Can We Unlearn Racism?

What does a small white minority in Africa teach Europeans about how to face a racist past? Boersema argues that it requires nothing less than unlearning racism: confronting the shame of a racist past, acknowledging privilege, and, to varying degrees, rethinking notions of white nationalism. Drawing on interviews with a cross-section of White South Africans, Boersema depicts the limits and possibilities of individual and collective transformation. He also reveals that the process of unlearning racism can give rise to white identity politics—a new form of racism born out of misappropriating antiracist strategies. In this event we will investigate a question that should be at the forefront of every society’s collective consciousness.

About the speakers

Jacob Boersema is a Lecturer at New York University. He is a sociologist and historian who studies race, racism, and whiteness in the Global South and North. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University’s Center of Cultural Sociology. Can We Unlearn Racism: What South Africa Teaches Us About Whiteness, published by Stanford University Press, is his first book. He is an avid open water swimmer as long as there is no ice.

Saskia Bonjour is associate professor in political science at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the politics of migration and citizenship in the Netherlands and in Europe. The role of family, gender, and sexuality norms in the construction of national, cultural and racial identities is central in her research. She has also published about party politics, the role of the judiciary in policymaking, and the impact of EU migration policies on domestic politics.

Darshan Vigneswaran is the Co-Director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies and Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam. He edits the journal European Journal of International Relations and is also a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society, WITS University. From 2010-12 he was a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity where he co-coordinated an international working group on Public Space and Diversity. In 2008, he was a British Academy Fellow at the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford.

Sarah Bracke is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam. She is PI of the Vici research project EnGendering Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’ funded by the Dutch Research Council, and director of the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality.