Assimilationism and the denial of everyday racism

How do nonwhite people come to disavow their everyday experience of racism? This article describes “racialized assimilationism” – a discursive formation that predicates the promise of national belonging on essentializing notions of cultural similarity and difference – to expand Philomena Essed’s framework of “everyday racism” with conceptual tools to understand everyday racism’s denial. Leveraging interview materials from Essed’s study in the Netherlands and data collected in France and the United States three decades later, we identify two major processes in the assimilationist logic of everyday racism: (1) the responsibilization of nonwhites for their own marginalization, (2) a pedagogy of disavowal. We argue that assimilationism figures as a counter-heuristic to antiracism, encouraging minority populations to understand their social position as resulting from individual responsibility, deny racism, and reproduce nationalist narratives of racial innocence. Finally, our unique comparison between two distinct studies highlights the continued significance of assimilationism across time and space.