This essay is part of a forthcoming special issue of Sociological Forum: “Resistance in the 21st Century.” Suggested citation:
- al-Gharbi, Musa (in press). “Resistance as Sacrifice: Towards an Ascetic Antiracism.” Sociological Forum.
“Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two closely related forms…we call these individual racism and institutional racism… The second type is… far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type… It is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.”
(Ture & Hamilton 1992, p. 4)
This passage, from Kwame Ture & Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, marks the first use of the term “institutional racism.” The reality the authors described in 1967 remains distressingly familiar today.[1] While overt expressions of what they called ‘individual racism’ have markedly declined in the intervening period (Bonilla-Silva 2017), vast disparities remain between blacks and whites in terms of education (Shedd 2015), employment (Western & Pettit 2005) and wealth (Sullivan et al. 2015); discrimination in hiring and promotion continues (Quillian et al. 2017), as do the predatory lending practices targeting blacks which Ture and Hamilton condemned (Semuels 2018).
Social scientists often discuss these disparities as outcomes. However, inequality is probably better understood as a process (Abbot 2016, pp. 233-252)– one sustained largely as a result of how systems and institutions are structured and reproduced, and the ways in which people act and interact within them across time. Systemic racism is not a product (outcome) of people holding the ‘wrong’ beliefs or feelings. It is a function of behavioral patterns — and (unjust) allocations of resources and opportunities — that systematically advantage some, and disadvantage others, within particular contexts. It persists because it is enacted moment to moment, situation to situation. It could be ended if those who currently perpetuate it committed themselves to playing a different role instead – not merely through their words or feelings, but with action.[2]
This essay makes three core contributions: first, it highlights a disturbing parity between those who are most rhetorically committed to ending racialized inequality and those most responsible for its persistence. Next, it explores the origin of this paradox – how it is that ostensibly antiracist intentions are transmuted into ‘benevolently racist’ actions. Finally, it presents an alternative approach to dismantling racialized inequality, one which more effectively challenges the self-oriented and extractive logics that undergird systemic racism: ascetic antiracism. Rather than expropriating blame to others, or adopting introspective and psychologized approaches to problems that are fundamentally social in nature, those sincerely committed to antiracism can take concrete steps in the real world – actions which require no legislation or coercion of naysayers, just a willingness to personally make sacrifices for the sake of racial justice.