The ways that academic scholars conceive of, analyse and debate race and racism are matters of theoretical deliberation within and across disciplinary boundaries, but such discussions, however abstract and rarefied, are rarely done just for the sake of speaking to other scholars. Their purposiveness may be far removed from aiming at policy relevance or even social action, but they commonly have a critical edge or intent directed at the demise, or at least the reduction, of racism in a world shaped by and divided on racial lines, where inequalities, life chances, social and international relations and everyday life are informed by race and racism.

For Golash-Boza, race scholarship cannot be an ‘armchair exercise’; it should not be studied ‘only for its intellectual interest … [but for] the end of racial oppression’ (Golash-Boza 2016: 139). In this light, race scholarship must always be a more than academic matter; however, what that entails practically is itself an issue of contention and, usually, an intra-scholarly debate about the relationship between the academy and politics. While race studies is far from the only arena where there is, or can be, a tension between ‘academic’ and ‘applied’ knowledge, or where academics seek to speak to and impact on publics and policy, it is an acute place in the contemporary world to address such issues. Applying scholarly research and knowledge does not occur in a linear or direct manner, and Chapters Four to Six explore and develop that point further in looking at institutional racism and some of its consequences within sociology and in public policy around racism and policing.

The field of race and racism research does embody the difficulty of linking scholarly depth and precision with the pressing and evident need to tackle questions about racism, xenophobia, and racial inequality in the everyday social and political realities of contemporary societies. Just a few high-profile public events of recent years make the need and the difficulty evident: the ways in which forced migration and refugees have become central to European politics and counter-reaction to migrants has tested analyses of racism and migration (Lentin 2014). The furore about police brutality in the US against African-American men has challenged head on the limits of post-racial arguments, by making plain the realities of everyday racialised violence (Coates 2015, Goldberg 2015, Camp and Heatherton 2016).