Locating Racism in the World

In Locating Racism in the World, Ainsley LeSure develops a worldly theory of antiblack racism rooted in the analytic promise of phenomenology, a philosophical examination of lived experience, that lends unique insight into why and how American democracy is confronting its greatest existential crisis since the Civil War on the eve of its 250th anniversary. Through an analysis of central texts in political theory and black studies written by Kwame Ture [formerly Stokley Carmichael], Charles V. Hamilton, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers, LeSure argues that racism is best understood as a reality-violating common sense generated and perfected through racist practices that produce a white, antiblack world. This worldly understanding avoids the key pitfalls of post-Civil Rights theories of racism: the assumption that one needs to account for the emotional and mental states of individuals to validate beyond dispute that certain racial practices and their outcomes are instances of racism. And it also avoids black studies’ recent pessimism by clarifying that the aim of democratic politics strong enough to combat racial common sense must focus on observable reality, take plurality seriously, and transform equality from an abstract ideal into an active one that people actualize in their everyday lives.