Programme:
19:00-20:00: Online lecture with Arun Kundnani
20:00-21:00: Q&A from the audience.
When: Friday May 16th 19:00-21:00
Where: Haus des Engagements (Innenhof, Rehlingstraße 9)
Language: English
Entrance: free
Barriers: The facilities are wheelchair accessible.
About:
Arun Kundnani shows how Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and anthropologist Ruth Benedict called for teaching people, especially poor people, to be less prejudiced. Here lies the origin of today's liberal antiracism, from diversity training to Hollywood activism. Meanwhile, a more radical antiracism flowered in the Third World. Anticolonial revolutionaries traced racism to the broad economic and political structures of modernity. Thinkers like C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, and Frantz Fanon showed how racism was connected to colonialism and capitalism, a perspective adopted even by Martin Luther King.
Kundnani argues how liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression. Liberals will of course point to the structural side of the phenomenon but will time and again fail to define what they mean when talking about these “structures”. In this way, Kundnani demonstrates how white liberals can heroically confront their own whiteness all they want, yet the structures remain. As neoliberalism reordered the world in the last decades of the twentieth century, the case became clear: fighting racism means striking at its capitalist roots.
About the lecturer:
Arun Kundnani is a writer interested in race, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, and radicalism.
Kundnani is the author of What is Antiracism? (Verso, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007), and co-author of Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters (Common Notions, 2024). He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and The Intercept. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University and is an Associate of the Transnational Institute.
