The Epistemic Violence of Racism

Written for a volume reflecting on the failures and challenges of the United Nations Summit on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. Describing the way in which discourse about racism has evolved in a post-apartheid era, adopts a definition of racism as embedded prejudice linked to structural discrimination. Noting that neither a biological nor a cultural basis for understanding "race" has validity, I then define the ongoing "epistemic violence" of racism, rooted in European and American history. How we will overcome racism in a context where it is no longer overtly linked to any racist regime? If racism is embedded in a paradigmatic epistemé, how can it be overcome without public regulation, civil transformation and personal conversion as the necessary and simultaneous conditions of its eradication?