I’ve been wanting to write this post for some time. But every week just brings more bad news. More terrible examples. 

In November last year, the Dutch government almost collapsed over racist remarks made by one of the coalition government ministers. December was witness to the horrifying antisemitic attack at Bondi beach. President Donald Trump has called Somalis “garbage.” In the U.K., increasing numbers of his former school classmates have been going public about Nigel Farage’s history of racist and antisemitic remarks . Writing in The New York Times, David Broder warns of a rising right-wing across Europe. He doesn’t use the word racism. But it is obviously the object of concern when he writes that, 

“By 2030, there’s every chance that we will be talking not about voters flirting with populism but of far-right parties heading Europe’s main countries. Figures like Mr. Farage, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Wilders could hold sway across Europe.”

My home country, Canada, is not immune. The Conservatives lost the last election, but not because of  Poilievre’s, racist dog-whistling invocation of “Anglo-Saxon language” and his targeting immigrants. The last federal election went the way of the Liberals largely because of Trump’s anti-Canadian policies and rhetoric.

Back to the United States, the 2025 National Security Strategy is full of racist signalling. These include phrases about “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence” and how addressing the consequences of structural patterns of discrimination undermines American security and safety by going against merit and competence. It’s all just racism, and it is not hidden particularly effectively.  

Of course, there has always been a lot of racism in politics. Readers of The Duck are likely familiar with the racist history of our own academic field, and W.E.B. Du Boix makes a powerful argument that the international system (or society, if you go that way) itself is shaped by “the colour line.”

Yet, despite legacies of racism, public manifestations of it in recent years are especially concerning.  In one sense, the racism that has likely always been there is coming to the surface.

That should trouble all of us. 

The scholar of racism, Albert Memmi,  writes that, “There is a strange kind of tragic enigma associated with the problem of racism. No one, or almost no one, wishes to see themselves as racist.” Even the racists seem to know that it is a bad thing to be described as one. Yet, obviously, there are racists out there and racism exists.

Part of what Memmi is getting at is being able to use the descriptor and have it stick. The goalposts for identifying racism are often contested, especially by those who use racist arguments. “I’m not a racist but…” says the person who doesn’t like immigrants who bear a different skin tone, speak a different language, eat different foods. “I’m not a racist but…” says the person who generalises derogatively about an entire minority group. 

That people can hold conflicting ideas (not seeing themselves as racist while holding racist views) is not my point, and holding prejudicial views that generalise against an entire ethnic group is, I would say, racist. 

There are, however, different ways that racism presents itself. We need to be mindful of the difference between individual racism and the structures of racism, without one cancelling out the other. 

For example, are you a racist if you support a politician who is clearly discriminatory of particular ethnic or racial groups, or who whose policies are aimed at undoing efforts to repair histories of structural forms of discrimination? 

I want to say yes, because I think that complicity matters. But I also think there is more to it than that.

Racism functions at different registers, individual, collective, and structural. Our social and political orders are often built on structures that privilege certain racial (or ethnic) groups over others. Legacies of persecution, tax rates, educational opportunities, implicit biases, conditions for opportunity, etc. can all contribute to shaping a society that is, in some ways, racist. 

But does that then mean that we are all racist?

My undergraduate sociology professor would say yes. I’m not so sure. Individual choice has to mean something, and simply saying everyone is racist because our society is built on histories of racial injustice and exploitation doesn’t seem to be a very useful or insightful point to make, even if there a truth to it.

There are significant normative differences involved in highlighting structural as opposed to individual racism. Speaking to the structures can remove individuals of their own responsibility. It can also be very abstract, ignoring that there are people involved in sustaining such structures. However, focusing on individuals ignores the structures that can support or enable racism that enables individual racists. Nevertheless, the distinction is important, despite how it is being deployed to help legitimate the rise in racism we are witnessing today.

Memmi asks us to confront the question of how far racism can be acceptable in public. Politicians on the populist-right with their anti-immigrant and anti-pluralist ideologies are working very hard to make racism acceptable, without it somehow being “racist.” How they do so is worth thinking about.

I think that their strategy is based on framing structural forms of racism as a cause for other forms of inequalities that are unrelated, making individual racists no longer appear racist but as victims instead. Consequently, support for underprivileged minority groups becomes a case of taking resources away from some other demographic –  hence white working-class outrage. Or it is used as evidence suggesting that the nation no longer knows who it is –  reflecting an upper class aggressive nationalism that also speaks to working class nostalgia. The publicity of racism is allowing these two to merge. There is a strategy at work here that allows racism to be made public as something that appears other than racism. It is this publicity of racism that frightens me: the practice of making racism public in a way that tries to present it as something else.

I don’t have a clear solution here. I feel that I need to address this issue at greater length than I have done so far. But I remain deeply concerned, frightened even, of how racism is being welcomed into the public sphere. I suspect that those out on the streets in Minnesota protesting ICE’s brutalism feel something similar.