This book is a study of the discursive representation of Islam and Muslims in British broadsheet newspapers, analysing the ways in which they reproduce anti-Muslim racism. While the focus here is British newspapers, given the centripetal forces of political and economic globalisation, the greater standardisation of journalistic texts and the widespread and continuing influence of Orientalist scholarship (particularly in ‘the West’), the conclusions oŸered may be useful to studies of broadsheet, or ‘quality’ newspaper reporting in other countries.
This book has gone to great lengths to reveal, through research and practice, the possibilities of addressing and reducing racist practices in American schools. It features an Antiracist Education Teacher Study that assisted in providing baseline figures of teacher perceptions of racism, and demonstrated how teachers can successfully implement antiracist concepts in their classrooms. Findings further indicate that such teacher involvement makes a difference in student acceptance and attitude. As teachers display enthusiasm for teaching their subject areas multiculturally, and having an intolerance for racist behavior, many students have shown greater respect and appreciation for their teachers who are willing to expose life's realities. Educators in the Teacher Study became role models for their students. This role modeling empowered students in positive ways to address issues of racism from the student perspective. Dr. Donaldson also focuses on shattering the denial of teachers who doubt the existence of racism in schools and who question how student learning is adversely affected by racism. She uncovers the difficulty teachers have with coming to grips with the realities of racism. In light of these difficulties, those who endured became empowered to become better teachers.
Can humanity escape segregating behavior or master the tendency to exclusion? Where does the force of prejudice come from? How might one conceive the philosophical foundations of an effective antiracism? Pursuing these questions, Pierre-André Taguieff puts forward a powerful thesis: that racism has evolved from an argument about races, naturalizing inequality between "biologically" defined groups on the basis of fear of the other, to an argument about cultures, naturalizing historical differences and justifying exclusion. Correspondingly, he shows how antiracism must adopt the strategy that fits the variety of racism it opposes.
Looking at racial and racist theories one by one and then at their antiracist counterparts, Taguieff traces an intellectual genealogy of differentialist and inegalitarian ways of thinking. Already viewed as an essential work of reference in France, The Force of Prejudice is an invaluable tool for identifying and understanding both racism and its antidote in our day.
Pierre-Andre Taguieff, philosopher and historian of political ideas, is director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. Hassan Melehy is assistant professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut.
‘By all standards, this is a remarkable book. The book is a major contribution to our understanding and handling of one of the crucial contemporary issues that acquires more import and gravity by the day' - Zygmunt Bauman Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe is an in-depth political sociological study of the phenomenon of anti-racism, as both political discourse and social movement practice in western Europe.
