Friday, May 21, 2021 | 5:30PM to 7PM
During the 2020 summer of global uprisings in defense of Black life, widely circulated anti‐racist reading lists created heightened demand for books that promised to teach readers how to examine their internalized racism. Situated in U.S. racial liberalism’s extensive literary genealogy, anti‐racist “how‐to” literature has historically swooped in during moments of heightened racialized confusion to restore narratives of American exceptionalism. This literature sustains the tenuous promise that racism is something that one can challenge in interpersonal relationships and by following specific steps toward individualized behavior correction.
Building on a broader body of work that has critiqued liberal anti‐racisms for detracting from abolitionist struggles against racialized injustice, this presentation based on an article by Prof. Elizabeth Hanna Rubio specifically frames the limitations that “how‐to anti‐racisms” place on transgressive multiracial coalition building. Through ethnographic analysis of discourses and practices that move through various sites of contemporary Black‐Asian American activist encounters, Prof. Rubio builds on Black and radical women of color feminist theorizations of solidarity to show how “how‐tos” destabilize coalition building by overdetermining resolutions to conflict. She argues that in “settling” anti‐racism into a repertoire of predetermined steps, how‐to‐ism constrains the contradiction, anger, and uncertainty that is fundamental to forging the radical accountability central to abolitionist work.
Article: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nad.12139
