Racism and Antiracism

Anoop Nayak, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary
Antiracism A political challenge and intervention in racist policy and practice.
Decolonizing geography A polemic and critical approach that seeks to situate geography through its heritage in white colonial
modernity with a view to transforming it.
Everyday multiculturalism Refers to the habitual and mundane forms of multiculturalism practiced in diverse societies,
contrasting with the top-down policy initiatives of government.
Race A fictitious social construct used to divide up the human population.
Racism The practice of discrimination based on cultural stereotypes and prejudice toward nation-states, ethnic/religious
groups, or individuals.
Whiteness A term used to describe contingent forms of race privilege that may be linked to skin color, occupation,
consumption, social class status, wealth, or home ownership among many other indicators.

Broadly speaking, race is premised upon a belief in innate human difference. This viewpoint derives from an abiding conviction that
biological distinctions exist between social groups, delineating for example between “Europeans,” “Africans,” or “Asians.” A
simplistic and highly contentious assertion such as this implies a level of homogeneity within these communities, suggesting
that race is a timeless and enduring set of characteristics passed down through our genes to successive generations. There is, however,
little scientific evidence to support the idea of essential racial characteristics let alone anything approaching the existence of defin-
itive or unique species within humankind. For this reason, race can be seen as a modern mythda human invention used to divide
up and make sense of a complicated social world. In this vein, contemporary human geographers prefer to speak about the “idea of
race” rather than ascribe any particular qualities to this social category. Nevertheless, race continues to be invoked through processes
of racialization, for example through the labeling of particular neighborhoods as the “ghetto”, “favela”, “bairro,” or “banlieue.”
Deconstructiondthe taking apart of signs and discoursedthen remains a powerful device for imploding race categories as it is con-
cerned with unpacking the ways in which the concept of race is made meaningful. In doing so, race and ethnicity are no longer
identifiable “objects,” a fixed locus for classification, but are instead intrinsically connected to relations of power. This under-
standing of race and ethnicity as social constructs also entails a radical shift in geographical investigation from a focus on race
toward more politicized and critical understandings of the processes of racialization and how they might engender forms of racism.
Biological forms of racism were a recurring motif in imperial expansion and remain a feature of modern-day genocides. The Nazi
holocaust witnessed the mass execution of Jews, premised on the racist belief that they were inferior beings whose “blood” could only
weaken the Aryan race. In Rwanda longstanding conflict between the Hutus and Tutsisdtribal communities that share many ethnic
characteristics in terms of language, diet, and customsdcentered upon blood, origins, and soil. When Belgian colonialists arrived in
central Africa in 1916, they considered the Tutsis to be biologically superior, an attribute that Tutsis were keen to embrace as they
achieved better jobs and privileges over the next two decades. What had once been a mixed society gave way to sporadic conflict
and growing resentment, which eventually culminated in the slaughter of nearly 20,000 Tutsis by Hutus in 1959 with many fleeing
to the neighboring countries of Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda. Three years later, Rwandan independence was granted when Belgium
withdrew from Africa, but mass genocide in the 1990s has demonstrated the power of racial discrimination and the haunting return of
the colonial legacy. Similar world examples can be seen with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, where conflict between Serbs and
Croats resulted in “ethnic cleansing” and the attempt to purge “impure” people from the body of the nation-state.
The shifting contours of racism witnessed in the last quarter of a century have seen a move away from biological forms of race
superiority toward cultural expressions of racism. As recent conflict has shown, essentialist beliefs in race have not been entirely
eradicated, but the focus of racism in the late modernity is more frequently based on beliefs about cultural difference and the incom-
patibility of “different cultures.” These accounts treat culture as a hermetically sealed and bounded category, a marker of authen-
ticity, rather than the more open-ended and promiscuous process it actually is. The challenge to cultural racism is prevalent in
studies exploring Islamophobia and the experience of Muslim communities on the world stage. This challenge includes geograph-
ical research in Australia, Denmark, England, Scotland, Sweden, and the United States, among other places. To take one example,
Australian researchers have explored racist conflict on Sydney beaches between white Australian and Middle Eastern youth of
predominantly Lebanese Muslim heritage. In what became known as the Cronulla riots, the intractability of cultural racism was
seen in the language that “decent” white citizens of Australia had “welcomed” these strangers to their country, only to find they
had “taken liberties”, and did not adhere to the values and beach etiquette of other Australian citizens. A series of seaside conflicts,
amplified by “shock jock” radio phone-ins and drunken anger, culminated in some 5000 white males deploying violence and terri-
torial slogans such as, “We grew here, you flew here,” in order to assert their claim over the beach. Such expressions of innate cultural
difference signal the implacable nature of racism and how it is territorially bound.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, Volume 11 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10213-6 191

