Russia’s most recent and ongoing aggression against Ukraine, whose beginning many date on February 24, 2022 but which really began on February 20,  2014, with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, triggered a massive refugee crisis in Europe. People reporting on this crisis quickly pointed out racial discrimination in the treatment of refugees. On the one hand, observers noted outright racism against African, Indian, and Romani people trying to leave Ukraine. On the other hand, they criticized the different policies, treatment, and portrayal of Ukrainian refugees, compared to Syrians, Afghans, and other refugees from the Middle East during the 2015 refugee crisis. As American journalist and NBC’s London correspondent Kelly Cobiella “put it bluntly: these are not refugees from Syria. These are refugees from neighbouring Ukraine. … These are Christians, they’re white.”

As I was reading these reports, I found myself somewhat perplexed by the unequivocal claiming of Ukrainians—those regarded as “properly” Ukrainian, anyway—as white Europeans. Having grown up in Austria, itself precariously situated at the periphery of what is unambiguously Europe, I vividly remember the rampant bigotry and vile racism against Turkish migrants who came from Turkey, the Balkans, and the Levant under so-called “guest worker” agreements, against Eastern Europeans before and after the fall of the “Iron Curtain,” and against refugees from the former Yugoslavia during the war in the 1990s. While whiteness wasn’t an explicit part of the conversation at the time, it was clear that the migrants were regarded as decidedly not European. So I was quite puzzled by the appeals to “white Europeanness” that framed representations of the purported crisis in 2022. The racial thinking expressed here appeared to me to be an imposition of U.S. centric frameworks of race and racism—what George Fourlas aptly characterizes as “practices of inclusion and exclusion according to a Black-white binary” (25)—onto a place with complicated histories, geographies, and identities that needs its own historically and contextually specific analysis.

Those of us who want to think about race and racialization beyond the limits of U.S. categories find a model for this kind of analysis in Fourlas’ terrific book Anti-Colonial Solidarity: Race, Reconciliation, and MENA Liberation. Fourlas is particularly interested in the racialization of MENA people in the United States, though his account situates the racism directed at them in a global history of Orientalist colonialism. And it is racism they experience, Fourlas insists, rather than merely xenophobia or Islamophobia. These latter terms, he argues, obscure the distinctively racialized experience of MENA people, who are institutionally categorized as white but socially treated as non-white. As a consequence, he claims that racism is the appropriate framework for making sense of MENA oppression, and he does so for both historical and conceptual reasons.

Fourlas’ conceptual argument appeals to the normative weight and strategic value of racism compared to Islamophobia and xenophobia. While xenophobia is a useful term to capture prejudice against foreigners, which certainly informs the treatment of MENA people, it does not track the distinct experience of “foreigners” who are unable to assimilate into whiteness. Xenophobia is, thus, too broad a term to precisely name MENA experience. On the other hand, Islamophobia is too narrow because the victims of Islamophobic prejudice are often neither Arab nor Muslim. Consequently, Fourals suggests that Islamophobia, too, is a misnomer of the kind of treatment directed at MENA people.

One might be tempted to object, here, that people can be victims of Islamophobia even if they are not Arab or Muslim. Scholars like Jasbir Puar or Muneer Ahmad have made this argument in the context of the racialization of terrorism. For instance, Ahmad argues that a reordering of racial positions in the United States was occasioned by 9/11 such that “Arab Christians, Muslim non- Arabs (such as Pakistanis or Indonesians), non- Muslim South Asians (Sikhs, Hindus), and even Latinos and African Americans” are aggregated by a logic of fungibility in an amorphous category of the “Muslim-looking person.”1 Puar similarly describes a “consolidation of new racial populations” and “a racialization of religion, implicating Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians and those mistaken for them (‘terrorist look-alikes’).”2 Perhaps, then, Islamophobia is more capacious than Fourlas suggests and can be operationalized to analyze the social treatment of MENA people.

Fourlas’ historical argument for racism as the appropriate framework to understand MENA oppression offers a rejoinder to this sort of objection insofar as it is intended to demonstrate the co-emergence of colonialism, Orientalism, and racialization. Fourlas’ claim, as I understand it, is that U.S. racism is one historically and contextually specific form of tactics of colonial subjugation and division that are, despite their specificity, continuous with other such tactics. He accordingly charts a genealogy of various moments of emergence of Orientalist racism from the Reconquista to de las Casas’ vilification of Arabs, Greeks, Romans, and Turks as barbarians and to the construction of Greece as a seemingly unified entity at the dawn of the twentieth century. That U.S. racism is part of this genealogy, albeit with important modifications, is obscured by the emphasis on the Black-white binary so prevalent in the United States. Yet Fourlas argues that adequately understanding U.S. racism requires that we situate it in this global context to examine how Orientalism facilitates, at the same time as it is modulated by the historically specific forms of racism dominant in the United States. Diagnosing MENA oppression in this way thus not only redeems the framework of racism as the appropriate analytic lens but also suggests different responses to such oppression.

At the same time, reclaiming the language of racism in this way invites objections, which Fourlas discusses and ultimately rejects. On the one hand, critics might argue that accusing someone of racism tends to elicit defensive responses, thereby entrenching the problem and making the kinds of reconciliatory encounters Fourals envisages as an antiracist praxis difficult. On the other hand, the critic might object that because MENA people in the United States are officially categorized as white, they lack formal standing as targets of racism (though of course anyone in the U.S., not just formally recognized racial minorities, are legally protected from race discrimination).

Fourlas’ response is to call for an antiracist praxis that relinquishes colonial norms of condemnation, such as posturing and calling out, in favor of the collective work of reconciliation and meaning-making. He locates examples of such meaning-making labor in the pre-colonial practices of the MENA world, whose relational, reciprocal, and heterogeneous practices made possible, at the same time as they were covered over by an Orientalist, Western ideal of Greece as the cradle of European/Western civilization. Fourlas shows that this ideal is a recent invention that is, however, powerfully and consequentially retrojected into the distant past, thereby redacting a long history of shared meaning-making across differences. 

To remember and reclaim these practices, Fourlas claims the myth of Babel as a counter-myth against the myth of the Greek ideal and as a guide for anti-colonial solidarity. He also examines practices of solidarity in Cyprus and Rojava as concrete examples of other, anti-colonial modalities of socio-political relations rooted in mutual trust, respect, and a face-to-face encounter. These, he emphasizes, do not constitute a blueprint for anti-colonial solidarity but give us concrete strategies, tactics, and conditions of possibility in which real people are engaged and that, therefore, offer actual alternatives to Orientalist, colonial, and ethno-nationalist retrenchments with their concomitant intensification of violence. These examples offer important lessons in a time when what is at stake is our planetary future, and we would do well to carefully consider how to scale up practices of solidarity and what myths might help us do so.

But I want to consider, by way of conclusion and as an opening for conversation, whether the kinds of solidarity Fourals envisions aren’t precisely what causes a retrenchment of whiteness, creating a vicious cycle that seems difficult to break. To illustrate, let me return to the various refugee crises with which I began. To be sure, a full accounting of the purported crisis requires precisely the sort of grappling with Orientalism and colonialism Fourlas performs. This is particularly important in spaces that Fourlas describes as “interstitial” (65): regions characterized by rich and complex histories and presences of colonial violence, as well as relationality, exchange, and appreciation among people who together created shared practices and identities that are today submerged—though, I would argue, not eliminated—under national and linguistic borders. In his book White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism & Coloniality along the Balkan Route, Piro Rexhepi argues that these “peripheries of white supremacy, where processes of race and border making are intricately and historically tied to the ways in which whiteness and coloniality function within the inner core of Euro-American spaces” are particularly prone to anxieties about encroachments on whiteness, for instance in the form of “Arabization” ostensibly brought on by refugees.3 Put differently, it is precisely because the Balkans are a particularly intense site of coloniality that they are a premier space for the production and reproduction of whiteness and race. Viewed in this lens, claims that Ukrainians are Christian and white and, therefore, different from Syrians, Afghans, or African migrants is not really claims about their race but attempts to recalibrate whiteness in a space where it is fragile and porous. Indeed, Rexhepi argues that anxieties about refugees are “not so much about xenophobic racism” but about “refugee’s proximity and potential to resonate with the local racial other, the collaboration of which exposes the fragility of the supposed whiteness of the Bulgarian and Balkan people.”4 What is on display, in other words, is what Nicholas De Genova has described as “a variegated and contradictory nexus of racialized formations of whiteness that extend toward a series of ‘off-white’ or ‘not-quite-white’ borderland identities”5 that creates affective investments in whiteness.

