Facile postracialism presumes the non-significance of race. However, its political expression (what this book terms state postracialism) requires a parallel discourse, a burly minder. In contemporary Britain our postracial turn has been paralleled by political antagonism to antiracist movements: an ‘anti-‘ or ‘contra-‘ antiracism. Postracialism and ‘contra-‘ antiracism are symbiotic because if race and racism are supposed to have declined in social salience, then those who continue to campaign against racial injustice must be treated with suspicion, as divisive voices, even as ‘reverse racists’. Chapter 5 of this book explores this symbiosis. It examines the ways in which the overtly racist discourses of past decades have been superseded, in mainstream political debate, by discursive modes that are less overtly racist but which aim instead to delegitimise contemporary antiracist movements, to harry the discursive space available for critical race voices.

For the most part, these new racist expressions shy away from taking issue with the presence per se of Black and Brown communities in Britain; instead they rest on the insistence that Black political demands, multicultural identification and calls for racial justice have gone too far. In short, Britain may or may not be ‘full’ in terms of minority ethnic population but it has reached full capacity as regards addressing matters of race and racism. This chapter's discussion focuses on the ‘contra-‘ backlash evident since the BLM summer of 2020, when there was a brief window in which BLM seemed state adjacent, a moment of interest convergence. That moment was brief. After 2020, critics of multiculturalism and antiracism gone-too-far sought renewed discursive spaces, urging moral panics around BLM, CRT and the trial and acquittal of protestors who toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020. Chapter 5 traces the emergence of those ‘contra-‘ discourses, including the transatlantic targeting of CRT, which has been cast as a particular trope.

Anything but antiracism

The first step in delegitimising antiracism is declaring it no longer necessary. Under ‘really existing postracialism’ racism exists elsewhere: in other places and other historical periods.