The Americanisation of Anti-Racism? Global Power and Hegemony in Ethnic Equity Alastair Bonnett Following recent debate on US influence on anti-racism around the world, this article offers a critical assessment of how anti-racism is being shaped and disseminated. It is argued that the US-Americanisation of anti-racism is autonomous of US political will or action and has a complex and contingent relationship with neo-liberal globalisation. After considering how these themes suggest a revision in Gramscian perspectives on hegemony, the paper illustrates them by reference to the World Bank’s advocacy of cultural pluralism in Latin America. It is argued that this ethnic equity project is articulated and ‘sold’ as a form of counter-authority, a form that employs and deploys the USA as a model of the modern nation. Keywords: Anti-Racism; Racialisation; Neo-Liberalism; Transnationalism; US- Americanisation; World Bank Introduction ‘The Hegemon of the World’, Izvestiya’s headline of 6 December 1921, announced a new geopolitical reality: the political, economic and military global dominance of the USA. In the course of the twentieth century, assumptions of US pre-eminence were to become common-place. By century’s end it was even imagined in some quarters that the story of the last one hundred years could be reduced to a narrative of US power (Slater and Taylor 1999). However, it is only over the last decade that the implications of this power have managed to edge their way into English-language debates on how racism and ethnic discrimination are identified and challenged (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999; Cohen 1996; Laurie and Bonnett 2002; Modood 1996a,b). One argument these diverse interventions share is that contemporary processes of Alastair Bonnett is Professor of Social Geography at the University of Newcastle. Correspondence to: Prof. A. Bonnett, School of Geography, Sociology and Politics, Daysh Building, University of Newcastle, Newcastle- upon-Tyne NE1 7RU. E-mail: alastair.bonnett@newcastle.ac.uk ISSN 1369-183X print/ISSN 1469-9451 online/06/071083-21 # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13691830600821778 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 32, No. 7, September 2006, pp. 1083  1103