192 Racism and Antiracism

Geography and the Shadow of Empire

Over the last two centuries, the degree to which the discipline of geography has been wedded to the ideology of Empire has been
nothing less than startling. So, firm has been the interlacing of geographical knowledge with the imperial drive that the configura-
tion has led scholars to rethink the “geographical tradition” through its colonial heritage; however, one would be mistaken in
believing that 19th-Century proponents of the discipline were at all coy about the imperial roots of their subject. Instead, many
luminaries viewed geography as a practical subject that was intimately connected to empire building, the acquisition of territories,
the extrapolation of resources, and the exploitation of native peoples. Undoubtedly, this pragmatic bent enabled the ideological
“mastery” of white Europeans to be secured at the expense of colonized nations.
Geography became a prime contributor to models of racial classification. Established in 1830, the Royal Geographical Society
was content to sponsor a series of presentations in which the concept of racial difference was legitimated. Other debates included
the impacts of the climate on white settlement in the tropics and the debilitating effects the physical environment could have on the
“white race.” Here, a moral economy of the environment was established and used to explain why particular people were primitive,
backward, morally unrestrained, sexually libidinous, intellectually inferior, and altogether uncivilized when contrasted with white
Western Europeans. Loose associations were made with the natural environment citing the deterministic effects of temperature,
weather, light, and the physical landscape upon Indigenous peoples who, as a consequence of an intemperate climate, were deemed
feeble-minded, lazy, and lascivious. These antiquated ideas are recognized to be formidable racist constructs whose appeal cease-
lessly echoes throughout the modern age. For this reason, there have been concerted to explore the value of living in multicultural
societies where progressive encounters with difference can be viewed as enriching.

Everyday Multiculturalism, Race, and Convivial Encounters

In turning away from the “object” of race, cultural geographers developed a fascination for the communication of racism through
the semiotic production of race signs, where the use of particular words, images, and phrases informs and speaks back to a broader
repertoire of race thinking and race-making devices. A recent example concerns the rise in “hate crime” following the June 2016
European Union (EU) referendum where 52% of the British public voted to leave the EU. Prior to the referendum, the UK Inde-
pendence Party showed posters of what looked like a large number of Syrian asylum seekers queuing with the caption, “Breaking
Point,” in bold red capitals. This image is entirely removed from the freedom of movement across borders granted to the EU
member states. The leave campaign focused on cultural racism expressed through discourses surrounding the need to take back
control of the nation-state, to create a hostile environment for illegal immigrants, to defend its borders from the flood migrants,
and ultimately to return to an imagined golden past when Britain was allegedly a “white nation.” While such proclamations fail
to withstand historical scrutiny, they demonstrate how cultural forms of racism are discursively, symbolically, and pictorially
brought to life. What is evident is that such propaganda does not even mention race; its vital signs are kept alive in recursive images,
narratives, and key phrases.
In investigating the contingent and competing ways in which race signs and cultural racism operate, geographers reveal how
place and community are arbitrary and incomplete constructions. These visions have the power to include and exclude. For
example, the police, outsiders, and the popular media deem many urban areas in Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom
and the United States as “no-go” places; yet equally these may be safe spaces and “home” to various ethnic minority and Indigenous
communities. Such cultural forms of racism rarely consider the connections between crime and social deprivation and the material
effects that unemployment, poverty, homelessness, or low-grade living have upon choice and action. In this respect, the “ghetto”
becomes a trope through which numerous racist fantasies are projected. Through this particular geographical imagination relatively
affluent, mainly white suburbs are confirmed as ordinary, civilized, family-orientated, and safe spaces to inhabit.
Where state multiculturalism in Britain, Canada, Germany, and South Africa has long been criticized by academics, politicians,
and social commentators alike, there has been a reinvigorated belief in the value of everyday encounters with difference. Contem-
porary research in human geography agitates for a closer understanding of how race and multiculturalism unfold in everyday life.
Rather than focusing upon multiculturalism as a planned and state-organized event, this body of work suggests that these relations
are enlivened through habitual encounters with difference. This corpus of work has been part of a broader convivial “turn” that
focuses upon the grounded, organic forms of multiculturalism that are part and parcel of everyday life. This approach extends inter-
nationally to research in Australia, the Czech Republic, Italy, New Zealand, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, and English urban areas,
among other regions. Geographical studies have explored the prosaic negotiations that enable diverse people to rub along together.
These can include various light-brush encounters in everyday settings that might lead to gestures of recognition, smiles, and the
exchange of pleasantries and also include forms of knowledge sharing, such as information on where to buy the freshest fish in
the market or the best time to plant vegetable seeds in an allotment. Geographers have also demonstrated how these encounters
may entail acts of care and reciprocity, small favors, as well as the material practices of gift giving and exchange. They have suggested
that over time, everyday multiculturalism has enabled convivial feelings, atmospheres, and affects to shape the lived environment.
An important aspect of this type of research is that it strategically maneuvers against the idea that diversity is a threat to national
identity or the nation-state, by instead drawing attention to how public experiences can be enriched. State policies that emphasize
securitization, surveillance, and cohesion can overlook the manifold ways in which race and everyday multiculturalism is per-
formed. Some geographers have also argued that the architecture of the environment can play a pivotal role in enhancing convivial
 Racism and Antiracism 193

