Join us for the third event in the Edinburgh Race Lecture series.
'After Utoya – Sifting the wreckage of white supremacy' by Nasar Meer, Professor of Race, Identity and Citizenship at the University of Edinburgh
Chaired by Professor Rowena Arshad CBE, FEIS, Chair in Multicultural and Anti-Racist Education and Co-Director of the Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland (CERES)
Some years ago I addressed an audience on Utøya Island to commemorate the horrific terror attack there in 2011. Since then, Utøya has been rebuilt as a space to promote antiracist values. In this public lecture, I will reflect on this experience to argue that the terrorism undertaken on Utøya Island and the wider Norway attacks in 2011, and elsewhere over the subsequent years in places including Christchurch and San Diego, are intimately related, not only to each other but to the past, present and future of how we try to understand the politics of white supremacy. I will argue these violent attacks especially have a particular relationship to the racialization of Black, Jewish and Muslims minorities, but also to a broader reticence to recognise Whiteness as a social, political and historical project against which non-white groups are racialized. Whiteness here is a ‘project’ from which some people who may define themselves as white today would have been excluded in the near past. Recognising this, it will be argued, is no less important to sifting through the wreckage of white supremacy.