Ainsley LeSure (Ph.D., University of Chicago, Political Science, 2015) is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and specializes in political theory with a particular focus on the critical theory of race and racism, social justice, democratic theory, Black political thought and feminist theory.
Her current book project, tentatively titled, Locating Racism in the World: Toward an Anti-Racist Reality, reconceptualizes racism in the post-Civil Rights era. Specifically, the book calls for a shift away from framing post-Civil Rights racism as either unconscious or institutional and toward a worldly account of racism that offers a better conception of the relationship between its individual and collective determinants. The three payoffs of a worldly account of racism are: first, a clearer pathway toward individual and institutional accountability; second, a clear mandate for a participatory, deliberative democracy to address racism’s reality defying tendencies through world-building that establishes and protects reality; and finally, an account of the common good of a racially just society as reality itself. To this end, this project offers novel and unexpected interpretations of canonical political theory and black studies texts: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power, and Hannah Arendt’s work on racism.
