Racism, policy and politics speaks to the contemporary and intersecting fields of race, racism and anti-racism in relation to policy, politics and policing. There already are many books on race, on policy (for example see Neale et al 2013, Turda and Quine 2018) and on the police, so what does this one add to all of those? I want to highlight two things that make this work distinctive. One is biographical: while various sections of this book are based on conventional social science research, they also draw on my own immersion in public policy. I say more about that at the end of this Introduction, but here I indicate that this can be seen most directly in the discussions in Chapters Six and Seven, though it had wider import in framing the general orientation of this book. This engagement and experience reinforced for me a sense of disquiet I had about the academy, in particular about the ways in which policy and politics are sometimes understood and represented in academic scholarship, as well as the nature of critical scholarship, and the circularity of some debates around race and racism. This is the basis of the second claim to distinctiveness I want to make. The chapters in this book review, engage, critique and maybe reconfigure academic and scholarly takes on impact, engagement as well as public sociology/criminology and any other way of framing a purposive critical encounter with policy and politics. The need for this perspective arises from the contemporary and recent issues discussed in this book, which illustrate various paths and trends that form an impasse around race and racism, and around policy, particularly in relation to the police, and the sense of familiarity and echoes of the past in all of that.

This book begins with a critical appraisal of sociological and social science debates about what race is, and closes with a final chapter that examines ways in which scholars frame riots. A key issue that recurs throughout the book is the sense that these things – not just riots, or debates about race but also many related matters – are always, seemingly, changing, yet at the same time, they feel as if they are unchanging. This paradox is what the term ‘the changing same’ speaks to, and I say a little more on this later.