In Racism and Justice, editors Sean Hier, Daniel Lett and B. Singh Bolaria 

have collected together 14 essays (plus an Introduction), divided into three 

sections (‘Essentialism, Identity, and Difference,’ ‘Racism, Inequality, and 

Change,’ and ‘Multiculturalism, Anti-Racism, and Justice’). Each of the three 

sections is prefaced by a strong introduction, along with very useful 

summaries of each individual essay that follows. The essays themselves are 

short and contain only the most basic references and few footnotes. The 

best word to describe this collection is eclectic. Drawing on scholars from 

Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, the anthology offers essays on a 

wide range of topics, from the Sydney Cronulla Beach riots (Jock Collins 

and Carol Reid), to Jim Crowism and lynching in the United States (Meir 

Amor), to the ‘geneticization of identity’ (Robert Carter) to the politics of 

public apologies and racial redress (Graham Dodds). Equally eclectic is the 

range of political and sociological viewpoints represented in the anthology, 

from critical realism (Adam Molnar), to debates with Orientalism (Peyman 

Vahabzadeh), to an ethics of infinite possibility and its implications for 

solidarity work (Mohamed Abdou, Richard J.F. Day and Sean Haberle). This 

wide-ranging and eclectic nature of the book is both its strength and its 

weakness. 

 According to the editors, Racism and Justice has two general goals. 

The first is to ‘critically assess the current state of knowledge about racism, 

justice and social change in Canada and beyond’ (17). In this, the collection 

is a clear success, producing a lively debate about how to conceptualize 

race and racism as well as how best to confront it. For example, the 

opening two chapters immediately draw the reader into a debate about 

essentialism or the idea that there is some core essence that defines 

discrete groups of people. The first essay, by Rita Dhamoon (25-41), draws 

on critical race theory as a form of ‘post-essentialist social critique’ in 

order to force new considerations of how we come to know what we think 150 

we know about race. This essay is followed by Alicja Muszynski’s defense 

of essentialism, or at least a caution against going too ‘post-al’ (42-53). For 

Muszynski, it is ‘ironic that just as landmark gains are realized for 

previously excluded groups, academics have deemed that their status as 

groups is no longer relevant, in effect pulling the rug out from under them’ 

(47). It is rare for an edited collection to invite such divergent opinions, 

especially on something so personally, as well as politically, relevant to so 

many of us. This is more than an academic debate: it is a political tension 

that has clear implications for social activism and the conceptualization of 

justice.   

 But, this political tension also leads to a somewhat uneven read and 

it is difficult to find a narrative thread or political project in the book. This 

problem reflects back on the second goal of the anthology, namely to 

confront the challenges of a ‘post-racial’ order.  By ‘post-racial,’ the editors 

do not mean ‘racelessness’ but, instead, a ‘future-oriented politics of 

possibility…that simultaneously confronts the forces of continuity and 

change’ (9). Post-raciality centres on a paradox in which a ‘social-justice 

infrastructure’ that has enabled dramatic social change coexists with the 

persistence of racism.   

 It is not clear that this paradox is either as new or as complex as the 

editors suggest.  The essay by Charles Ungerleider, tellingly entitled 

‘Racism, Justice, and Social Cohesion in Canada’ (173 – 188) seems the only 

evidence that there even exists a ‘social-justice infrastructure’ from which 

the paradox would unfold. Ungerleider offers a whiggish history of anti- 

discrimination practices in Canada, from a problematic past of interning 

Japanese citizens and barring Jews entry as they fled Nazi Europe to a more 

sunny contemporary situation where many forms of structural racism have 

been eliminated through the sheer political will of the Canadian state. 

Ungerleider places great importance on the fact that Canada was an early 

signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 

1948 and from which time the institutional infrastructure designed to 

confront racism and to equally distribute citizenship rights has grown 

progressively and, seemingly, satisfactorily. While we must continue to 

fight racism where it rears its ugly head (as in the aftermath of September 

11, 2001), Ungerleider nonetheless concludes that Canada is distinct in the 

world for embracing such a diverse population and managing, through this 

institutional infrastructure, to maintain a functional social cohesion.  

 This kind of essay is odd in a collection dedicated to racism and 

justice, and its inclusion seems to simplify, rather than complicate, the 

debate about contemporary forms of racism or, even, post-raciality. And, 151 

many of the other contributors do not seem to share in the idea that we 

have arrived at a post-racial moment. For example, in one of the stronger 

essays in the collection, Alana Lentin  (189-206) takes as obvious the fact 

that Western states assume a ‘Janus-faced attitude’ (205) toward racism, 

so that they are both the enforcers of anti-discrimination policy and 

culpable in ongoing and systemic racism. Lentin offers a very different 

history of the formation of international anti-racist policies, arguing that 

the focus of UNESCO policies on cultural difference has depoliticized 

racism and allowed modern states to be both racist and anti-racist at the 

same time. Her focus is on the resultant anti-racist organizations to emerge 

in Western States and she offers a neat categorization between those 

organizations that are state-oriented (appealing to the state to fulfill its 

promise of true democratic citizenship) and those (more radical, if less 

successful) that set themselves against the state itself. The work of these 

various anti-racist groups, along with their differing degrees of popular 

and institutional legitimacy, argues Lentin, plays an important role in 

defining what constitutes racism to begin with. 

 Given its focus on sociological knowledge about racism and the 

debates that the collection welcomes–as well as the ones that it will no 

doubt engender–Racism and Justice is a good choice for any sociology 

course that wants to draw its students into the field and offer them some 

rich theoretical and empirical materials from which to form their own 

views.  Certainly, the book will encourage readers to engage in ‘critical 

dialogue on the politics of identity, inequality, and change’ —- as the editors 

hope it will. - Amanda Glasbeek, Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2) Fall 2009

 

(Close)

 Racism and Justice; Critical Dialogue on the Politics of Identity, Inequality and Change.

If there is a guiding philosophical framework to these 14 essays on the issues of racism and justice in Canada and beyond (and how these issues are understood in academia), according to editors Hier (sociology, U. of Victoria, Canada), Lett (a doctoral candidate in political science at the U. of Victoria), and Bolaria (emeritus, U. of Saskatchewan, Canada), “it is an eschewal of either/or thinking<—>racism either exists or it does not, race either matters or it does not, progressive justice is either achievable or it is not.” Topics include essentialism as a category of social analysis; intersections of multiple inequalities; Orientalism and the sociology of knowledge; the recent Sydney, Australia, race riots and the contexts and contradictions of the racialization of young people; political apologies and racial reconciliation; racism, justice, and social cohesion in Canada; competing anti-racisms and the interpretation of racism in the post-multicultural era; solidarity practices in Canadian activism; and the politics of anti-racism and neo-fascism. Distributed in the US by Independent Publishers Group.–Reference & Research Book News, August 2009

(Close)