Permanent Racism: Politics and Policy in 'Postracial' Britain (Book Launch)

With speaker Professor Paul Warmington, Visiting Professor, Research Centre for Global Learning (GLEA), Coventry University and Visiting Researcher, Centre for Identities and Social Justice, Goldsmiths, University of London

Racism has no place in our society – or so we are told. The problem is, however, that racism has had a very real place in our societies and is too useful an invention to be readily relinquished. Critical Race Theory’s founder Derrick Bell used the unsettling phrase ‘the permanence of racism’ to signify that our world is far from being postracial and that struggles for racial justice remain locked into cycles of progress and regression.

This paper examines how, in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, Britain’s regression from the uneven state multiculturalism of the Macpherson Report era accelerated, with claims that Britain had become a ‘postracial’ model, calls to discount structural racism and moral panics around ‘woke’ signifiers, such as CRT, BLM and EDI.

Based on Paul Warmington's new book, Permanent Racism, this paper reflects on the positioning of antiracist scholars in the ‘postracial’ policy world. How might we speak truths about racism to the ‘postracial’ powers-that-be?   

Biography

Paul Warmington is a Visiting Professor at the Research Centre for Global Learning (GLEA), Coventry University and a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Identities and Social Justice, Goldsmiths, University of London. Paul is an internationally recognised scholar, whose work is rooted in Black Atlantic thought and focuses on education and social justice, and on Black intellectual movements. He began his career in further education in the late 1980s and has worked in higher education at the Universities of Nottingham, Birmingham and Warwick. His work has been covered in The Guardian, Times Education Supplement and The Voice. He recently contributed to BBC1’s landmark documentary Subnormal, on the placing of Black children in ESN schools during the 1960s and 70s. His book Permanent Racism: Race, Class and the Myth of Postracial Britain is published by Policy Press in January 2024. 

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