If Rexhepi and De Genova are right, I wonder where this leaves us with regard to realizing the kinds of anti-colonial solidarity Fourlas recommends. For if whiteness is a flexible formation that is continuously recalibrated to suppress the very practices of solidarity that threaten its ascendancy, both a refusal of invitations to whiteness and a disinvestment from whiteness appear difficult indeed. Let me close, then, with a question Fourlas poses to his readers: “How do we uphold the anticolonial principle of non-domination and continue to strive toward anti-colonial solidarity when confronted by hostile forces?” (130). What concrete forms must unplugging and engagement take to produce possibilities for collective sense-making and solidarity rather than resentment, backlash, and a “possessive investment in whiteness”6 that would rather go extinct than make concessions? 

I appreciate the invitation to offer comments on George Fourlas’ book: it is an important part of the re-emergence of anti-colonial writing toward MENA liberation. His work joins the remarkable field already paved by a motley crew of new and old activists and thinkers: Frantz Fanon, Fayez Sayegh, Edward Said, Noura Erakat, John Harfouch, Eqbal Ahmed, Seloua Boulbina, to name a few. This book is a vast, wide-ranging, broadly schematized book. In the process of framing what anti-colonial solidarity could look like, George has reached way back, and looked way forward in order to crumple up the colonial map and recycle it anew.

Part of the method of anti-colonial thinking is to resist the temptation to go for the low-hanging fruit in order to aim for much slower, long-term, larger strategies. Accordingly, George’s work falls well within the realm of thoughtful, resistant, forceful anti-colonial thinking: in particular, in anti-colonial solidarity. As he frames this category, it requires a rethinking of a number of other terms: history, racial identity (of a broad swath of peoples who have been forced to be interpellated by long-standing colonial regimes), “intermural” obligations (which have been eviscerated by the antagonisms between colonized peoples whose lands that have been usurped), and accordingly MENA epistemes, unity, etc.  

In his first chapter, George argues along the lines of racialization and embodiment that take their lead from the standard of Whiteness: thus, the xenophobia against first generation immigrants can become diluted in future generations if they are read as white, as George points out—but that is not the case for non-Black, non-White populations. In this regard, poignantly, the sense of not belonging becomes transgenerational, and thus, as he says, security is always conditioned by that fear (Fourlas 2022, 26). But xenophobia and racialization are historically conditioned: that history is an intrinsic part of the history of colonialism—the history that the governors of Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Texas, among others, are trying so hard to stamp out. Racialization is intrinsically embedded/embodied not only in visible perceptions, but perceptions that are conjoined with historical legacies and political narratives that condition our sense of what it means to be “Asian,” for example. In Georgia, the state in which I reside, then: being Asian is most often a reference (if Asians are even acknowledged at all) to East Asians, and rarely South Asians or Southeast Asians. Besides a history of attempted conquest, what do these populations have in common, besides attempts to colonize or rebuff by the United States or the British, and a sense that all of these tiny little countries are part of the continent of Asia? Asians from the North, the East, the South, the South East, have little (not nothing, but little) in common culturally, linguistically, culinarily, religiously.

Similarly, George approaches the issue of theorizing MENA liberation from specific histories in chapters three through six. One of his primary aims is to explore how to reconcile the differing stories that MENA peoples tell about their identities (Fourlas 2022, 55–56). Critical of the race-national conflation in telling the story of racialization, he wants to explore how the historical fluidity of different identities can be reconciled to form MENA solidarities. I think this is a crucial question, and a number of scholars, including myself, have tried to theorize an amalgam of amorphous identities (mostly other than MENA) through vehicles such as law (Lopez 1998; Gross 2010); phenemonology (Alcoff 2006; Sundstrom 2008; Al-Saji 2004); history (Montoya 2002); and anti-coloniality (Fanon 2004; 1988; 1965; Quijano 2000; Lugones 2010). I wonder how these approaches—to different populations, who were nevertheless colonized—compare to his approach to a similar topic.

I wonder if part of the answer to my query begins from the place where George is re-schematizing anti-colonial solidarity as that which should avoid domination. And in this sense, what strikes me is an almost casual comment: as he says, “anti-colonial solidarity” requires reconciliation. This is a casual sentence, but a profound insight. Reconciliation of what, of whom? As he says in the introduction, “reconciliation is the condition of the possibility of cooperative meaning-making and that same cooperative process for ongoing meaning making activity (Fourlas 2022, 8). As he suggests later on, anti-colonial solidarity is a defensive position, rather than merely active project of coalition-building. But often populations emerge in unity because they are constrained (or made so intentionally) and are afforded scant resources. How do groups antagonized under colonial legacies find a way to reconcile?

Some might say solidarity has to do with compromise, sharing some common priorities, all of which may be included in his account of anti-colonial solidarity. But George digs even deeper: he argues that anti-colonial solidarity requires a rethinking of a number of conditions:

1. It requires a rethinking of race and the conditions under which racism is named and recognized.
2. Reconciliatory approach to decolonization
3. Rethinking decoloniality through the lens of MENA peoples

I want to explore George’s rethinking of race and racism as a condition of anti-colonial solidarity: he frames his discussion of race and racism by pointing to the absence of clear-cut racial contours for those who are affiliated with MENA, that is the “unknown” Middle Easterner, as this term emerges from National Security surveillance measures in the aftermath of 9/11. George refers to Edward Said’s coining of Orientalism as a term that highlights racism against those who are loosely affiliated; however, he correctly points out that the creation of the so-called Oriental imaginary was not a straightforward route: rather, it emerges from produced—read colonial—sense of what the Middle East is. Moreover, this term both overlaps but also stands at some distance from Islamophobia or “Arab American racial formations.” Similar to the quandary that many philosophers of race had in naming and identifying those who might have been understood as Hispanic, Latino, Latin American, since there was both some overlap, but also because, taking lead from the standard colonial categorizing of race through biology, kinship, or national boundaries did not function in helping to locate the contours of race in such a way that underwrote those who were Argentine, Mexican, Cuban, Salvadoran, Guatemalan. The standard colonial visions of Gobineau’s three races (Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans) or Kant’s four races, from which all other peoples can be derived are: “They are: (1) the white race; (2) the Negro race; (3) the Hun race (Mongol or Kalmuck); and (4) the Hindu or Hindustani race.”

As we know, the conditions of racial identity—predicated on geology, climate, phenotypes, etc.—clearly don’t work when addressing peoples who have common interests or even common forms of exploitation, but radically different histories. Similarly, those who are named through the British empire as Indian, had little in common except their common subjugation by a sole imperial administration: areas now known as Burma, Indian, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, which if they do have something in common, emerges from histories of migration—and from a shared legacy of empire. These nations are quite antagonistic with each other in large part as the legacy of colonial interventions.

George quite insightfully points to the difficulty of resisting racism when those who are MENA do not see themselves as being directly interpellated through categories such as Islamophobia or anti-Arab, or anti-Muslim, or terrorist, or Middle Easterner: alternately, these terms may not apply to Lebanese Christians, or Iranians, whether they are Muslim or Zoroastrian or Jewish, but still interpellated incorrectly as Middle Eastern, or Indian Jewish—even as they are named Arab or Muslim. And so George asks: how do we handle racism in conflict with Orientalism? Therein begins George’ exploration of reconciliation as a form of meaning-making.

Reconciliation as a form of meaning-making is both about wholeness, as George borrows from Danielle Allen—not oneness, but acknowledging differences—through interactive practices as well as forging modes of give and take. And this requires overcoming another important obstacle—that of the intramural antagonisms of a broad swath of peoples who have been forced to be interpellated by a long-standing colonial regime, antagonisms that often emerge between peoples whose lands that have been colonized and dominated.

Here, George names several important impulses: the attempt to avoid being that “unknown” Middle Easterner (although, of course, this is an impulse that extends to many non-whites): by shirking the misnaming or misrecognition through self-identification as “one of the good guys,” as it were: I am not Muslim or Arab or Middle Eastern, but Christian, or South Asian, or Persian. In so doing, one does not necessarily avoid the wrath of the white supremacist or racist; since as George points out, racists don’t ever admit to being wrong (63) that is the hallmark of a racist identity: the foreclosing the possibility of curiosity or openness. Moreover, by avoiding being interpellated as the bad guy by stepping outside of the racial naming, one becomes complicit in racist violence—denying whiteness while affirming white expectations of non-whiteness (62). This kind of retreat into bad faith is certainly there and does not ensure that one will be able to avoid being the target of white violence; however I would be interested in what George thinks about the concern of being the target of the wrath of the state: certainly this is the other side of complicity with colonial impulses: and in a racial capitalist frame, designed to coerce and reward non-whites who are capable of ascending into whiteness to do so. How does one reconcile cultural pressure with fear of state-led violence?

