Scholars trying to make sense of the contemporary politics of race face a bewildering variety of perspectives, operating at macro and meso levels of explanation. That range and diversity reflects the unsettled status of race, as shown in the previous chapter, as well as the changing and dynamic nature of what count as ‘race issues’, what is specific to particular nations and regions of the world, and whether a time of ‘post-race’ has arrived. Consequently, debates about what constitutes the boundaries and content of race and ethnicity studies, and of racism, are both long-standing and contemporary (for example see Bulmer and Solomos, 1999a, 1999b, Murji and Solomos 2015). In the 21st century, Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism has dominated public and media discussion; and the combination, or more accurately the recombination, of race and religion, alongside polarities around race and gender, such as the wearing of headscarves and in the European migration crisis, introduce new forces in the study of racial ideologies and processes. Their interconnection in policy and politics with issues of identity, belonging, citizenship and the boundaries of British/European/western values is prominent. All of this reflects the need for an analysis of the politics of race and racism that can go beyond seeing racism as either an undifferentiated, long-standing process beyond place and time, or as something superfluous and a relic of another age.

What is the nature and form of such a dynamic approach? While European theories of race and racism remain largely informed by classical and post-structuralist thinking, there is a notable and extraordinary range of perspectives emanating from the US. Critical race theory, once something relatively novel, has become quite familiar in the UK and beyond (Gillborn 2008, Cole 2009, Delgado and Stefancic 2012). It has brought to the fore the issues of white privilege and power, highlighting the role and power of whiteness and white social structures in the persistence and continuance of racism – what Martinot (2011) calls the ‘machinery of whiteness’. But critical race theory has also split, or perhaps matured, into other and related strands of analysis, such as: the call for ‘race critical’ theorising (Essed and Goldberg 2002);