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Antiracism: An Introduction. By Alex Zamalin. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 224 pp. $19.95 (paper)
It takes courage to stick your neck out and push back against racism, whether it be to contest the use of racial epithets during a one-on-one conversation or to challenge institutional practices that produce racially disparate outcomes. Summoning courage is easier to do when you know that women, men, and children before you played their own part in resisting the racialized dehumanization of their day. In Antiracism: An Introduction, Alex Zamalin provides a primer on the history of those who pushed back against anti-Black racism, and identifies the theoretical ties that bind their myriad efforts, despite the variation of their ideologies and practices. Bridging the past with the present, Zamalin compels his readers to think about how they can carry on the antiracist tradition in this current phase of competing racial orders (see King and Smith 2005).
Zamalin begins by recovering the radical meaning of antiracism from contemporary standards where one passes as antiracist by not being a bigot or in rejecting only the most intentional discrimination. Though he acknowledges that antiracism has no singular political ideology, he asserts, “Essential to the tradition is a direct and ongoing confrontation with the philosophy of racism, the individuals who embrace its ideas, and the structures and institutions that perpetuate it” (p. 7). His focus is on anti-Black racism and the Black historical figures who dedicated their lives to its erasure.
Elevating commonalities over tensions within antiracism,...