relations where parks, benches, markets, and other social hubs can prompt new forms of being and belonging. This influence of the
environment is apparent in research conducted in public parks and green spaces, at after-school events, fast food restaurants, and
garden allotments. What these studies point to is the humdrum nature of multiculturalism, which often goes unseen or is taken-for-
granted. Such banal manifestations of multiculturalism contrast with “spectacular” media representations of terrorism and geopo-
litical conflict, border control, and immigration, as well as familiar narratives of race, crime, and the ghetto. It also seeks to put to rest
the charge made by various politicians that “multiculturalism is dead.”
Despite the merits of research on the cusp of the convivial turn, some authors have also identified the persistence of everyday
racism. Examples include ingrained institutional practices, unconscious bias, and subtle forms of race discrimination. In this vein,
research has shown the everyday racism endured by Indian Malays employed in Singapore, the way Arab youth in Australia are
subject to feelings of bodily discomfort, how Sikhs in Scotland moderate their behavior in public to ameliorate fear and suspicion,
and the way British Bangladeshi Muslim young women must navigate local, national, and global discourses of race and religion in
their daily lives. These critical works imply that despite human rights legislation, many minorities can be treated as secondary citi-
zens by the nation-state. To further explore this, some researchers have looked at forms of “everyday bordering,” where the use of
state documentation and proof of citizenship are required for access to medical services, education, housing, welfare, and employ-
ment. This research direction indicates that future work on multicultural encounters must engage with the structural issues of power
that segment society.

Decolonizing Geography: Whiteness, Race, and Antiracism

Despite the attempts of cultural geographers to include the voices of racialized minorities into their accounts, geography has been,
and continues to remain, a predominantly white discipline. Whiteness is embedded in its historical foundations, its institutional
apparatus, and of course the networks of university students, teachers, and researchers that comprise the “geographical community.”
It would, then, amount to academic conceit to presume that just because the discipline of geography is now interrogating its impe-
rial legacy, that it can simply emerge unblinking and untarnished from the shadow of race and empire. Where feminist geographers
have long contested and subverted the masculine basis of the discipline, the whiteness of geography has only recently been subject
to scrutiny. Reflecting on its inherent whiteness, one geographer elegantly compares the discipline to the starched white institution
of the golf club or the US Supreme Court, while others maintain that the lack of ethnic minority participants could be a reflection of
the imperial legacy. The power of whiteness is augmented in the constitution of editorial boards, promotion committees, funding
bodies, grant assessors, and other such disciplinary gatekeepers. What are the cultural effects of this overbearing whiteness, and how
do they shape geographical thinking today?
We might contend that the whiteness of geography enables certain truths and norms to operate as the dominant modus operandi.
Other truths and knowledges are obscured or subordinated as it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge the institution from the
outside as most of the teachers, students, and academics within it are white. Such acts of cultural knowledge production are sited
within a very particular and highly partial realm of experience. The recursive privileging of white racial norms effectively lends itself
to exclusionary practices of intellectual production, which is particularly problematic for a subject that claims to be the “world’s
discipline”. However, the seated position of privilege that whiteness holds does not mean that a more reflexive, antiracist politics
is impossible. While some human geographers are increasingly reflexive about their whiteness, others campaign to make geography
a more inclusive and thereby less starkly white discipline. Although white geographers may be implicit in the production of racial
norms, they are active agents who can also resist and overturn these ideas. To gain further insight into how this goal is being
achieved, we can turn to radical attempts to decolonize geography and to generate equality through antiracist geographies.
Given the colonial roots of the discipline and its overarching whiteness, an antiracist impulse to decolonize geography is long
overdue. Antiracist geographies in their many diverse forms seek to make a meaningful political intervention in race debates.
Broadly speaking, antiracism refers to activities and practices that seek to challenge, extinguish, or ameliorate racism. Within
academia, this could include, for example, the establishment of antiracist policies across universities; the inclusion of work by black
and Indigenous scholars and antiracist activists on course syllabi; attempts to recruit black and minority ethnic students and teachers
into the discipline; organizing campaigns against race discrimination; and the development of race awareness across the campus.
Tackling the culture of institutional racism in the workplace is a difficult but pivotal aspect of decolonizing geography and devel-
oping antiracist practice. For example, data gathered by the Equality Challenge Unit for the United Kingdom show that a relatively
small percentage of minority ethnic students choose to undertake geography, and at postgraduate levels, their numbers are sparse.
When it comes to lectureship posts, geography has little more than half the number of minority ethnic staff compared with national
figures for the higher education sector more widely. A plethora of studies and reports have found ethnic minority lecturers are more
likely to be employed on casual fixed-term contracts and have heavier teaching loads, lower paid salaries, and less chance of gaining
promotion or financial increments compared to white colleagues across the university sector. In the US geography departments, the
disciplinary picture is equally bleak, where the number of ethnic minority tenured and senior staff remains well below those figures
in congruent fields such as history, sociology, and anthropology.
A major intervention into decolonizing geography was seen in 2017 when the Royal Geographical Society along with the Insti-
tute of British Geographers (RGS/IBG) hosted their annual conference on the theme, “Decolonizing Geographical Knowledges:
Opening Geography to the World.” While this theme was met with no little debate and controversy, it represents a bold and chal-
lenging opportunity to rethink established geographical orthodoxies. The political act of decolonization stems from the return of
194 Racism and Antiracism

