The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy

by Alana Lentin

As Robin D.G. Kelley puts it, 'anti-wokeness is the perfect example of the functioning of the racial regime.' Taking the reader beyond the distracting framings of culture wars and moral panics, Alana Lentin shows how the attacks on Black, Indigenous and anticolonial thought and praxis reveal the processes through which racial colonial rule is ideologically resecured.

Throughout the book, the often chaotic and contradictory restitching of the racial regime is traced through the attacks on Critical Race Theory; the 'whitelash' against the teaching of histories of slavery and colonialism; the counterinsurgent capture and institutionalisation of antiracism, Indigeneity and decoloniality in the interests of Zionism, settler colonialism, and imperialism; and how the state mandated 'war on antisemitism' reforms white supremacism at an acute time of genocide. 

While the racial regime undergoes constant recalibration, its inherent instability is the consequence of continual resistance from below. Maintaining and deepening that resistance is vital at a time of rapidly mounting fascism.

Genres: Race, Cultural, History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

Published May 20, 2025

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

W.E.B. Du Bois’s prediction in the first decade of the 20th century that the issue of the century was likely to be the ‘colour line’ (as it was then known) seems to have been optimistic – it’s looking increasingly, ¼ of the way through, that it’ll be the issue of the 21st century as well (alongside the climate emergency). Looking at it from this ¼-century vantage point, with the reassertion of white supremacy globally, of fascism and its reactionary allies across Europe, the USA, Turkey, India, the Philippines, Argentina, Israel and more, there is little doubt that we are facing a global crisis. Alana Lentin’s latest book is a significant and vital contribution to making sense of that crisis, and therefore of planning and implementing a response, of building struggle with effect.

Drawing on Cedric Robinson’s notion of racial regimes, Lentin unpicks and unpacks recent cultural and political shifts to begin to unravel current practices of race in the light the persistence of imperialism and colonialism and their long run imbrication with capitalism as a global system. No doubt, in part influenced by the continuing genocide in Gaza but also correctly identifying on the most significant recent shifts in regimes of racial power, much of the discussion turns around the conceptualisation of antisemitism, linked to the persistence and power after 25 years of a ‘War on Terror’ of Islamophobia. It is in this complexity that we can see two of the book’s key strengths: first, the sophistication of the argument, and second the clarity if Lentin’s insight and the consequent accessibility of the analysis.

There are two principal strands to the case, the first centred on ‘culture’, the second on more explicitly ‘political’ aspects of the issue. The ‘cultural’ aspect unravels the moral panic about Critical Race Theory and its use as a fear mongering battering ram to undermine scholarship and impose control on the education sector. Here we see the crispness of Lentin’s analysis which explores and critiques the Right’s attacks while also maintaining a critical approach to CRT, both for its specificity and its limitations: here is an author demonstrating their expertise. This evaluation of CRT-centred attacks is then accompanied by a discussion of the struggles over history and what Lentin calls the ‘technologies of white forgetting’. One of the aspects of this part of the analysis that I particularly appreciate is that, in writing from Australia, Lentin brings in issues, ideas and voices that get beyond the all too dominant North Atlantic, Euro-American perspectives. Linked to this, her sense of empire and colonialism is one positioned in Empire, in a colony of settlement where both colonialism and Indigeneity have aspects seldom recognised or understood in that dominant frame.

The second aspect of the analysis, the ‘political’ one, is similarly grounded in this wider perspective, while focusing in on the shifting place of Zionism in that global regime of racial power. Here Lentin points to two significant tactical approaches. The first is the weaving of Zionism and Zionist support into wider struggles for racial justice, including claims and practice around the US Civil Rights Movement, anti-racist training and education, as an aspect of the conflation of a political ideology (Zionism) with a religious and cultural grouping (Jewish), and more significantly the particular form that Zionism takes in contemporary Israel (although Lentin is critical of Zionism as a whole). The second, related, tactical strand she explores is the Zionist attempts to build alliances with Indigenous peoples’ movements as part of an assertion of indigeneity in Palestine. This Lentin shows to be a powerful factor in coloniality’s defanging of decolonisation, of what she sees as ‘colonising decolonisation’, but also that amongst those Indigenous people’s movements there is a widespread but not universal rejection of these claims.

One of the elegant things about this approach is that to a large degree Lentin deploys Robinson’s tactical and strategic approach to struggle here: start with the cultural, contest the meanings of words, concepts, and tools, but don’t end there – go into the on-the-ground struggles and the material conditions of that work. The other elegance of the book is that Lentin then wraps up this unpicking of the ‘recalibration of white supremacy’ by focusing in on the efforts to assert cultural control over the political struggles through efforts to define antisemitism as seen in the widespread alignment by those defending white supremacy of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. In this discussion Lentin shows two key things – first that this approach asserts Euro-American supremacy while also maintaining antisemitism as distinct and the worst of the racisms, while secondly shifting responsibility for contemporary antisemitism to the racialized, othered, Muslim and so expanding whiteness to its formerly Othered Jew. The second key thing Lentin does here is demonstrate how contesting those definitions on the terms set by formalist approaches, by the state, by those supremacists, does little to assist the racialized other – in the current times, Palestinians – because it cedes the ability to determine the cultural landscape to those with power.

This is a powerful, important contribution to our contemporary understandings of regimes of racial power and white supremacy. It, however, also, points to and leaves largely unconsidered (rightly noting that to do so would be a different book) the ‘origins’ of notions of race, of racism as a regime of oppression, of their imbrication with capitalism, and of the meaning of that imbrication. Lentin properly contests both crude reductionist perspectives and monocausal approaches, including those that see that origin as a singularity. At the same time, she also poses important historical questions about that relationship and therefore the forces shaping the development of racial regimes, deferring to Robinson. There may be, in her more academic work, discussions of these more arcane questions of racial regimes as such – if not, it’s a discussion that we need to be having.

But that’s not to distract from the power and usefulness of this elegant and rigorous exploration of the emerging new racial regime – although it’s also likely to require rethinking as that regime continues to take shape, and as we continue to challenge and contest it. That is to say, as valuable as this is, we in our various forms of struggle would do well to remember that it is also, in various ways, provisional.