The crash of 2008 and the subsequent worldwide failure to confront the neoliberal project have generated reactionary nationalism all over the world. Racism is a central component of this reaction: it is expressed in anti-immigrant politics, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Negrophobia, and anti-indigenism, among other forms. Reaction is intersectional: it not only exhumes white supremacism but revivifies assaults on workers, poor people, women, LGBT people, and the planet itself. These grim developments, however, do not go unchallenged. Reaction is always reacting TO something, and that something is the immense achievements of popular-democratic movements since WWII. Since the Great Recession of 2008 and especially since Trump’s election in 2016, Black movements, the struggle for immigrants’ rights, global and local feminisms, and resurgent opposition to against capitalism itself have threatened the neoliberal order in new ways. It is their accomplishment, our accomplishment, which we have forced the global regime to turn toward reaction. The fight against racism is a key dimension of this struggle; we see it everywhere. Focusing on global trajectories of race and racism, contemporary configurations of racialized experience, and the remarkable demonstrations of anti-racist solidarity occurring on a global scale, this talk concentrates on the current crisis and the new parameters of racial politics becoming visible today all around the world. To revise Gramsci on this matter: the old has not yet died, but the new is still being born.

Howard Winant has been Professor of Sociology at UCSB since 2002, where he also holds affiliations with the Black Studies, Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies Departments.  In 2009 he founded and directs the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, a multidisciplinary program active on all ten UC campuses which works to network and support new approaches to research on race, racism and racial justice.  Professor Winant holds a doctorate in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz, and has worked and taught in the US, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.  Professor Winant’s research interests include racial and social theory, and the comparative historical sociology, political sociology, and cultural sociology of race, in the US and further afield. His work on racial formation theory with Professor Michael Omi is considered seminal in the field of racial studies in contemporary US society