For George, reconciliation can also be part of an antidote to “call-out” culture and anti-racist shaming. His analysis of call-out culture is a rare and brave one, in that he points out how much damage anti-racist allies can do by calling out racist impulses. Given that George and I taught at the same lefty liberal arts college, his analysis brought back many memories of well-meaning anti-racist impulses. Still, as I share this concern with George, but perhaps do not share his optimism that this is an impulse, if checked through shared meaning-making, as he argues, that will redirect the trajectory of shaming. In part, because this kind of calling out does not happen in many places in the world—such as at Emory, where I now teach—where shaming is not only avoided, but not even considered to be necessary. Thus the burden is unapologetically placed on faculty and students of color, for whom the ubiquity of deep, entrenched racism is acknowledged routinely by students, faculty, and administration of color. So then: is George’s analysis necessarily extendable to other cultural/institutional groups? I would love George to discuss further his thinking on shaming and its relation to call-out culture and anti-colonial solidarity.

Finally, after having read through George’ analysis of reschematizing how MENA identities might be reconceptualized, from understanding the arbitrariness of the distinctions between Turks and Greeks, Cypriots from Armenians, and other redrawing of lines, as well as perhaps the need to retain a founding myth, such as the myth of Babel to guide us, I wonder how we might take these ideas up in a world that seems increasingly fractured by short-term vision: the next election, the next right-wing domination, the next economic emergency, the next Trump? 

I would like to see his further engagement with feminist scholarship of color, transnational feminist scholarship, and post-colonial feminist scholarship that attempts to address similar decolonial concepts. Many of those scholars are speaking to these exact questions: Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Chandra Mohanty, Jacqui Alexander, Leila Ahmed, Seloua Boulbina, Uma Narayan, to name just a few. I say this not as a note of chastisement, but because they really have traversed similar questions, and I wonder how they do or don’t run up against George’s work.

And speaking of anti-coloniality, I’m wondering about the use of anti-coloniality in relation to a different discourse of decoloniality that has been invoked by Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, Ranajit Guha, Gyan Pandey and Anibal Quijano, among others. Also, I want to urge the development of a transdisciplinary literature as an anti-colonial pushback to the myopia of philosophical approaches to race, providing a metaphorical antidote by engaging in collective collaboration with the texts by other scholars in other fields. Certainly George does this with his discussion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and his invocation of religious mythos. But also he engages with scholars in interdisciplinary fields who recognize the gatekeeping of philosophers and other disciplines, and push forward by knocking down the gates.

Finally: What kind of world might unite those who could/should fit into an anti-colonial MENA cultural collective. What are the necessary re-visions to thinking solidarity?

Let me end here by reiterating that this book is exciting because it opens the path to thinking about how to think past the coloniality of philosophy of race, which has been re-energized by John Harfouch’s work on anti-colonial thought (Harfouch 2021).

Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Al-Saji, Alia. “Who Is the Muslim Woman? Towards an Intersubjective Theory. Part of a Panel Entitled ‘How Race Counts: Arabs, Muslims and the Politics of Visibility in the Diaspora.’” In Forty-Third Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, 2004.

Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965.

———.Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. New Evergreen ed. New York: Grove Press, 1988.

———.The Wretched of the Earth: Frantz Fanon. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Fourlas, George N. Anti-Colonial Solidarity: Race, Reconciliation, and MENA Liberation. Explorations in Contemporary Social-Political Philosophy (ESCPP). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.

Gross, Ariela J., and Ariela Gross. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. 1. Harvard paperback ed. Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Harfouch, John. “Anti-Colonial Middle Eastern and North African Thought: A Philosopher’s Introduction.” Radical Philosophy Review 24.2 (2021): 169–97.

Lopez, Ian F. Haney. White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Lugones, Maria. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 742–59.

Montoya, Maria. Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.

Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 533–80.

Sundstrom, Ronald Robles. The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice. SUNY Series, Philosophy and Race. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008.

George Fourlas’ Anti-Colonial Solidarity: Race, Reconciliation, and MENA Liberation is impressive in its many contributions across a range of subfields of philosophy.1 The contribution I focus on in this essay is from the first couple of chapters, and corresponds to my own area, the philosophy of race and racism. In this essay, I aim to clarify some aspects of Fourlas’ formulation of the problem of the fraught use of the terms “racism” and “racist,” contrast his analysis with Lawrence Blum’s influential account of fraught use, and argue for the superiority of Fourlas’ understanding. In making my case, I seek to extend my analysis from previous work on what I herein call “the politics of inflation.” I close by raising a tension in Fourlas’ analysis which I offer in the spirit of encouraging further dialogue.2

1. “Racism” is Fraught: Fourlas on the Colonial Norms Underlying Anti-Racist Posturing

In Chapter 1, “The ‘Unknown’ Middle Easterner: Post-Racial Anxieties and Anti-MENA Racism throughout Colonized Space-Time,” Fourlas problematizes the ordinary use of the terms “racism” and “racist.” According to him, we think of racists as morally flawed, but the language of racism, which carries with it a certain moral condemnation, “has become increasingly fraught to the point of sometimes seeming meaningless” (21). It has become “fraught” in the sense of losing its normative force on the racist—i.e., the power to motivate the sort of critical self-reflection and self-transformational change that seems necessary to enact broader social change. Fourlas does not explain what he means by “meaningless,” but it seems safe to assume he does not mean “cognitively meaningless,” i.e., a string of signs that purports to have sense but in fact lacks sense. Rather, consistent with an argument I have previously made, we should understand charges of “meaninglessness” in terms of “pragmatics problems,” such as communicative failures like generating confusion, controversy, vagueness, ambiguity, as well as cognitive speaker failures, as when one applies “racist” to some non-racial phenomenon (thus committing a category mistake).3 Indeed, Fourlas’ analysis is instructive in analyzing an undertheorized pragmatics problem, namely, that criticizing something as racist often sparks resistance, i.e., push-back not simply against the allegation of racism per se, but against the speaker’s linguistic competence (the speaker does not know what “racism” means), motivations (the speaker’s allegation of racism is self-serving or ill motivated), and moral framework (the speaker’s allegation of racism is itself racist).4 

Despite the fraught nature of ordinary use, Fourlas’ thesis in Chapter 1 is that the term “racism” ought to cover racial hostility and fear directed at MENA peoples, that is, people thought to be (descended) from the Middle East and marked by the imagined cultural characteristics of its peoples—what he terms Orientalist racism.5 In the United States, Orientalist racism is sometimes thought to be an impossiblility, a conceptual mistake of one sort or other. Against this position, Fourlas raises historical, conceptual, and normative arguments for the appropriateness of the term “racism.” These arguments are worth further examination, but given limited space I turn to an objection to Fourlas’ proposal that does not depend upon the criticisms he considers.

Against Fourlas’ proposal to extend “racism” to accommodate MENA objectification is the objection that expanding the scope of racism contributes to the fraught nature of racist/antiracist discourse. According to Lawrence Blum, the major source of the diminished meaning and normative force of “racism” is the overextension of the term, what he calls “conceptual inflation.”6 Some of Fourlas’ arguments nearly anticipate this worry. Consider his argument contrasting “blue racism” (racism against police officers) and “Orientalist racism.” While “blue racism” is an overextension of “racism,” argues Fourlas, “Orientalist racism” is not because it is plausible in light of historical, conceptual and normative considerations, including that “condemning the objectification of police is less morally forceful because the language lacks the historically situated weight that is found in the language of racism, and because the police are effectively the domestic militant force that maintains colonial power relations” (32). One reply to his argument is that expanding the scope of racism to encompass “Orientalist racism” would likely generate pragmatics problems of its own, including conceptual confusion, contestation, and resistance. Hence, the charge is that Fourlas’ proposed solution to the fraught use of “racism” is inadequate because the proposal to inflate the concept would facilitate fraught use.

