Ruth Arber Race, Ethnicity and Education in Globalised Times

Annotation

What is the speci?city of contemporary racism? And what happens to questions of race in a context where multiculturalism is taken for granted. Few authors address these kinds of questions with subtlety. For the most part, questions of racism are treated either as self-evident or alternatively as self-evidenced. The?rstapproach,accentuatedineverydaylife,andplayedoutinmediaexposes, is the tendencyto treat racism as manifestly self-evident. We just know what racism is in principle, and we just know what it looks like when we see it in practice. Dualistic assumptions dominate this sense of identity relations - persons are racist or they are not; an act is racist or it is not. However, despite the obviousness of racism in contexts where different people have different seating arrangements on a bus, or somebody says "I am better than you because your skin-colour is different", this approach barely comes to terms with the depth of embodied politics and the elusiveness of structures of racism in the contemporary world.