Ainsley LeSure

Ainsley LeSure

Visiting Scholar in Race and Ethnicity Assistant Professor, Politics, Occidental College

[email protected]

Ainsley LeSure is an Assistant Professor of Politics and affiliated faculty of the Black Studies Program at Occidental College in Los Angles, California. She is a political theorist with broad interests in antiracist critical theory, democratic theory, social justice, and feminist theory. Her current book project “Subverting the Rule of Race: Achieving Racial Equality Democratically,” traces how an over-emphasis on the inner states of individuals – like implicit biases, intentions, motivations, sentiments, aversions, and beliefs – in explaining the tenacity of racial injustice in the contemporary moment blinds us to the way racism makes its appearance in the world. Using resources provided from the political thought of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, the book offers an account of individual and collective responsibility for racism in the post-Civil Rights era and a theory of political resistance to racial domination that takes seriously the project of democratic racial equality. In addition to the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, her research has been supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.