Alana Lentin, "The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy" (Pluto Books, 2025)

Alana Lentin, "The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy" (Pluto Books, 2025)

May 4, 2026 · 1h 21m

About this episode

Alana Lentin discusses her book 'The New Racial Regime', analyzing the dynamics of race, white supremacy, and the backlash against critical race theory.

The New Racial Regime begins by interrogating the backlash against critical race theory and explains how the so-called war on woke can be used against educators or to curtail struggles challenging settler colonialism. Alana Lentin grounds her analysis with an engagement of the ideas making up the Black radical tradition and explicates the work of Cedric Robinson in particular. She builds a historically situated analysis of ‘race’ as inherently unstable and explains that the racial regime requires constant recalibration to maintain hierarchies of dominance within global systems of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Exposing the limitations of liberal anti-racism, Lentin’s analysis explores how racialism is embedded in social institutions and can inhibit a clear understanding of antisemitism, as well as anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism. The New Racial Regime is an insightful and principled response to present-day struggles over culture, education, and politics. Alana Lentin is a Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University. Genevieve Ritchie is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University. Learn more about your ad…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Alana Lentin

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Western Sydney University, Pluto Books

Books & works: The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy

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