Alana Lentin

“In his theorizaton of crisis racism under Thatcherism and in the France of an insurgent Front national, Etienne Balibar describes how the invocation of crisis licenses the ‘crossing of certain thresholds of intolerance […] which are generally turned on the victims themselves and described as thresholds of tolerance’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 219, italics in original). Establishing the intolerable is crucial to the exercise of racisms integral to but disavowed in national and European imaginaries (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998: 78). This preserves a hegemonic self-image of the tolerant acting intolerantly under duress: the 2004 redesignation of the wearing of the hijab in France as intrinsically an act of proselytization, the defence of the publication of the Jyllands Posten cartoons as an inclusive act of mockery, the objection to a Muslim cultural centre and ‘inter-faith prayer space’ near the former site of the World Trade Center in New York as an ‘assertion of Islamic triumphalism that we should not tolerate’ (see Pilkington 2010).”
― Alana Lentin, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age