Fourlas does not directly address the inflationist worry. I draw on resources from his analysis to articulate a reply. The first thing we might point out in response to it is that it misdiagnoses the problem of fraught use. Blum’s own diagnosis of fraught use is de-politicized insofar as it remains within (does not go beyond) the representational practice of using the term “racism.” The problem, on his view, is internal to the representational practice: in applying “racism” many tend to over-apply it. Blum does not say much beyond this slippage. In particular, he does not ask the further question of why the term is commonly overused. Fourlas, by contrast, offers a partial and plausible prima facie explanation which undercuts much of the force behind the inflationist objection.

His analysis begins with the notion of anti-racist posturing. In Chapter 2, “Changing Lenses: Anti-Racist Posturing versus Praxis, an Enactivist Critique,” Fourlas explains that much contemporary use of “racism” is invoked within call-out culture, also known as cancel culture. He notes that those performing racist call-outs aim at “condemning, shaming, and ultimately isolating the exposed actor” (or at least this tends to be the function of the performance) rather than motivating constructive personal change (39). Displaying one’s virtue as against the vice of the isolated wrongdoer is crucial to the anti-racist posture. Anti-racist posturing, or enacting the call-out, is largely a liberal practice, according to Fourlas, and conforms to a liberal script: “Typically, liberal actors posture as beacons of moral purity, such that they will cannibalize their own if moral failures are brought to light” (41). Fourlas notes another element of the script, as well. Sometimes the liberal posturer claims moral purity in the effort to stave off accusations of racism. In such cases, the posturer claims innocence by denying the racist mishap or by claiming it was unintended, unforeseen, misunderstood, or taken out of context. 

To illustrate, Fourlas considers the case of comedian Shane Gillis, who briefly worked at NBC. After making racist and homophobic claims, he attempted to justify his remarks by claiming to be morally innocent because his status as a comedian “is assumed to absolve him of responsibility, such that it is ridiculous for him to ever perform a serious utterance—he can’t be racist because he is merely a chuckling nihilist” (42). NBC responded by assuming “an equally innocent posture in the hiring and firing of Gillis, because they did not know what Gillis said, and when they found out, they did the right thing, they assume, by firing him” (42). Andrew Yang responded to the incident by condemning NBC for firing Gillis, arguing that current social standards are unfair and have become unduly vindictive and punitive.

Fourlas criticizes all parties in the dispute for their “atomistic” positions. By firing Gillis, NBC enacted an anti-racist posture, presenting itself as morally pure, by quickly acting to remove the impure blemish from its space. Presumably, this is problematic, for Fourlas, because reducing racism to the actions of atomized individuals side-steps the structural complexity of racism. Yang’s call-out of NBC also fails as an anti-racist gesture because it serves to display his own purity through the use of a shaming tactic that “mirrors” NBC’s punitive method—that is, he sought to shame NBC into apologizing and correcting its behavior. His call-out likewise minimizes the structural complexity of race/racism by treating the moral issue as one that’s limited to evaluating an atomized institution. 

For Fourlas, the problem with Gillis’ distancing himself from racism and the subsequent anti-racist posturing it inspired is that all three actors “[fail] to appreciate the nuances of power and the importance of social work, such that a blanket approach to moral failure has been taken that produces greater division among folks who ought to otherwise stand in solidarity” (38). In other words, “calling-out racism too often reinforces racism,” even if it is sometimes acceptable (Fourlas argues that the call-out is “an appropriate reaction to actors whose power positions them beyond sociality”) (38). He defends this assertion by situating the call-out within “the coloniality of power.”7 Consider the mechanism of colonial power known as the prison-industrial complex. The carceral system disempowers and enslaves those who are caught up in its machinery and disproportionately punishes racialized bodies (43). Its retributivist modality “responds to crime, conflict, and difference through violent retribution” (43). Because the carceral system is designed to punish, it fosters an ideological consciousness that Fourlas terms the “collective ethos” of retribution. 

One way in which this retributivist modality impacts sociality is by fostering an “atomistic notion of personhood and responsibility.” I understand him to mean that moral assessment is reduced to a simple rational procedure that involves applying a general moral principle to a particular act, irrespective of other contextualizing features such as the structures within which the individual acts. For example, “stealing is wrong” is taken as a moral imperative such that transgressing this norm calls forth retribution in order to rectify the harm. The retributive ethos thus mirrors the carceral state’s function of identifying wrongdoing, then punishing. Becoming ingrained in social consciousness, individual attitudes and interpersonal interactions are conditioned. For example, the anti-racist posturer lacks compassion for the racist wrongdoer and is quick to dismiss the “racist’s” rationale and any mitigating circumstances. In this way, living under the coloniality of power cultivates an “individualistic, objectifying, and ultimately carceral ethos” that overdetermines the conceptualization of value and personhood. This ethos and its attendant norms means that “despite the intentions or critical awareness of the condemning actor, the anti-racist posture and the shaming call-out can have devastating consequences for sociality—that is, more often call-outs reinforce racism. The anti-racist posture therefore seems to be just that, a positioning, a presentation, a superficiality that relies on and reinforces racism, thus maintaining the status quo while making the poseur seem morally superior” (39). 

I emphasize the richness and nuance of Fourlas’ political account of fraught use vis-à-vis Blum’s a-political account of fraught use. Blum informs us of the overuse of “racism” and the practical difficulties it raises, but he says next to nothing about the politics of overuse. The lesson I draw is that philosophical analyses of racism need to focus more on the politics of using the term “racism,” including the politics of inflation, as opposed to merely focusing on the content of particular uses. As to the objection that accommodating Orientalist racism inflates the concept of racism, perhaps the appropriate reply is that it is not the “inflation” of the concept per se that is problematic but the political contestedness of the concept. Said differently, failing to inflate the concept to accommodate Orientalist racism (and other legitimate forms) does little to end political contestation; instead, it makes it more difficult for anti-racists to engage the political debate about racism by willingly withdrawing their ability to forcefully condemn pernicious and oppressive racial wrongs. 

2. “Racism” is a Critical Tool; “Racism” is a Shaming Tool: On Fourlas’ Transition From Anti-Racist Posturing to Anti-Racist Praxis

I close with a question for Fourlas, in the spirit of prompting further elaboration of his political analysis of the ordinary use of the term “racism.” There is an apparent tension in Fourlas’ analysis of fraught use, and it is not clear whether this tension is merely apparent and has a viable solution. The tension is that Fourlas both wants to retain the moral opprobrium of “racism” and wants to move beyond the punitive, shaming and isolating function of the term. Is it possible to have it both ways? If so, how can “racism” condemn without shaming, particularly if “racism” is a term that connotes serious moral wrongdoing? The strong negative valence of the term is among Fourlas’ reasons for preferring “racism” over alternatives like “xenophobia” and “Islamophobia.” He argues that “racism” carries greater moral weight than these terms and that the oppression of MENA warrants greater moral opprobrium (31). While I hope that reconciliation is viable, initially at least it is arguably implausible.8

To give teeth to this tension, I draw on certain aspects of Fourlas’ discussion in Chapter 2. At one point, Fourlas considers whether it is possible today to fruitfully modify the call-out in a way that would exhibit good-faith intentionality on the part of the speaker and critical reflection and personal growth on the part of the accused. He introduces the term “reintegrative shaming,” which, according to John Braithwaite, “communicates disapproval within a continuum of respect for the offender; the offender is treated as a good person who has done a bad deed” (45).9 The idea seems to be to evoke shame with the intention of integrating the racist into the anti-racist community. Fourlas appears to consider this “the best form of call-out,” yet his analysis of the coloniality of power seems to suggest dim prospects for this approach to integration. 

Consider the case in which one college student calls out another in the classroom. The response is predictable: “Social divisions are solidified in this act, friends pick sides, and rather than actually solving a problem, the students have made the problem worse. Little concern is given to where the [opposing] students are coming from, what they have or have not experienced, whether or not they would be willing and able to learn with others” (48). The problem is that the integrative shaming tactic functions to stigmatize rather than integrate, which in turn tends to reinforce shameful behavior. Quoting Braithwaite’s analysis: “Stigmatization is disintegrative shaming in which no effort is made to reconcile the offender with the community. The offender is outcast, her deviance is allowed to become a master status, degradation ceremonies are not followed by ceremonies to decertify deviance” (45). Perhaps one contributing factor is the moral opprobrium connoted by “racism,” which naturally (if not invariably) results in shaming the accused. 

