In today’s authoritarian climate, we are witnessing not only the rise and proliferation of Alt-Right movements, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ineffectiveness of the liberal paradigm whose propensity for identity politics works to silence the cry of the dispossessed and foreclose radical change. The liberal message to the racialized, excluded, and/or abandoned is to invest in identity and to translate grievances in familiar and sanctioned terms—be reformist, not revolutionary (for example, ask for more police body cams, not defund the police).

Our panelists will consider the challenges facing scholars of race and racism in today’s political landscape. How do we engage in the labor of critique while avoiding contemporary separatist temptations? How do we complicate, if not break with, a non-violent, sentimentalist liberal vision of the future that announces more of the same—a cosmetically repackaged but intolerable social reality? Can we think beyond identity and consider the violence of the status quo as unacceptable while eschewing identitarian thoughts and positions in favor of a collective struggle for freedom and equality?