%0 Journal Article
%T ¡®Does anybody really care what a racist says?¡¯ Anti
%A Remi Joseph-Salisbury
%J The Sociological Review
%@ 1467-954X
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0038026118807672
%X In September 2016 a new five-pound note entered circulation. In an online article, I offered a counter-hegemonic reading of Winston Churchill¡¯s life in order to critique his depiction on the note. The article sparked a wave of online criticism. Drawing upon comments on the piece I wrote, in this article I show how, in the face of the threat posed by anti-racist counter-narratives, states of white amnesia lead commenters to draw upon alternative explanatory discourses that are consistent with ¡®post-racial¡¯ white supremacy. Particularly, I focus on those comments that pathologise me as the author of the article. These comments construct me as ¡®a racist¡¯, as ¡®confused¡¯ and as ¡®lacking intelligence¡¯. In each case, this framing allows the commenters to reconcile the cognitive dissonance that counter-hegemonic anti-racist work threatens to produce
%K anti-racism
%K mixed-race
%K ¡®post-racial¡¯
%K white amnesia
%K white supremacy
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038026118807672