Despite the dim prospects of integrating the racist into the anti-racist community, Fourlas holds out hope: “The goals of anti-racist praxis, however, demand that it at least be theoretically possible for a racist to become a good person and ultimately become anti-racist themselves” (46). The question is whether Fourlas’ “theoretical possibility” is a viable practical possibility. Fourlas could argue that the dim prospects of integration presuppose the limiting conditions of the current state of anti-racist discourse under the coloniality of power. Perhaps “epistemologically decolonizing” our discursive practices would yield brighter prospects for integration (40). The prospects of epistemological decolonization are questionable,10 but my question would persist even under such conditions. Fourlas’ premise seems to be that integrating the racist requires moving beyond shame. This, in turn, seems to require removing the connotative (shaming) function of “racism.” But how can shame be removed without at the same time removing the term’s strong critical function? Can racist behavior be indicted without evoking shame? 

In fairness, this problem is not unique to Fourlas. Others, like George Yancy, conceive of the racist call-out as an open invitation for the racist to critically self-reflect and enact transformational change.11 Yet, it is unclear how the call-out might be heard as an invitation for the racist actor to not only work on their racist behavior but to join the anti-racist community. In short, can the term “racist” retain its critical function (its strong moral opprobrium relative to other terms like “xenophobia”) without retaining its shaming function? I take it this is more than a theoretical problem. After all, it seems that in order to enact anti-colonial solidarity, the discourse of racism and integrationist praxis must be reconciled. In closing, Fourlas’ book gives those of us in the philosophy of race a lot to think about and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

As decolonial theory and critical philosophy of race make inroads into the philosophy profession, we see more people rallying around ideas like “global white supremacy” and “coloniality.” I join philosophers who applaud these analytical innovations. Like many of them, I am also daunted by what is exposed by these sources of illumination. But I do not refer simply to the horrors per se. When I move away from abstractions like “global white supremacy,” I balk also at the complex heterogeneity involved: the vast array of peoples of the Americas, Africa, the MENA world, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, toward whom the dominative elements of coloniality have been variously directed. I think one implication is that both our critical attention and our efforts at solidarity demand a great deal of theoretical work at the middle- or meso-level, and this requires careful consideration of particular communities affected. Philosophy has been slow to respond and is only now beginning to grasp the significance of anti-Black racism. Thanks to Fourlas’ new book, we have a compelling philosophical assessment of MENA realities and identities. It is rich in insights and explanations, and its scope is large both in diagnostic and liberatory aims. His treatment of this subject matter is also suffused with a generosity of spirit and hopeful determination that resonates with the themes of the book. 

I will relegate my discussion primarily to the first half of his book where he examines how coloniality’s racism is a central context for MENA social realities and why an expansive MENA identity is required for contending with racism. In the first part of my reply, I engage with the fine particulars of his account of anti-MENA racism. In the second section, I invite Fourlas to say more about the on-the-ground norms or principles by which meaning-making processes of MENA solidarity should be guided.

Fourlas’ Position in Brief

Fourlas argues that one of the central sociopolitical realities of MENA peoples is a vilifying and often violent form of racialization. Following some now standard work in critical race philosophy, he regards the overall context to be that of coloniality, wherein the processes of modern global unification originated in the “New World encounter” and developed into global capitalist white supremacist imperium-making.1 A crucial feature of coloniality—and perhaps one that does not reduce to transatlantic phenomena—is Orientalism as described by Edward Said, an historically consolidated white European process of defining and dominating MENA peoples. 

Two important ideas are salient here. First, Fourlas is keen to emphasize the importance of race as the “primary contradiction,” though without denying some form of intersectionality.2 In characterizing the racialization, he highlights important specificities that are unavailable in macro-level language about “Othering” and in meso-level discourse about Black-white relations: Middle Easterners are categorized as white in a strictly legal sense but culturally and politically racialized in terms of a historically-generated constellation of attributions—criminal, illegal, terrorist, fanatical, war-prone, and the like—that are moored to the Orientalist inheritance and, in the U.S., specific events like 9/11, two recent wars in the Middle East, and the imperialist discourse of the “War on Terror.” Second, Fourlas is sensitive to the special moral weight of race in our accountability practices: the ascription of racism has more political clout than that of, say, Islamophobia, and that force should be used for liberatory aims (Fourlas, 22). These two points are linked. Specifically, the liberatory use of the heavier accountability practice is hampered in the case of MENA peoples because they are legally designated as white and the charge of racism tends to be configured by a Black-white binary that leaves opaque MENA subordination. So the book is in part a diagnostic of MENA subordination as a product of Orientalist racism, and it is a case for the institutional recognition of anti-MENA racism and the application of anti-racist accountability on behalf of MENA peoples. It is also a call for what he calls cooperative meaning-making in the formation of MENA solidarity in the face of Orientalist racism. This meaning-making process must resist self-“whitening” and narrow nationalism, and look to models of reconciliation that can already be found in various parts of the MENA world.

I resonate with Fourlas’ framing concerns and find very many of his claims persuasive. So, in what follows, I offer two in-house criticisms, as it were, which really amount to a call for more elaboration and fine-tuning. 

A More Distinctive Racism?

First, I would like to suggest a partly modified diagnostic of anti-MENA racism that recognizes the seriousness of anti-MENA conditions, continues to offer a basis for MENA solidarity, but also clarifies further the distinctiveness of anti-MENA oppression. On Fourlas’ account, MENA American subordination, though primarily racial, is not exclusively so. As he describes it, MENA Americans have been subjected to xenophobia, as when they are persistently perceived as foreigners even if they were born in the U.S. In addition, he characterizes how MENA peoples have been subjected to Islamophobia and how Muslim affiliation is paradigmatic, even if problematically so, of the common U.S. understanding of MENA-ness. But he is firm that the racialization of MENA peoples and anti-MENA racism are central to MENA experience, with xenophobia and Islamophobia being secondary galvanizing elements. 

I think it is clear that despite what the law and the census say, MENA people have been racialized as non-white. Unsurprisingly, this has empirical backing.3 I also agree with Fourlas that the stakes are high: anti-MENA racism has taken a variety of vicious and dominative forms in MENA homelands (e.g. imperial wars and imperial neo-colonialism) and against the MENA diaspora in the U.S. But I would like to suggest that the role of xenophobia and Islamophobia are more potent than Fourlas’ characterization indicates. Specifically, they can have some surprising independent force, and partly in virtue of this, they bend anti-MENA racism to their forms making such racism more culturally and nationalistically inflected than what we might find in, say, anti-Black racism. 

Elsewhere I have argued that xenophobia should be conceived of as unjust civic ostracism based on the perceived cultural foreignness of the target. The harms of xenophobia can range from personal shunning (e.g. “Go back to your country!”) to institutional exclusion (e.g. Trump’s Muslim travel ban and Roosevelt’s Japanese American Internment). And the mechanism of vulnerability-making in xenophobia largely involves an approximation of the Arendtian idea that being stateless is conducive to being rightless. Many fundamental rights and social recognition generally are mediated through citizenship and other aspects of civic incorporation in the nation state, so xenophobia as civic ostracism obstructs the allocation or enforcement of rights and due social regard.4 

Now, one possible relation between xenophobia and racism is that they are operationally separable, that the former is a weaker social force than the latter, and that the former can converge upon and reinforce the latter. On this very last point, the convergence of xenophobia is regarded as largely additive with respect to racism. This seems to be Fourlas’ position. Another potential relation is that xenophobia and racism are operationally separable, but when they do converge, they morph into a more fused or entangled phenomenon, a kind of xeno-racism. I proffer this interpretation. Anti-Black racism classically posits behavioral or attitudinal tendencies, which is sometimes deemed to be “cultural,” that are very close to the body, as it were, and of course to a derogated animalized body. For example, stereotypes of Black people reference aggression, sexual drive, laziness, and the like. Although anti-MENA racism can also posit qualities that are more integrally bodily, it tends to elevate the cultural content even as it vilifies the subject. In this vein, consider the new words or twists on older ones that have emerged in the racialization of MENA peoples: “radicalization,” “sleeper cells,” “alienated Muslims,” and “homegrown terrorists.”5 In addition, problematic and distortive interest has deepened in the U.S. regarding veils and burqas, women’s rights, and religio-cultural conceptions of MENA gender relations, where this reaches even state-level reasons cited in international action, as when some Americans trumpeted the rescue of MENA women as a reason for U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.6 This congeries of ideas, which overlaps a great deal with the ascriptions of Islamophobia and has significantly gendered elements, seems integral to current anti-MENA racism and involves cultural attributions that civically ostracize MENA people and thus indicate a distinctive kind of xenophobic racism as opposed to a merely additive combination of racism and xenophobia. Relatedly, the xenophobic and Islamophobic character of the racism may help to explain more fully why anti-MENA racism resists absorption into conceptions of race and racism beholden to a Black-white binary, for these conceptions hew more closely to the body and are more deeply framed by natural kind thinking. 

