Nasar Meer - The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (21st Century Standpoints)

Nasar Meer weaves together an impressive account, drawing on research in a number of national contexts, to address the question of why there has been a failure to achieve the objective of racial justice. This masterful account should become an important part of future conversations by researchers and policymakers about how we can lay the foundations for radical change in this vital area of the social world.

John Solomos, University of Warwick

Nasar Meer asks a thought-provoking foundational question: What if racial justice movements are destined to fail because racial injustice is part of the DNA of our social institutions? He argues convincingly that only by looking at these deep roots will we understand why racial injustices prevail even after generations of anti-racism struggles. His deeply scholarly yet based-in-practice account is a compelling wake-up call to rethink what progress actually looks like and whose interests it serves.

Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College

Timely and insightful, provides not only a clear mapping of our current context with regard to racial justice, what has been achieved, what has been obscured and what has failed, but also what can be done. An essential read in the current reactionary conjuncture and provides us with ways in which to think about our past, present and future in more hopeful and just terms.

Aurelien Mondon, University of Bath

Asks profound questions about how struggles for racial justice come to reach their impasse through counter-reactions designed to preserve existing racial orders and formations. Meers book not only offers an illuminating analysis of the present conjuncture, but also the challenge of thinking through the concepts of racial justice and equality.

Sindre Bangstad, KIFO, Institute for Church,
Religion and Worldview Research, Norway

A crucial analysis of what we can learn from various attempts at racial justice throughout the Global North. An accomplished scholar of race, ethnicity and nationalism, Meers thorough and beautifully crafted text provides a needed guide for making sense of our present moment and its historical antecedents as both the Black Lives Matter movement and the global pandemic intensify.

Jean Beaman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Nasar Meer enjoins us to reckon with the systemic character of racial injustice, the imprint of the past on the present and our compulsion to optimism in the face of the repeated failure of ameliorative initiatives. Alive to the moral, affective and political dimensions of its subject, this is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the conditions which produce racial injustice and to imagine those which will allow the justified perseverance of hope.

David Feldman, Birkbeck, University of London

Essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of structural racism and how it persists, despite waves of policy and political intervention.

Carol Young, Coalition for Race Equality and Rights

For those scholar activists, community organisers, freedom dreamers and everyday people living the political and emotional struggle against racial injustice, this is a book for you. Meer offers a sobering reflection on how reckoning with what has not yet come to pass can in fact provide a renewed sense of hope in what might be.

Kennetta Hammond-Perry, Stephen Lawrence
Research Centre, De Montfort University

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

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Cover design: Lyn Davies

For Aiisha Smith-Meer

What are the 21st century challenges shaping our lives today and in the future? At this time of social, political, economic and cultural disruption, this exciting series, published in association with the British Sociological Association, brings pressing public issues to the general reader, scholars and students. It offers standpoints to shape public conversations and a powerful platform for both scholarly and public debate, proposing better ways of understanding, and living in, our world.

Series Editors: Les Back, Goldsmiths and Nasar

Meer, University of Edinburgh

Other titles in this series:

Published

Race, Taste, Class and Cars by Yunis Alam

Miseducation by Diane Reay

Snobbery by David Morgan

Money by Mary Mellor

Making Sense of Brexit by Victor Seidler

Whats Wrong with Work? by Lynne Pettinger

Contents

Nasar Meer is Professor of Sociology and Director of RACE. ED at the University of Edinburgh, and was a Commissioner on the Royal Society of Edinburghs (RSE) (202021) Post-COVID-19 Futures Inquiry, and a Member of the Scottish Government COVID-19 and Ethnicity Expert Reference Group. He is Co-Editor of the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and his publications include: Whiteness and Nationalism (ed, 2020); The Impact Agenda: Challenges and Controversies (co-authored, 2020); Islam and Modernity (4 volumes) (ed, 2017); Citizenship, Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism (2015, 2nd edn); Key Concepts in Race and Ethnicity (2014); Interculturalism and Multiculturalism (ed, 2016), Racialization and Religion (ed, 2014) and European Multiculturalism(s) (ed, 2012). He is presently Co-Investigator on The impacts of the pandemic on ethnic and racialised groups in the UK (UKRI, 202123) and Principal Investigator of GLIMER Governance and Local Integration of Migrants and Europes Refugees (JPI ERA Net/Horizon, 201721). He is an elected Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE).

Much of the underlying research for this book draws on funded support from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), JPI Urban Europe and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). I am immensely grateful for what such publicly funded research allows, and I remain indebted to my colleagues and collaborators for the continuing dialogues this has permitted. The teams at GLIMER, RACE.ED and