appropriated land and territory, suggesting that the disciplinary move is a recognition of the academic spatial colonization that
geography has undertaken. Special issues on decolonizing geography in the RGS/IBG journals Area and Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers have been formative in spearheading this agenda. In these special issues, a number of authors draw attention to
the whiteness of the discipline and the lack of ethnic diversity. Many argue that debates on decolonization and antiracism need to be
shaped by those on the margins who have been racialized as Indigenous or nonwhite by colonial typologies.
The need for a multiplicity of voices is then part of the opening up of geography, but this opening needs to be ethically managed
with an acute awareness to institutional racism and the dominance of Anglo-American practices. For example, postcolonial scholars
have argued for a need to “provincialize” Western geographical debates in order to begin to engage with Indigenous knowledge and
“Southern theory.” Doing so entails moving beyond any fixed literary canon that largely reflects the ideas and vested interests of
those in the Global North when it comes to teaching and research. Experimental attempts to bring Indigenous people into the class-
room to discuss land rights or those from the Global South to discuss the impact on their communities of global warming and its
potential solutions might open up new political dialogs. A critical observation made by antiracist scholars has been the need to
begin the difficult task of dismantling the unequal and thoroughly racialized structures of the discipline to develop more egalitarian
forms of knowledge, funding, recruitment, and participation. As such, part of a decolonizing approach is to shed light on the prob-
lems of colonialism and recognize how this continues to shape geography in the present.
One area where antiracist ideas are trying to effect change is by decolonizing student curricula. When it comes to teaching geog-
raphy in schools, colleges, and universities, unreflective statements may actually reinforce race thinking. Some standard geography
textbooks reproduce uncritical discussions of development, immigration, global warming, and risk and resilience. Although so far
rather piecemeal in practice, examples of critical pedagogies in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand have attemp-
ted to redress this imbalance in schools and in university syllabi. Such a move is especially important in a discipline where inter-
national field trips and other “expeditions” are seldom placed within a postcolonial framework from which an antiracist geography
could transpire. Engendering an antiracist awareness has the benefits of facilitating alternative geographical imaginations and devel-
oping more critical and reflexive understandings. In schools, and within higher and further education, the voices of Indigenous and
nonwhite scholars are rarely detected. Antiracist geographers seek to address racism in teaching environments and facilitate broader
participation with a view to transforming the norms of the discipline. Developing antiracist geographical teaching can challenge the
whiteness of the discipline from within and any attending racist assumptions. Such an endeavor may entail a critical reflexivity on
behalf of teachers and the production of new texts and resources that explicitly subvert the colonial legacy in the classroom.
Decolonial antiracist geographies are not however an entirely novel aspect of the human geography tradition. Rather, antiracist
thought and practice is part of a longer struggle with racism that calls into question the purpose of geography in the postcolonial
period. An explicit example of antiracism within the discipline was seen at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual
conference in 1971, arguably the largest and most prestigious public arena for geographical debate. Here, a number of geographers
called for the United States to withdraw its troops from Vietnam, a struggle that was viewed as an act of imperial conquest. As
Marxist ideas spread within the discipline, many American campuses became sites for political protest, which included a number
of geography staff and students giving their support to the Civil Rights Movements. This antiracist zeal is captured in lambasting
remarks aimed at “armchair geographers” of this period who appeared seemingly untouched by political events and continued
to restrict their analyses to the rarefied confines of academic ivory towers. What was being advocated instead was a type of “geog-
raphy for all” in which local people and Indigenous communities become part of the solution, as opposed to being the objects of
geographical study.
Geographers have also critiqued development discourses that regularly center on poverty, war, famine, and disease in the Global
South. Looking closer to home can help us understand the relational geographies that connect up different places. A further example
of antiracist geography is the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice supported by the AAG. Rose, who
became the first black president of the AAG in 1976, explored the quality of life of African Americans, studying the black ghetto,
blacks and Cubans in Miami, and the high rates of homicide in black communities. His work turns the gaze back upon the United
States and its own structural inequalities. What is clear is that much more institutional support for research, engagement, and impact
activities around antiracist research is required and that sponsorship and prestige can play a role in making this work visible. Never-
theless, to speak of a decolonial antiracist geography belies the fact that it is a marginalized subfield of human geography, held
together by a cluster of feminist, queer, antiracist, Indigenous, and ethnic minority scholars and actors.
Recent engagements with the politics of antiracism extend into geographical discussions on the Black Lives Matter movement
that initially developed in the United States but is now a transnational form of activism that intersects across a range of different
local–global issues. Other work has begun to explore black and Indigenous environmentalism, for example, looking at the ways in
which air pollution or flooding can most adversely affect poor minority ethnic and Indigenous communities. To this extent, anti-
racist geography operates as a live wire whose current passes through, but reaches beyond traditional academic scholarship on race.
For these agents, direct action through political involvement is one of the ways that geography can be used to change the everyday
world in which we live. Such action can include involvement in campaigns that may challenge the political representations of
famine, poverty, development, pollution, food, and water scarcity. In short, for antiracist geographers, black matters remain spatial
matters.
Although antiracist geography is still a niche area comprising a few willing campaigners and marginalized minority scholars, and
Indigenous writers and activists, it remains a theoretically and politically challenging space to inhabit. It reminds human geogra-
phers of the need to connect their objects of study with everyday institutional practices. It also demonstrates how a number of
geographical issues concerning the environment, population growth, military conflict, diasporas, and global media can be further
 Racism and Antiracism 195

