Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain by Mohan Ambikaipaker (review)

Mohan Ambikaipaker's Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain complicates the workings of existing antiracism policies and the lived experiences of racialized groups in Britain, who experience the workings of everyday racial violence. Outlining the workings of the state and its construction of those deemed internal "others" the author exposes imperial and colonial legacies of Britain. In doing so, Ambikaipaker demonstrates how these legacies are much more than remnants of a historical past but in fact operate as colonial continuities. While the state distances itself from its imperial past, or in fact engages in active "forgetting of the British empire" (20), power dynamics in the present continue to reproduce patterns of exclusion for those deemed outsiders of the nation. One of the most important contributions of the book is Ambikaipaker's concept of "everyday political whiteness" (26). The ethnographic research reveals the many failures of the state to respond to or prevent gendered and racial violence. By bringing together critical race theory and decolonial studies, the author unveils the racist workings of the state not as exceptions to an otherwise nonracist system but how multiracial Britain and its state-sponsored antiracism continues to relate to racialized subjects and postcolonial migrants in ways that produce imperial and colonial relations of power.

This is a daunting yet hopeful ethnography study of the state of antiracism in Britain and the radical potential of political blackness. By using "activist anthropology," Ambikaipaker offers an insight into the work of the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), a community-based antiracist organization located in East London. What makes the book distinct is that the author offers both a theoretical grounding of racism and whiteness in multiracial Britain and an engaged activism, which draw from his ethnographic analysis over the course of multiple years while simultaneously working as a caseworker for the NMP. Relayed with intricate detail and compassion, the analysis offered in the book is daunting and gives insights into the everyday racial violence communities of color experience, yet Ambikaipaker also urges the reader to (re-)consider the radical potentiality of political blackness for interracial solidarity and radical antiracist practices that have the power "to transform our social relationships" (202).

The books structure is grounded in specific and painful personal stories of severe injustice that reveal the nature and logic of white racial violence in Britain. Carefully curated by Ambikaipaker, these narratives are the center stage of his analysis and are prioritized over his voice as anthropologist and activist academic. As such, the author keeps his promise of examining the "lived experiences of racial violence and racialized state violence as the lived experience of engaging in antiracist activism" (xiii). The stories shared in this book are the product of not only interviews and observant participation when the author worked as caseworker at the NMP but also of a deep personal relationship harnessed by living in and with the communities presented in the study. While the focus of the ethnographic research remains in and around Newham, Ambikaipaker's critical race analysis places his data in both current and historical context of racial and racist politics of the British state and thus aims to offer a "critical analysis of the western liberal social order in Britain" (24) as a whole.

Focusing on state-sponsored antiracism in multiracial Britain, the place where the London Metropolitan Police Service once declared "by far the best place in Europe to live if you are non-white" (188), Ambikaipaker interrogates the logic of race-blind liberal policies and the failure to protect minority communities from discrimination. The stories shared detail the ongoing and everyday white violence experienced by black communities and the failure of institutions to respond and protect those communities. Through testimonies, the author outlines how different communities are very much aware of their differences and the different treatments they each experience in society. Yet these testimonies acknowledge a common logic of white supremacy that underpins their experiences of being treated differently. Despite the detailed narratives of racist...