The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence

Not so long ago, many spoke of a ‘post-racial’ era, claiming that advances made by people of colour showed that racial divisions were becoming a thing of the past. But the hollowness of such claims has been exposed by the rise of Trump and Brexit, both of which have revealed deep seated white resentment, and have been attended by a resurgence in hate crime and overt racial hatred on both sides of the Atlantic. At a time when progress towards equality is not only stalling, but being actively reversed, how should anti-racist scholars respond? This collection carries on James Baldwin’s legacy of bearing witness to racial violence in its many forms. Its authors address how we got to this particular moment, arguing that it can only be truly understood by placing it within the wider historical and structural contexts that normalise racism and white supremacy. Its chapters engage with a wide range of contemporary issues and debates, from the whiteness of the recent women’s marches, to anti-racist education, to the question of Black resistance and intersectionality. Mapping out the problems we face, and the solutions we need, the book considers how anti-racist scholarship and activism can overcome the setbacks posed by the resurgence of white supremacy.

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. Yancy has published over 250 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, books, and at various news sites. Yancy is known for his numerous essays and interviews in the New York Times' philosophy column The Stone, and Truthout. He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including most recently Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future and In Sheep's Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (coedited with philosopher Bill Bywater. Yancy is editor of the Philosophy of Race Book Series at Bloomsbury.

Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being―named by the Guardian as one of the best books of 2016―and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. She is currently Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities, at York University, in Toronto.