Mohan Ambikaipaker’s Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain complicates the workings of existing antiracism policies and the lived experiences of racialized groups in Britain, who experience the workings of everyday racial violence. Outlining the workings of the state and its construction of those deemed internal “others” the author exposes imperial and colonial legacies of Britain. In doing so, Ambikaipaker demonstrates how these legacies are much more than remnants of a historical past but in fact operate as colonial continuities. While the state distances itself from its imperial past, or in fact engages in active “forgetting of the British empire” (20), power dynamics in the present continue to reproduce patterns of exclusion for those deemed outsiders of the nation. One of the most important contributions of the book is Ambikaipaker’s concept of “everyday political whiteness” (26). The ethnographic research reveals the many failures of the state to respond to or prevent gendered and racial violence. By bringing together critical race theory and decolonial studies, the author unveils the racist workings of the state not as exceptions to an otherwise nonracist system but how multiracial Britain and its state-sponsored antiracism continues to relate to racialized subjects and postcolonial migrants in ways that produce imperial and colonial relations of power.This is a daunting yet hopeful ethnography study of the state of antiracism in Britain and the radical potential of political blackness. By using “activist anthropology,” Ambikaipaker offers an insight into the work of the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), a community-based antiracist organization located in East London. What makes the book distinct is that the author offers both a theoretical grounding of racism and whiteness in multiracial Britain and an engaged activism, which draw from his ethnographic analysis over the course of multiple years while simultaneously working as a caseworker for the NMP. Relayed with intricate detail and compassion, the analysis offered in the book is daunting and gives insights into the everyday racial violence communities of color experience, yet Ambikaipaker also urges the reader to (re-)consider the radical potentiality of political blackness for interracial solidarity and radical antiracist practices that have the power “to transform our social relationships” (202).The books structure is grounded in specific and painful personal stories of severe injustice that reveal the nature and logic of white racial violence in Britain. Carefully curated by Ambikaipaker, these narratives are the center stage of his analysis and are prioritized over his voice as anthropologist and activist academic. As such, the author keeps his promise of examining the “lived experiences of racial violence and racialized state violence as the lived experience of engaging in antiracist activism” (xiii). The stories shared in this book are the product of not only interviews and observant participation when the author worked as caseworker at the NMP but also of a deep personal relationship harnessed by living in and with the communities presented in the study. While the focus of the ethnographic research remains in and around Newham, Ambikaipaker’s critical race analysis places his data in both current and historical context of racial and racist politics of the British state and thus aims to offer a “critical analysis of the western liberal social order in Britain” (24) as a whole.Focusing on state-sponsored antiracism in multiracial Britain, the place where the London Metropolitan Police Service once declared “by far the best place in Europe to live if you are non-white” (188), Ambikaipaker interrogates the logic of race-blind liberal policies and the failure to protect minority communities from discrimination. The stories shared detail the ongoing and everyday white violence experienced by black communities and the failure of institutions to respond and protect those communities. Through testimonies, the author outlines how different communities are very much aware of their differences and the different treatments they each experience in society. Yet these testimonies acknowledge a common logic of white supremacy that underpins their experiences of being treated differently. Despite the detailed narratives of racist violence, the book is offering an insight into the possibilities (and dare I say hope in) of political Blackness as radical antiracism and a form of solidarity-building between racially and religiously different communities that share the common experience of inequality in a system marked by whiteness. Political Blackness does not refer to skin color but, as stated by the author, is a political term that includes all nonwhite communities. Thus, political Blackness, in the work of the Newham Monitoring Project, the activists cited in the book, as well as advocated by Ambikaipaker, is a tool to build solidarity and forge alliances between communities.The critique to state antiracism offered in this book can easily be seen also in representations of diversity and multiculturalism in British popular media. For example, films like Bend It Like Beckham are designed to showcase multicultural diversity in the UK while also promoting an antiracist stance. Yet, as Sara Ahmed explains, such representations of multiculturalism in British films not only