Why Race Still Matters as therapy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Alana Lentin's Why Race Still Matters (2020) is a timely articulation of where we are at in current debates on race. The book lists, names and archives critical arguments, and identifies the many actors entangled in a battle of ideas. In this article, I provide three main readings of Lentin's work. I suggest the book is an erudite and necessary reading of the public’s racial literacy, which also casts a needed self-reflective gaze on how anti-racists may be frustrating failing the public. Indeed, Lentin sublimates frustration into a productive and insightful use of “Not-racism”. A concept that unsettles the prevailing way we discuss and fail to discuss Racism. In the end, I suggest Lentin’s Why Race Still Matters works as sort of therapy that speaks to the emotional register that surrounds anti-racist work. There is decluttering of the conversation that points to how we may manage the ways we fight and discuss racism.