After two sections addressing the social phenomenology of racism, a third section entitled Treatment leads readers into a discussion of strategies for civil opposition. Memmi advocates developing an intense consciousness of racism in order to create an awareness of its continual definition of social presences. Interestingly, Memmi mentions John Howard Griffin s self-transformative autobiographical journey, Black Like Me , as a model of experiencing the world of others. By treatment, however, Memmi does not invoke medicalization for racism and he prefers to deal with group hatreds in terms other than those of abnormal psychology. To the contrary, given its common presence, racism is a normative human condition.
Education is the most viable mode of treatment, and teachers are the front line of anti-racism.
Perhaps the least tenable and most debatable section of the book lies in its final and mostly rhetorical argument in favor of universalism. Ironically, one sees here the same profoundly decent human impulse that characterized Memmi s own reaction in his early university classes where he listened to students deny human difference. Universalism in the sense of reciprocal human decency is a civilized hope, but the precise social contours of that hope remain vague here. The forced global submission of labor to capital, however, relies on another sense of political universalism. In failing to capture this latter aspect of universalism as enablement for globalism, Memmi s conclusions do seem deficient at a time when resistance means localism.