This introduction to a new handbook on language and race gives a detailed overview and literature review of linguistic anthropology scholarship that intersects with issues of race, racism, and radicalization. Written by linguists H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity, it is the first volume to offer a sustained theoretical exploration of all aspects of language and race from a linguistic anthropological perspective.

"The world is not white. It can’t be. Whiteness is just a metaphor for power." – James Baldwin

In this thought-provoking introduction to a special section of American Anthropologist, authors Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesus and Jemima Pierre disentangle the histories of white supremacy and its relationships with the postcolonial state, neoliberalism, and scholarship in anthropology and the social sciences more broadly.

In this compelling essay from Current Anthropology, Jemima Pierre asks, If one of the legacies of slavery in the Americas was the racialization of enslaved Africans, and indeed the racialization of the modern world, did this legacy of race not also impact the communities on the African continent? The essay grapples with this question by insisting what should be a baseline understanding: that modern racial consciousness, and especially global racialization processes that emerge in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, also impacted continental African communities.

This paper explores the possibilities and challenges of building cross-racial solidarity between Southeast Asian American and Black communities through an ethnographic account of a community-based educational space working with low-income Southeast Asian American and Black youth. These spaces can play a unique role in teaching youth to engage in anti-racist work and building cross-racial coalitions. The authors argue that attention to challenging anti-Blackness is central to cross-racial coalitions but should also recognize the distinct nature of anti-Asian racism.

In her ethnography of incarcerated indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico, anthropologist Shannon Speed offers not only powerful stories of agency and resilience by the women themselves, but also a searing critique of indigenous "dispossession and elimination" across borders. She asks us to consider how racial and gender ideologies are mobilized to produce the "neoliberal multicriminalism" that makes these women subject to disproportionate vulnerability.

This essay offers a historical lens through which to understand anti-Asian racism within the current conjuncture of the COVID-19 pandemic and US racist state violence. It argues that anti-Asian violence should be seen not merely as episodic or as individual acts of violence targeting Asian peoples but as a structure of US settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The essay ultimately argues for the need to approach the struggle against anti-Asian racism expansively so as to encompass the struggle for decolonization and Black liberation.

While it might be easy to imagine the Trump administration's immigration policies as an aberration, historian Elliott Young's new book highlights how immigrant criminalization and detention has long been a central feature of US immigration policy. His analysis provides an important corrective to contemporary debates by showing how various waves of immigrant incarceration in the US have been justified on the basis of immigrants' perceived racial otherness and danger to the nation.

How can a transnational, hemispheric approach inform anti-racist efforts in the US today? Rather than seeing US race politics as a "cultural export" to other parts of the world, this set of essays by a range of social scientists doing work in the Americas highlights what other movements can teach us. As an anthropologist and Latin Americanist, I appreciate how these essays highlight the power of ethnographic, interdisciplinary, and transnational work for understanding and practicing anti-racist politics here and now.

In his 2000 book Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Paul Gilroy contended that the faulty, enduring concept of race (and race-thinking) distorts our vista on the planetary humanism he champions. As the winner of the 2019 Holberg Prize, and the Director of the University College London’s Centre for the Study of Race and Racism, Gilroy returned to these themes in a series of lectures last year. They seem more pertinent than ever.