disregard difference in power relations but primarily present multicultural communities as “less trusting and less happy” (2008, 123) and sameness and cultural bridges as the solution to such unhappiness. Sameness thus becomes the logic that promises happiness (Ahmed 2008). In the film, the two portrayed communities, the Indian immigrant family and white British society, are brought together by virtue of being alikeby focusing on the common grounds that existin this case, sports. Thus, the young female Indian-British protagonist of the film, who breaks the social norms of her Indian family home by wanting to be a football player, becomes happy when her family embraces her love for football and, ultimately, her love for her white coach. As such, popular films like Bend It Like Beckham are feel-good movies, where differences are overcome through the cultural bridges such as football. The antiracism propagated by popular works like this highlight individual approaches of understanding and tolerance but does not acknowledge or address historical and structural inequalities between communities of color and white society. Ambikaipaker’s work interrogates these false promises of happiness in state-sponsored multiculturalism and state-sponsored antiracism by looking at state legislation, experiences of racialized minorities, and the difference between self-organized antiracism grounded in political Blackness vis-à-vis feel-good multiculturalism.Organized in six chapters, the book guides the reader through a variety of lived experiences of racial violence and resistance thereof while simultaneously creating an archive of overlapping and interconnected moments of shared struggle. Chapter 1, “Colonial-Racial Zone,” looks at the colonial and imperial history of Britain in shaping its present and challenges the notion of multiculturalism and intercultural encounter as sufficient to alter power imbalances. Instead, the author poses the question of “what kinds of power relations are constituted in these spaces of diversity and interracial encounters” (21). A key theoretical term coined by the author is presented in chapter 2, “Everyday Political Whiteness.” This concept is used to unpack the power relations and the limits of state-sponsored antidiscrimination policies. “Everyday political Whiteness” is defined as “a form of civic agency that aims to reproduce and renew the structural privileges and cultural-epistemological primacy of whiteness in British liberal democracy” (49). The workings of race-blind and dehistoricized understandings of current racial injustice thus reproduce “weak racial justice rule of law” (65) by means of equating racism to other nonstructural forms of social ills or by resorting to responses for racial violence that include interpersonal mediation that disregards imbalances in power between perpetrator and the harmed.To illustrate the colonial power relations produced, chapters 3 and 4 highlight the racial state violence as both gendered and sexualized, where experiences of Black and Muslim women (as well as Black Muslims) are analyzed vis-à-vis racialized violence and the criminalization of men of color in contrast to the white subject. The post-9/11 period and “War on Terror” thus becomes a war on the racialized communities as presented in chapter 5, “The Forest Gate Antiterror Raid.” This chapter interrogates not only the violence produced on these communities but also how the constant blurring of war and peacetime is in fact “part of the forceful logics of contemporary liberal democracy” (131). Here, security for the Western liberal state is realized through violation and suspension of the safety of those deemed internal others of the British state. Finally, returning to political Blackness, the author recounts the histories of shared struggle and solidarity building in the face of British state violence against nonwhite communities to look at political Blackness as a political response to “everyday political violence.” Although communities experience racism in different ways and are also responded to differently by the state, Ambikaipaker returns to the work of the NMP to demonstrate the connectivity and genealogies of solidarity between different groups. The final chapter is thus both an archive and response to the stories of violence in the previous chapters. The solidarities that emerge through the connections enabled by political Blackness illustrate how by “its very unsettled character, [political blackness] cultivates a political imagination that is based on engaging the problematics of unity and solidarity, not simply celebrations of diversity” (201).Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain is a great contribution to critical race theory and critical race research in Europe in particular. The critique of British antidiscrimination structures, legislation, and policy reveal the systemic colonial forgetting that can be seen across the European continent. While the book does not offer a genealogy of political blackness as a whole it does offer insight into the possibilities of solidarity building and antiracism work led by communities most impacted by gendered and racial violence. The book is both ethnographic analysis and an archive of the popular resistance of communities of color and their histories of shared struggle and solidarity.Mahdis Azarmandi is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at DePauw University.