The Politics of White Misrecognition and Practices of Racial Inequality

Many critical theories of recognition fail to reckon with the complex ways in which maldistribution and symbolic domination are articulated together in racial orders. Both Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser remain too optimistic about the role that legal recognition and social affirmation of difference can play in redressing racial injustice. Racial identities – understood through an ‘embodied politics of location’ rather than as forms of racial essentialism – are irrevocably entangled with practices of inequality, and not just for Black subjects. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Raoul Peck, I show how racialized imaginaries can provide forms of ‘affirming’ social recognition for White subjects while also naturalizing their complicity in projects of racial dispossession.