identifies the many actors entangled in a battle of ideas. In this article, I provide three main readings of Lentin's work. I suggest the book is an erudite and necessary reading of the public’s racial literacy, which also casts a needed self-reflective gaze on how anti-racists may be frustrating failing the public. Indeed, Lentin sublimates frustration into a productive and insightful use of “Not-racism”. A concept that unsettles the prevailing way we discuss and fail to discuss Racism. In the end, I suggest Lentin’s Why Race Still Matters works as sort of therapy that speaks to the emotional register that surrounds anti-racist work. There is decluttering of the conversation that points to how we may manage the ways we fight and discuss racism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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