Noticing Race

Zero-Sum Questions: Beyond the Echo Chambers

Dr. Jeremiah Olusola

PhD/M.Ed/PGCert/AFHEA

Research Fellow, University of Surrey

Over the past few years, first as a PhD student, then as a Postdoctoral Researcher, I’ve found myself presenting at some of the most prestigious education conferences in the UK. The rooms are often full. The questions often sharp. The nods of recognition immediate. We speak a shared language: structural racism, racialised outcomes, institutional power, historical injustice. There is often a palpable sense that we are on the “right side” of history.

And yet an uncomfortable realisation has set in. We are preaching to the converted

The conversations in these spaces are taking place within an intellectual echo chamber, where I find myself refining arguments that everyone in the room already broadly accepts. We are rehearsing critiques that land safely because they land among allies and advocates. The friction is minimal. The stakes can feel abstract.

What troubles me now is how starkly these conversations contrast with those I am having outside the academy.

In my “real world” interactions, that include family spaces, community settings, taxis, barbershops and gyms, a very different set of concerns is being articulated. Often by white, working-class people, but increasingly that seems to be changing. These conversations are shaped by a sense of civilisational anxiety: the feeling that something is being lost, that the rules are changing, and that power, understood as scarce, is being redistributed without consent.

These conversations are shaped by a sense of civilisational anxiety: the feeling that something is being lost

One refrain surfaces repeatedly in these exchanges, sometimes tentatively, sometimes angrily, sometimes almost plaintively.

“If minoritised groups are encouraged to name race, organise around it, and translate that collective identity into influence or recognition, why is the same logic treated as illegitimate when invoked by white people?”

Beneath this question sits a more unsettling assumption, rarely voiced explicitly but powerfully felt: that power is finite. Within this zero-sum imaginary, gains made by some groups must be experienced as losses incurred by others. The unease, then, is not simplistically about race-conscious politics, but about why white people are increasingly the group expected to absorb that loss.

This is not a comfortable question for many. It is one that many critical scholars and antiracists already sense beneath contemporary debates, but which must be brought into the open and engaged seriously, rather than closed down through moral shorthand or treated as beyond discussion. Within progressive academic circles, the reflexive response can be to treat such concerns as ignorant, malicious, evidence of fragility, post-racial backlash, or moral failure.

But, at its core, the concern is brutally simple and therefore effective in its appeal to the primeval brain. It frames society as a zero-sum contest between groups. It naturalises race as the basis of collective identity. In doing so, it extends the race-centred analytical logic established by antiracist scholarship. Simultaneously, it perverts that analysis to claim that white people are uniquely prohibited from organising around their own interests while others are actively encouraged to do so. It presents antiracism not as justice, but as ideological capture imposed by identarian elites who will never bear its costs.

Antiracist scholarship, by contrast, insists that race must be actively noticed precisely because inequality is already structured along racial lines. Where a colour-blind approach might aim to promote fairness by downplaying difference and treating race as something that should not be foregrounded (Bonilla-Silva, 2018), antiracist analysis argues that power has long been accumulated and protected through racialised systems. From this perspective, refusing to name race does not produce fairness but preserves existing inequalities; initiatives that explicitly foreground race are therefore understood as correctives, aimed at redressing historical and structural imbalance. Both the “zero-sum” and antiracist positions are internally coherent. Both speak to real anxieties. And both are talking past each other.

Both the “zero-sum” and antiracist positions are internally coherent. Both speak to real anxieties. And both are talking past each other

This is where echo chambers become dangerous, leaving unaddressed grievances and fears to be taken up, simplified, and weaponised by more radicalised ethno-nationalist narratives.

Programmes that explicitly foreground race are often cited as evidence of progressive overreach. From within antiracist frameworks, their rationale is clear: if race shapes educational experience, it must be named. But from outside those frameworks, such initiatives can appear to confirm a fear that some identities are institutionally recognised while others are rendered illegitimate.

The mistake, I contend, on the part of antiracists is not in noticing race. The mistake is assuming that the moral logic of noticing race is self-evident.

But outside the academic conference rooms, people are encountering race-conscious politics for the first time through hostile media, populist rhetoric, or institutional gestures that appear symbolic. In that context, suspicion flourishes.

So how do we begin to address this?

Not by diluting antiracist commitments. Not by appeasing nationalist resentment. But by doing the harder work of intellectual engagement. This means debating colour-blindness rather than dismissing it. Explaining why race-conscious approaches are necessary without assuming shared premises. Acknowledging how, what I am calling here, “zero-sum thinking” shapes people’s responses to power redistribution. Most importantly, it means leaving the safety of the echo chamber.

If we cannot speak convincingly beyond our own audiences, our arguments risks becoming weightless, intellectually sophisticated, but socially marginal. Amid growing nationalism (Gawlewicz and Sotkasiira, 2020), that strikes me as a kind of academic abdication.

The challenge ahead will be to build a language of justice that can withstand valid contestation and answer the questions being asked outside the room.

References

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.

Gawlewicz, A., & Sotkasiira, T. (2020). Revisiting Brexit: Beyond the racialisation of Eastern Europeans. Sociology, 54(5), 1025–1041. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520928523