Antiracism Inc. traces the ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. It also examines the ways organizers continue to struggle for racial justice in the context of such appropriations. Antiracism Inc. reveals how antiracist claims can be used to propagate racism, and what we can do about it.

While related to colorblind, multicultural, and diversity discourses, the appropriation of antiracist rhetoric as a strategy for advancing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas is a unique phenomenon that requires careful interrogation and analysis. Those who co-opt antiracist language and practice do not necessarily deny racial difference, biases, or inequalities. Instead, by performing themselves conservatively as non-racists or liberally as 'authentic' antiracists, they purport to be aligned with racial justice even while advancing the logics and practices of systemic racism.

Antiracism Inc. considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The critical essays, interviews, and poetry collected here focus on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, they focus on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who also work to build the worlds they envision. These collectivities seek to transform social structures and establish a new social warrant guided by what W.E.B. Du Bois called abolition democracy, a way of being and thinking that privileges people, mutual interdependence, and ecological harmony over individualist self-aggrandizement and profits. Further, these aggrieved collectivities reshape social relations away from the violence and alienation inherent to gendered racial capitalism, and towards the well-being of the commons. Antiracism Inc. articulates methodologies that strive toward freedom dreams without imposing monolithic or authoritative definitions of resistance. Because power seeks to neutralize revolutionary action through incorporation as much as through elimination, these freedom dreams, as well as the language used to articulate them, are constantly transformed through the critical and creative interventions stemming from the active engagement in liberation struggles.

In addition to critical essays by Felice Blake (How Does Black Cultural Criticism 'Work' in the Age of Antiracist Incorporation?), Kevin Fellezs (Nahenahe [Soft, Sweet, Melodious], the Sound of Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian] Refusal), Daniel Martinez HoSang (A Wider Type of Freedom), Paula Ioanide (Defensive Appropriations), George Lipsitz (The Logic of 'Illogical' Opposition: Tools and Tactics for Tough Times), Alison Reed (Gentrifying Disciplines: The Institutional Management of Trauma and Creative Dissent), Phia S. Salter + Glenn Adams (Provisional Strategies for Decolonizing Consciousness), and Barbara Tomlinson (Wicked Problems and Intersectionality Telephone), the volume also includes poetry by Dubian Ade, Jari Bradley, Dahlak Brathwaite, Corinne Contreras, Ebony P. Donnley, Colin Masashi Ehara, David Scott (YDS), Daniel Hershel Silber-Baker, and Sophia Terazawa, as well as interviews with Diana Zuñiga (CURB, Californians United for a Responsible Budget) and with Gaby Hernandez and Marissa Garcia (PODER, People Organizing for the Defense and Equal Rights of Santa Barbara Youth).

With stop-and-frisk laws, new immigration policies, and cuts to social welfare programs, majorities in the United States have increasingly supported intensified forms of punishment and marginalization against Black, Latino, Arab and Muslim people in the United States, even as a majority of citizens claim to support colorblindness and racial equality. With this book, Paula Ioanide examines how emotion has prominently figured into these contemporary expressions of racial discrimination and violence. How U.S. publics dominantly feel about crime, terrorism, welfare, and immigration often seems to trump whatever facts and evidence say about these politicized matters.

Though four case studies--the police brutality case of Abner Louima; the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib; the demolition of New Orleans public housing units following Hurricane Katrina; and a proposed municipal ordinance to deny housing to undocumented immigrants in Escondido, CA--Ioanide shows how racial fears are perpetuated, and how these widespread fears have played a central role in justifying the expansion of our military and prison system and the ongoing divestment from social welfare. But Ioanide also argues that within each of these cases there is opportunity for new mobilizations, for ethical witnessing: we must also popularize desires for justice and increase people's receptivity to the testimonies of the oppressed by reorganizing embodied and unconscious structures of feeling.

With stop-and-frisk laws, new immigration policies, and cuts to social welfare programs, majorities in the United States have increasingly supported intensified forms of punishment and marginalization against Black, Latino, Arab and Muslim people in the United States, even as a majority of citizens claim to support colorblindness and racial equality. With this book, Paula Ioanide examines how emotion has prominently figured into these contemporary expressions of racial discrimination and violence. How U.S. publics dominantly feel about crime, terrorism, welfare, and immigration often seems to trump whatever facts and evidence say about these politicized matters.

Though four case studies--the police brutality case of Abner Louima; the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib; the demolition of New Orleans public housing units following Hurricane Katrina; and a proposed municipal ordinance to deny housing to undocumented immigrants in Escondido, CA--Ioanide shows how racial fears are perpetuated, and how these widespread fears have played a central role in justifying the expansion of our military and prison system and the ongoing divestment from social welfare. But Ioanide also argues that within each of these cases there is opportunity for new mobilizations, for ethical witnessing: we must also popularize desires for justice and increase people's receptivity to the testimonies of the oppressed by reorganizing embodied and unconscious structures of feeling.