In the foreword to Alana Lentin’s The New Racial Regime, Elizabeth Robinson suggests that Lentin’s writing moves “beyond the terrain with which we were most familiar”. This less familiar terrain, I suggest, offers new methods for us to understand, discuss and organise against racism and fascism. As we are moved towards the unfamiliar, the book generates a number of key questions, guiding us through and against the latest iterations of the racial regime.

Firstly, Lentin reminds us that fascism is an ever-emerging response to class struggle and, therefore, foundational to a liberal democracy that is anti-communist in its makeup. Rather than approaching Fascism as an “aberration” then, what might become apparent when we place fascism within the toolbox of Western domination? In The New Racial Regime, Lentin argues that this de-exceptionalised understanding of fascism allows us to better understand other mechanisms of repression. This is not to diminish fascist violence, but to approach it as something that operates alongside other counterinsurgent forces that can appear more difficult to locate. Accordingly, although Lentin explains that fascism is integral to the maintenance and reproduction of global capitalism, we are taught that so, too are processes such as capture, co-optation and “the institutionalisation of dissent”. What becomes apparent throughout this book, then, is that often the mechanisms which appear to be countering repression are in fact reproducing and reinforcing it. As Lentin reminds us, these methods of counterinsurgency have a long history and yet their recalibration and reapplication continue to capture people, resources and knowledge. For instance, as anti-colonial theorist Sivanandan describes, it was no accident that the first target of the Race Relations Act in the UK, which was presented as anti-racist legislation, was in fact a Black man.

One of the most important contributions that the book makes is to pose and answer a fundamental question: what are the counterinsurgent mechanisms of our current time? One of them, we are told, is the process through which Zionists have rearticulated anti-racist language in order discipline pro-Palestine activity on university campuses and beyond. While this seems to have been policed especially violently, Lentin demonstrates how the disciplining of the Palestinian solidarity movement is a crystallisation of a “wider and deeper phenomenon” of counterinsurgent co-optation that operates across geographies. In Australia’s settler-colonial context, from which Lentin writes, Zionists have forged connections with First Nations people through egregious claims to indigeneity that equate “relations of blood” to relationships with Land. Not only does this obscure the fact that indigeneity “is a social and material relation of coloniser vs colonised”, but it exemplifies how Zionism is used to discipline solidarity movements, both in Australia and more broadly. This might help us to understand how the West’s continued support for the genocide in Gaza is not contradicted by the recognition of the “State of Palestine”, but can in fact be supported and legitimised by it. This act of recognition could be seen as a way to reconstruct a Palestine that is separated from the Palestinian resistance, and empty it of its radicality.  Rather than a shift away from support for Israel, then, we might locate this within the recalibration of the racial regime.

All of this, as Lentin clearly illustrates, is not to say that every reform is a mechanism of counterinsurgency, but to suggest that a false distinction between liberalism and fascism enables imperial actors to frame oppressive mechanisms as progressive and reparative. What if, rather than a “precondition of safety”, inclusion “most properly names the state’s violent expansion”, as Eric Stanley suggests in Atmospheres of Violence? Even if this provocation feels like a stretch, Lentin points to the fragility of many of the reforms and “gains” that were implemented during the so-called “racial reckoning” of the BLM movement. Reforms, in some instances, not only continue to defer justice to the neoliberal state, and subsequently reimbue it with legitimacy, but are impermanent and can be stripped back at will.

In the final chapter of the book, “Against Definitions” Lentin builds on discussions that describe how the broader “war on antisemitism” provides a battleground upon which the Western world can rehabilitate itself. But the unfamiliar and original contribution of this chapter shows the ways in which attempts to challenge the definition of antisemitism can drag us into debates that can never be on our own terms. The terrain is so firmly set within racialised constructs that engagement will overwhelmingly lull us into impossible choices or pyrrhic victories.

One of the key lessons that Lentin offers, through Cedric Robinson, is that the drive to find certainty and origins can sometimes obscure more than it reveals. Historical narratives are always uneven and asymmetrical, producing facts and silences, and the past is a position that fixes time and forecloses the future (see Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past). In this sense, origins are not unimportant but the desire to locate them can reproduce conceptions of linear time that can reify the “foundational myths” of European epistemology and continue the erasure of “alternative” temporal relationships that hold circularity and relationality. Much like definitions, origins suggest a level of certainty and fixity that cannot capture the slippery nature of race. There might be moments of intensification, increased visibility, different iterations of crisis and it is important to understand lineages of oppression and struggle, but how can we do this in ways that do not fix the past? Here, for instance, how might we resist the re-periodisation of colonial history that so often maintains silences through half-truths of atrocity? How might we recognise that this is often in service to the recalibration of the racial regime, rather than against it?

Maybe, this is a drive to maintain familiar, firm ground, at a time when it becomes increasingly important to hold the unfamiliar, the uncertain. It is this very uncertainty, or maybe instability, in which, as Lentin so clearly articulates, opportunities to resist the racial regime arise. Resistance, as Abdaljawad Omar tells us, is about opening up opportunities to organise the world differently, not necessarily defining the solution. This is not abstract, but plays out materially in the way we organise, the choices we make together and the places we engage. Opportunities arise, then, not in the challenging of fixed origins or definitions, but in stepping outside of these debates into a terrain of our own making.

As anarchist writer Eric Stanley states in Atmospheres of violence, “we can attend to the destructive completeness of a structure of the world, while also gathering the ways that completeness is always incomplete”. Throughout The New Racial Regime, Alana Lentin masterfully traces the shifting expression and expansion of white supremacy whilst holding its incompleteness, its unsteadiness. Understanding this dialectical relationship and refusing the terms we are (re)given, Lentin makes clear, is crucial for “unstitching” a racial regime that continually recalibrates old methods of repression.