Ajay Parasram & Alex Khasnabish answer pressing questions about racism & anti-racist politics

Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural forms of violence founded and exacerbated by and through imperialism. Alex Khasnabish is a writer, researcher and teacher committed to collective liberation who also lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). He’s a professor in sociology and anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His research focuses on the radical imagination, social justice and social movements. In our conversation we look at some of the ideas from their forthcoming book from Fernwood Press, Frequently Asked White Questions. The book comes out of both frustration and inspiration. They were frustrated by the insufficiency of existing efforts at anti-racist education, given especially the current state of affairs in the world, with a resurgent far-right populism winning political ground, but they were also inspired to create space for people to pose questions that, especially in the case of white folks like myself, we might feel somewhat anxious about asking, because there are certain expectations within existing social justice spaces. Their book was the outgrowth of a YouTube show where they saw specific patterns emerge from the questions that were being asked. It's clear that there were specific things on people's minds, and so they wrote the book in order to catalog and constructively engage with those patterns, those questions, those concerns that keep people from being able to even imagine multiracial society, and solidarity within it. Instead of trying to play expert, they want to try to move past “moralistic denunciation” and lecturing and toward a model of “generosity” and “genuineness.” As Ajay puts it, “basic respect” has become more difficult at a time of conflict and polarization. This is, for him, where the Left has collectively sort of “missed the boat;” it has “underestimated right populism and failed to adequately address the political moment.” In the face of these failures, they want to experiment with more “evocative methods” on what needs to be done. The crucial question, from their perspective, is who is going to come up with a narrative that is “savvy and engaging enough to capture public attention” and gain traction in an era of persistent white supremacy and a potent attachment to past and present frameworks for maintaining hierarchy? These are not ideas that are easy to drive home. Arguing for an anti-capitalist politics is not necessarily going to resonate with all people or publics. But they still bring it into the conversation in ways that are convincing, and bring it, more specifically into the conversation about ecological justice movements and anti-racism. One of the biggest takeaways here is the idea that where we start out ontologically has a crucial effect on where we end up. In Ajay’s words it's ontology rather than epistemology that is at stake here. Rather than just a matter of knowledge, it's about the “nuts and bolts that go into cultivating whole systems of knowledge and approaches to ethics.”