As Robin D.G. Kelley puts it, 'anti-wokeness is the perfect example of the functioning of the racial regime.' Taking the reader beyond the distracting framings of culture wars and moral panics, Alana Lentin shows how the attacks on Black, Indigenous and anticolonial thought and praxis reveal the processes through which racial colonial rule is ideologically resecured.

Throughout the book, the often chaotic and contradictory recalibration of the racial regime is traced through the counterinsurgent attacks on Critical Race Theory; the 'whitelash' against the teaching of histories of slavery and colonialism; the counterinsurgent capture and institutionalisation of antiracism, Indigeneity and decoloniality in the interests of Zionism, settler colonialism, and imperialism; and the nexus of antisemitism and fascism at an acute time of genocide.

While the racial regime is constantly being remade, its inherent instability is the consequence of constant resistance from below. Maintaining and deepening that resistance is vital at a time of rapidly mounting fascism.