Reframing Racism: Structural Racism, Anti-Racist Struggles, and Critical Theory

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | In recent years, the concept of structural racism has become an object of often heated semantic and political struggles. Hostility to the concept is also linked to epistemic obstacles that keep the debate from moving beyond a focus on discrete racist acts, prejudice, and ‘xenophobia.’ These obstacles have, in part, also shaped how racism was thematized, or rather, remained largely unthematized, in Frankfurt School critical theory. Nevertheless, an account of the structural nature of racism can profit both from insights articulated in recent anti-racist struggles and from earlier work in the critical theory tradition and its resolutely socio-theoretical focus in order to avoid individualizing, psychologizing, and moralizing racism.

Robin Celikates is Professor of Social Philosophy at Freie Universität (FU) Berlin, co-director of the Center for Social Critique Berlin, and currently a visiting scholar at MIT. Before moving to FU in 2019, he taught at the University of Amsterdam and was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is a co-editor of the journal Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory (Duke UP) and publishes on critical theory, migration, and social movements (more information here). His books include Critique as Social Practice (2018) and the edited volume Analyzing Ideology (forthcoming).