Current anti-MENA racism aside, Fourlas also discusses a very early proto-racialization of MENA peoples when Bartolomé de Las Casas, in his defense of the indigenous of Latin America, seems to group together Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Arabs as a barbarian “natural kind.” This reveals an “Orientalist stance” that would later become a more discursive Orientalism of the sort that Said discusses (Fourlas, 24). But note that even in that moment, Las Casas depicts this grouping of peoples as being culturally and politically fairly sophisticated, where this is configured and distorted by their being, in Las Casas’ viewpoint, “effeminate” and decadent infidels. So, even at this early or incipient moment of MENA racial formation, a gendered xenophobic racism, as opposed to a racism-plus-xenophobia process, seems to have emerged.7

More Norms for Pragmatic MENA Transnationalism?

Second, I think the move from anti-MENA racism to MENA solidarity is somewhat underdetermined, as is the case generally in a transition from critique to corrective construction, so I am curious about what further guidance can be had in the form of on-the-ground norms or principles that shape MENA solidarity and identity. To begin, Fourlas cogently articulates how anti-racism forms a significant normative anchor point for MENA solidarity. He also offers a timely meditation on the nuances and pitfalls of accusations of racism and the need for communally integrative or re-integrative processes of “calling in” people. He even addresses fairly new phenomena, like the language of “blue racism” and the rise of anti-racist white allies who can only think in terms of a Black-white binary. In this same spirit and framework of conciliation, Fourlas persuasively highlights the need for an open, reciprocal, and trust-affirming hermeneutical and interpersonal process out of which MENA solidarity is built. Much of his theoretical focus is on what it is to create “conditions for the possibility” of new communal ties. His work here is creative, interesting, and important. But I would like to hear a bit more of the norms over which such conditions enable us to deliberate. In this vein, Fourlas rejects MENA peoples following the lead of the census and the law and thereby embracing that type of ascribed whiteness. Thus, as the conditions of possibility for MENA solidarity are fulfilled, MENA people should reject the norm of uniting as whites and instead unite as a non-white Orientalized people. He also insists that MENA peoples should reject the norms of narrow nationalism, like Assad’s recent Arab-ization project, pointing not only to their exclusive and non-dialogical effects but also to their colonial causation (Fourlas, 59-62). In fact, in his final chapter, where he sympathetically discusses Rojavism, he seems to cast doubt on nationalism altogether.

Fourlas persuasively rejects the norm of collective self-“whitening” and the norm of narrow nationalism. In many ways, his account is reminiscent of what Tommie Shelby calls “pragmatic Black nationalism,” a form of Black collectivity that is based solely on resisting anti-Black racism and not any kind of substantive Black identity, cultural or otherwise.8 Is Fourlas’ position, then, a pragmatic MENA transnationalism? I think it is. His book does not insist on any substantive unification norms, like a cultural core to MENA peoples, and it repeatedly appeals to the defense of MENA peoples from Orientalist racism. Given this parallel, let’s consider some important asymmetries between MENA and African American communities, the totality of which seems to require more norm positing for MENA solidarity. Specifically, Shelby’s account, by focusing on Black Americans, helps itself, generally speaking, to a shared language, a shared national history, a numerically fairly limited set of cultural, artistic, and religious traditions, and a central role in the civic narrative of national social progress (i.e., the slavery to civil rights liberty narrative).9 Hardly any of these apply in the case of a pragmatic MENA transnational solidarity. The collectivity that is MENA peoples is simply too vast and variegated. And,  historically, significant intra-MENA dissension in the form of sub-national subjugation (e.g., Kurdish subordination) and national wars (e.g., the Iran-Iraq War) has reached a level of discord and destruction that has no real parallel in the case of African Americans. 

I think that pragmatic Black nationalism, by benefitting from many shared structures in the social world of a single nation, can use anti-racism as a robust basis for solidarity. But pragmatic MENA transnationalism does not have the same collectivity-forming resources.10 This is not to say that there are none. I am simply pointing out a difference of degree, though a fairly large difference. Thus, are more unification norms—beyond anti-“whitening” and anti-narrowness—needed to produce a robust MENA solidarity? What might they be? For example, can there be a nuanced appeal to shared cultural development? Or is a common plight and commitment to anti-racism sufficient, after all? If we narrow our focus to MENA Americans, much of the same problem remains, but to a lesser degree. On the one hand, the frame of the nation-state reduces the cultural, linguistic, and historical possibilities or variability with potentially group-stabilizing effects in the incipient process of MENA American solidarity formation. On the other hand, insofar as a large proportion of MENA Americans are immigrants, which is indeed the case, the complexity and heterogeneity of the ancestral homelands persists in the adopted land, even if to a lesser degree. Without the socio-ontological “stabilizers” available in the case of African Americans, what further norms of solidarity can generate robust MENA American solidarity?

In my response to George Fourlas’ Anti-Colonial MENA Solidarity I will focus on the question of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) identity. There are notable similarities between Fourlas’ idea of MENA solidarity and the long history of pan-Arabism dating back to the nineteenth century. Here, I would like to give Fourlas the opportunity to elaborate on what is gained and lost in encouraging “MENA solidarity” vis-à-vis “pan-Arabism” or “Arab unity.” Specifically, I wonder if “MENA solidarity” might be both too narrow an identity and too broad. First, I will take up the work of Palestinian philosopher Fayez Sayegh, whom Fourlas references, to suggest that “MENA” might be too broad an identity to ground a certain kind of anti-colonial movement. Then, because Fourlas’ book is partly concerned with MENA diaspora, I will turn to another instance of political solidarity, namely the Organization of Arab Students (OAS), which was the premier political organization for Arabs in the United States during the 1960s. While Sayegh’s study suggests that perhaps the idea of MENA solidarity is too broad, the history of the OAS might lead one to conclude that “MENA” is too narrow. These two historical examples serve as a useful backdrop against which Fourlas might defend and extrapolate on the idea of MENA solidarity.

In his discussion of anti-colonial MENA solidarity, Fourlas asks, “On what grounds should we define ourselves?” (67). In his response, Fourlas hopes to avoid ethno-nationalism and a colonial mindset that defines a group through the negation of others. He goes on to write, that Arab nationalism “emerged as a direct response to Turkish domination,” and therefore, Arab national identity “tends to overdetermine sociality and prevent the realization of other liberated futures” (71-72). As I understand Fourlas’ argument, “Arab” “becomes a past form” because it is an exclusive nationalism based on opposition to Turkish colonial occupation. 

I would like to read these pages alongside Sayegh’s 1958 Arab Unity: Hope and Fulfillment, a book dedicated to documenting the history of pan-Arabism and offering suggestions for the future of anti-colonial Arab solidarity. In this book, Sayegh still very much wants to hold on to this Arab identity, and his reason for doing so stems from a very different history of the region than that which Fourlas advances. According to Sayegh, although the triumph of Ottoman over Egypto-Syrian Mamelukes in 1516 and 1517 did lead to the subjugation of all Arabs, “the political unity of the Arab peoples was nevertheless preserved under imperial Ottoman rule until the turn of the Nineteenth Century.”1 The dismemberment of the Arab world only begins with French and British partitioning, which reaches its zenith in the early twentieth century with Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration. In other words, according to Sayegh, it was the British, French, and Zionist colonial occupations that spurred the idea of Arab unity, not that of the Ottomans. Whereas under the Ottomans, Arabs had achieved solidarity and then had to fight for freedom,2 under European colonial domination, Arabs were forced to live under an arbitrary partitioning of their land. It is especially important to note that ‘Arab unity’ was a response not only to this fragmentation, but also to the aggressive de-Arabization of a portion of the Arab homeland. Of course, Sayegh here is referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Arab unity was not an ethno-nationalism,3 but rather the idea was used to reassert the land as an Arab territory in the face of an occupation that looked to eliminate Arabs from the land. In fact, it was the loss of Palestine in 1948 that spurred a demand for a more profound Arab unity than that offered by the League of Arab states, which only coordinated Arab states in manner that was too fragmented to overcome Zionist colonialism.4