developed through critical understandings of race and racism rooted in notions of inequality. In this way, antiracist geography is
important not only because it speaks back to social theory in new waysdto make us rethink what we do and whydbut also because
it informs us of how we might do geography differently in the future.

See Also: Cultural Geography; Diasporas; Hybridity and the Cyborg; Imperialist Geographies; Multiculturalism; Place, Politics of; Postcolonial Identities;
Race/Ethnicity; Self–Other.

Further Reading

Bledsoe, A., Wright, W.J., 2018. The pluralities of black geographies. Antipode Rad. J. Geogr. 51 (2), 418–437.
Burrell, K., Hopkins, P., Isakjee, A., Lorne, C., Nagel, C., Finlay, R., Nayak, A., Benwell, M.C., Pande, R., Richardson, M., Botterill, K., Rogaly, B., 2019. Brexit, race and migration.
Environ. Plan. C Politic. Space 37 (1), 3–40.
Derickson, K.D., 2017. Urban geography II: urban geography in the age of Ferguson. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 41 (2), 230–244.
Ehrkamp, P., 2019. Geographies of migration II: the racial-spatial politics of immigration. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 43 (2), 363–375.
Faria, C., Mollett, S., 2016. Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’. Gend. Place Cult. 23 (1), 79–93.
Klocker, N., Tindale, A., 2019. Together and apart: relational experiences of place, identity and belonging in the lives of mixed-ethnicity families. Soc. Cult. Geogr. https://doi.org/
10.1080/14649365.2018.1563710.
Lyons, H., 2018. The Intangible nation: spatializing experiences of Britishness and belonging for young British Muslim women. Geoforum 90, 55–63.
Mahtani, M., 2014. Toxic geographies: absences in critical race thought and practice in social and cultural geography. Soc. Cult. Geogr. 15 (4), 359–367.
Nayak, A., 2017. Purging the nation: race, conviviality and embodied encounters in the lives of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women. Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. 42, 289–302.
Tolia-Kelly, D.P., 2010. The geographies of cultural geography I: identities, bodies and race. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 34 (3), 358–367.
Wilson, H., 2017. On geography and encounter. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 41 (4), 451–471.

Relevant Website

Black Lives Matter https://blacklivesmatter.com/