My point here is that this question was asked by Arabs, as Arabs, in large part because they were colonized as Arabs. In this sense, Arab unity was an idea born from an explicitly anti-Arab ethnic-nationalist occupation. The coalition is then primarily among those who identify with the colonized as Arabs. The political solidarity of those who identify as Arab is forged in this very specific context. That is, a people lived on a land as Arabs, and it was stolen and declared no longer Arab. Asserting an Arab identity therefore has a strategic use in this context, or, as Sayegh says, it is an idea with “practical efficacy.”5

And so I ask Fourlas, how does “Arab” become a “past form” when the Zionist occupation rages on and stands, in my opinion, as the premier form of colonial apartheid in the world today? “Arab” has come to be defined in opposition to this occupation, which in its own way declares the Arab a “past form.” For instance, as Sarah Gualitieri notes, when the term “Arab-American” was coined in 1944, it meant in part that when we say we are “Arab-American” it means that whether we are Egyptian, Tunisian, Lebanese, or Iraqi, we are in the end Palestinian in our hearts.6 Given the historical and strategic importance of the Palestine question and Zionist colonialism, is something essential not lost in replacing the term “Arab” with “MENA”? Is “MENA” not so broad that the Palestine question gets pushed to the background? I appreciate the desire to define the region broadly to include non-Arab peoples, but has Fourlas overlooked the strategic importance of the term “Arab” in emphasizing Ottoman domination over and against British, French, and above all, Zionist colonialism which motivates Sayegh’s study of Arab unity?

Where Sayegh’s work leads one to ask if the idea of MENA solidarity is not too broad, on the other hand, one might look to the Organization of Arab Students and ask if it is too narrow. The OAS was the most important Arab student group in the mid-twentieth century. It played a major role in advocating for progressive Arab perspectives on American campuses. The ultimate goal of the OAS, as stated in its 1968 constitution, was the “recognition of and commitment to the cause of complete social transformation, inspired by the compelling need to end the suffering of Arab people that has been inflicted upon them by domestic and foreign exploitation.” In that regard, the organization came to be associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Student Union at San Francisco State, the Third World Liberation Front, the Black Panther Party, and other student activist groups agitating against racism and imperialism around the world. The group’s slogan, “One Arab Nation”, signaled their commitment to pan-Arabism, and they always insisted on the significance of Palestine as “the most important single problem in the minds of Arabs everywhere, overshadowing any other problem.”7

The OAS is an interesting case study for Fourlas’ idea not so much because it was the organization of Arab students, but rather because in practice the group went well beyond the Arab world, and this transcendence of a regional identity makes the group an interesting anti-colonial movement. Of course, the group was certainly heavily invested in promoting the Palestinian cause. Yet, the OAS was an anti-imperial project not only because it advocated for an Arab point of view on the Palestine question. It was also deeply invested in anti-colonial activities all around the world including solidarity with African Americans, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, as well as liberation movements in Africa, China, and Korea. The opening statement of the OAS’s 1967 Convention declared, “Our battle is an inseparable part of the imperialistic design being executed against the dynamic revolutionary voices in the Third World.” In this sense, the OAS advocated for a solidarity that went well-beyond both “Arab” and “MENA.” The OAS recognized, along with other student groups, that if they were going to succeed in their aim of decolonization, then they needed to coordinate with other oppressed peoples. The OAS enacts this kind of extra-MENA solidarity when, in 1968, they invited Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers to speak as their keynote. Carmichael took the time to educate the Arab audience on the history and peculiarity of anti-Black racism and then declared his opposition to Zionist colonialism in Palestine. When Carmichael went on to state, “We fight with the colonized world,” he was accepting the OAS’s invitation to make the Black student movement and the Arab student  movement part of one and the same revolutionary action (I have made Carmichael’s keynote address to the OAS available here).

I find this history interesting because it suggests to me that what made the OAS a serious challenge to colonialism was not so much that it was committed to Arab or MENA issues in isolation, but rather the group committed itself to a network of causes that were bound not by any specific identity but by their opposition to racism, imperialism, and colonialism. Perhaps one might even suggest that it was never “Arab” that made the group anti-colonial. Rather, it was the students’ commitment to non-Arabs’ struggle that most troubled imperialism because it created a coalition that went well beyond a few thousand Arab students. In fact, when the Nixon administration convened the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest with the express aim of derailing these student organizations, their 1970 report remarked on the principled selflessness of student activists and the fact that “their beliefs and their protests clearly are founded on principle and ideology, not on self-interest” (60). That is to say, what they found troubling was the students’ principled lack of commitment to a single racial identity or a single cause, be it Arab, MENA, or otherwise.

Given this context, one might ask if the idea of “MENA solidarity” is too narrow. Perhaps the only solidarity that matters is anti-colonial solidarity? While the OAS was focused on the liberation of Palestine, they would concede an exclusively Arab organization for an anti-colonial movement, such as when they asked Carmichael on anti-Black racism at their annual conference. Where, if at all, does MENA solidarity give way to anti-colonial solidarity? Does “MENA solidarity” not need to be discarded at times to accomplish anything anti-colonial? Again, as I noted above regarding Arab unity, is this not a strategic decision that very much depends on historical context? If so, are any identities ever truly “past forms,” or are they not fluid strategies that might prove more or less useful given the material circumstances?

In summary, I have posed two related questions concerning the idea of “MENA solidarity.” Sayegh’s work suggests that “MENA” might be too broad an identity for a certain kind of anti-colonial work. The history of the OAS suggests it might be too narrow. My point is not that “MENA solidarity” is either too broad or too narrow. Rather, these historical examples seem to suggest identities emerge strategically in response to very specific contexts and the forms of colonialism they are opposing. What form of colonization is MENA solidarity best suited to, since different forms of colonialism call for different strategic identities? How is that form of colonialism different from other instances?

George Fourlas’s Anti-Colonial Solidarity: Race, Reconciliation, and MENA Liberation is one of those special works of philosophy that persuasively imbues conceptual analysis with political urgency by bringing clarity to a context whose complexity and scope is often minimized: the MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) region and those racialized as MENA in turn. At its core, Anti-Colonial Solidarity is a call for a new kind of radical, relational freedom—one that consciously and actively resists the co-constitutive logics of orientalism, colonialism, and racism that continue to shape the global landscape. Over the course of the six chapters that comprise the book, Fourlas develops this liberatory vision through the notion of “anti-colonial solidarity,” which is best understood as both a political attitude and a material recuperation of the indigenous, pre-colonial reconciliatory practices of what is now called the MENA region. Rather than offer an outline for actualizing this vision, however, Fourlas takes as his starting point the existing relations of solidarity that are “already being enacted by MENA people all over the world” and which are rendered illegible by the “naturalized conflict narrative[s]” that have historically divided MENA peoples against themselves (4). In this sense, “anti-colonial solidarity” supplies “an alternative narrative for MENA peoples” that recognizes how “our oppositions are produced and maintained, often intentionally, in order to prevent our cooperative self-determination” (2). But the call for anti-colonial solidarity is not directed exclusively to MENA peoples; over the course of the book, Fourlas reminds the reader that “the problem of coloniality” is one that confronts all of us, for the only other alternative to our enduring colonial present “is collapse, degradation, and death” (7).

Anti-Colonial Solidarity’s six chapters are subdivided across three sections that correspond with the themes of race, reconciliation, and liberation that comprise the book’s subtitle. The first two chapters establish MENA subjectivity as an effect of Orientalist-racism, the product of over ten centuries of Orientalist thought that has engendered a normative racial hierarchy in the service of white, Western supremacy. It is necessary, Fourlas argues, to rethink anti-MENA sentiment as racism in order to overcome the artificial, nationalist identities that have fragmented “Middle Eastern populations who see themselves as enemies because of internalized Orientalist tactics that pit all against all” (52), and which obfuscate the colonial-racial relations of power in which the MENA region remains mired. 

The second two chapters supply an alternative, anti-Orientalist genealogy of the now-MENA world to excavate what Fourlas calls the “anti-colonial principle”—a principle which challenges the idea of the West as the protagonist of history by recuperating the pluralist and reciprocal Hellenism that historically proliferated in the now-MENA region. As Fourlas argues, “certain discourses surrounding the Greeks, and especially mainstream philosophical history, are guilty of maintaining an Orientalist ideal that justifies death and domination in the near-East” (84), in part by constructing ancient Greece as the historical origin of a “pure” Europe “in order to justify and excuse the goals of conquest” (81). Beyond its historical reductionism, this Orientalist Hellenism enshrouds the liberatory principle that lies at the core of “proper”—that is, pre-colonial—Hellenism: isonomia, characterized by Fourlas as “a relational modality grounded in experiences wherein boundaries are permeable or nonexistent and human relationships emerge through intentional coordination and appreciation” (89). 

The final two chapters make this normative ideal legible through an existential retelling of the myth of Babel—which Fourlas provides as “an abstract representation of the post-conflict experience” (110)—and in the historical-material examples of the peace movement in Cyprus and revolution in Rojava. Fourlas recuperates the myth of Babel as “an interpretative starting point[]” for imagining alternative modalities of social-political relations (101), one that can challenge the enduring colonial relation that “consum[e], exploit[], and impos[e] itself on those it refuses” (103). Cyprus and Rojava, meanwhile, are “conflicted interstitial spaces” whose violent histories are “rooted in colonial imposition” (115), and are thus uniquely positioned as models of grassroots reconciliatory processes of anti-colonial solidarity. Neither is meant to serve as a blueprint for enacting new forms of solidarity, however; rather, both “represent a modality that is simultaneously ancient in the pre-colonial sense, but also beyond the given or status quo of Euro-modern politics (i.e., state liberalism) and thus a new path” (128–29). They serve as evidence that anti-colonial solidarity is not only theoretically possible, but materially actualizable. 

Anti-Colonial Solidarity is an important text in many respects, deftly spanning continents, historical eras, and intellectual traditions to present a promising vision of life after/in spite of the coloniality of power. By my estimation, it also offers one of the most prescient analyses of contemporary Arab/Islamic/Middle Eastern subjectivities by avoiding reducing these lived experiences to the post-9/11 context. Fourlas instead manages to provide a properly global-historical analysis of the racism and coloniality that have long constructed “MENA” peoples as Europe’s others and which simultaneously illuminates the interconnectedness of the West’s varied and ongoing projects of colonial racialization. In doing so, Fourlas complicates the historically dominant framework of racial analysis (prevalent in the U.S. academy) that is predicated on a Black-white binary and urges us to recognize that an “Orientalist imaginary […] drove colonialism and continues to drive neo-colonialism” (23, emphasis added). Fourlas’s book is thus an acute reminder that “racial thought has always been a global project” (27) and, as such, is a valuable text for all peoples racialized under the colonial matrix of global white supremacy.

As someone whose social and political work has long been guided by a global-historical orientation to race and racialism, it is Fourlas’s radical reframing of “race”—and, in particular, his use of “Orientalism” to refashion racism as an ongoing colonial project—that most struck me as a reader. Over the course of the book, Fourlas seems to take up and expand Edward Said’s influential notion of Orientalism in two respects: first, Fourlas uses Orientalism as an analytic tool for theorizing modern racialization “within a global historical-material context” marked by coloniality (12); second, Fourlas deploys Orientalism as a heuristic for reconsidering “the fetishization of the ancient world” as a strategy for consolidating European hegemony (78). In the first case, Orientalism serves as an onto-epistemological logic of difference-making (what Said would call Orientalism’s “imaginative” dimension1), while in the second it operates as a tactic of narrative production and historiography (Orientalism’s “corporate-institution[al]” or discursive dimension2). It is in this first sense that I wish to press Fourlas for elaboration.

For Fourlas, Orientalism’s long onto-epistemological history—which even for Said extends as far back as Homer—provides a hermeneutic lens through which to reconsider the co-constitutive emergence of colonialism and (modern) racism. This history encompasses both the Reconquista, “wherein social-political status … was attributed to blood and birth (limpieza de sangre) beyond the royal family” (23), as well as the colonization of the Americas, where “the barbarian was seen as a natural kind, even if that kind was not yet described as a race” (24). Such colonial projects, as Fourlas understands them, were governed by an “Orientalist attitude” of onto-epistemological difference-making, or what Fourlas calls “Orientalist-racism” (23). The idea here is that some kind of Orientalist thinking governed Western conceptions of identity well before the eighteenth-century emergence of Orientalism as a formal discourse. This is a relatively non-controversial suggestion, and one which Said himself acknowledges; indeed, Aristotle’s political thought is rife with what we might call an “Orientalist logic”—a fact which is not incidental given his tutelage of Alexander the Great—that constructed non-Greeks (i.e., Egyptians and Persians) as “barbarians” who could be justly conquered. 

My concern is that Fourlas’s reframing of “Orientalist-racism” downplays the geographic specificity of Orientalism, which for Said is situated firmly East of what is now called (Western) Europe, extending “from China to the Mediterranean” (1978, 42). Fourlas, however, applies the phenomenon of “Orientalist-racism” to the Americas, treating “Orientalist-racism as a hermeneutic lens through which history [of colonization as such] can be read” (23): 

…if the spread of Orientalist-racism to the Americas is taken as a continuation of the same war tactics, a historical connection between Latin American and Middle Eastern experience becomes obvious … yet selective and reified Orientalist political narratives that ignore the long history of white supremacy would have us believe these spaces are not connected by a common history of strategic Orientalist-racist war tactics (68).

By describing the colonization of the Americas as “Orientalist-racist,” I worry that Fourlas here conflates Orientalization with racial otherization, rather than situate Orientalism as a specific modality of racial otherization. What emerges is thus a kind of Orientalism without the Orient, while what is unique to Orientalist-racism, as I understand it, is that it produces Orientalized subjects whose subjectivity is associated with a distinct set of historically and geographically contingent characteristics (the mystical, the submissive-exotic-erotic, the existential threat it poses to Christian empire). It is equally clear that not every racialized subject is an “Oriental” subject. I would thus contest Fourlas’s suggestion that what connects the Latin American and Middle Eastern experience is a “common history of strategic Orientalist–racist war tactics” or that “the Americans were seen as equally barbaric as the Arabs, Greeks, Romans, and Turks” (24, emphasis added). Even if they operate on similar logics of inclusion and exclusion, “Latin American”—and even indigenous American—subjectivity seems fundamentally discursively and materially distinct from “MENA” subjectivity, and these distinctions in part determine what shape liberatory praxis will take. What is shared, as Fourlas himself writes, is that in both contexts this racialization works in the service of white supremacy. 

I wonder how Fourlas might respond to the suggestion that what he describes as an “Orientalist-racism” in the above passage is in fact an imperialist-racism. Insofar as imperium—an ancient Roman notion which shaped the exclusionary logic of the European imperial projects in the early modern and modern periods—denotes a normative power of status and authority that is engendered by the construction and maintenance of social hierarchy. As Fourlas too notes, empire is selective in the historical and political narratives it embraces to legitimize and sustain itself, but it does so in distinct ways in distinct historical contexts. What remains constant, as Said writes, “is the hierarchical [relationship] between the metropole and overseas generally, between the European-Western-white-Christian-male and those peoples who geographically and morally inhabit the realm beyond Europe” (1993, 106; emphasis added). The effect of imperialist-racism, then, is the constitution of subjects who “geographically and morally inhabit the realm beyond Europe,” including Orientalized subjects. Indeed, Said himself characterizes Orientalism as one of several types of “imperialist tradition[s]” (1978, 15). Orientalist-racism on this reading would constitute a species of imperialist-racism, while “New World” racism might constitute another. 

What may be true, however (and what Fourlas’s excavation of pre-Orientalized Hellenism persuasively implies), is that Orientalist-racism was the condition of possibility for other modalities of imperialist-racism. Aristotle’s barbarians and slaves were not abstract beings, after all, but Persians, Egyptians, Medes, and Phoenicians. It is in part for this reason that I do not find the concept of “Orientalist-racism” analytically unproductive; on the contrary, it importantly qualifies a particular modality of racialization that is unique to and shared by “Orientalized” populations. As a conceptual frame, it cuts across the national identities that have work to pit MENA peoples against one another while simultaneously explaining how other racialized groups can take on (and historically have taken on) Orientalist-racist beliefs and practices. What makes Orientalism a species of racism is that it is an onto-epistemological construction of domination and subordination in the service of white Western supremacy—and it is this dimension of Orientalism that must be emphasized if we wish to build intra-racial and inter-racial relations of anti-colonial solidarity.