This is a transcript of the talk I gave about my book Not So Black and White at New York University on 16 October 2023. I have not had time to put the links in, but I will do so. And here are details of the book, reviews and bookshops.

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Let me begin with quote from Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born revolutionary and intellectual, from his 1952 masterpiece Black Skins, White Masks.

“The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.”

Fanon was making an argument about the illusory character of racial categorisation. And, yet, more than seventy years after Fanon wrote those lines, they still feel unsettling, as if they are a challenge not just to racialisation but to our identity, our very being. That they should do so exposes the deeply conflicted relationship we still possess with race.

We live in an age in which in most societies, there is a moral abhorrence of racism, albeit that in most, bigotry and discrimination still disfigure the lives of many. We also live in an age saturated with identitarian thinking, with the placing of people into racial and ethnic boxes. The more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to it. It is this paradox that I address in my book and that I want to address today.

For some, there is no paradox. What we now call the politics of identity is seen by many as essential in any challenge to racism. That, too, is what I want to address tonight – and to question. 

To do so, I want to retell the history both of the idea of race and of the struggles to confront racism and to transcend racial categorization, and how those two histories intersect. For it is in that intersection that we begin to understand how we have got to where we are.

So, I am first going to sketch out briefly the changing conceptions of the idea of race; and then even more briefly the changing character of antiracism; and finally take a look at the character of contemporary antiracism and the politics of identity.  And in so doing also to question some of the ways in which we think of all three.

* * * *

I want to begin with the argument that race is a modern concept. Modern, not because prejudices, or the categorisation of human groups, were not deeply rooted in the premodern world. On the contrary, they were integral to premodern consciousness.  

Paradoxically, that is why such prejudices were a long way from racial ideas in the modern sense. Because only in a world in which the principles of social equality and a common humanity had become accepted could ideas of racial inequality and difference acquire meaning. That was the world slowly coming into being in eighteenth-century Europe, in particular through the Enlightenment.

There is perhaps no period of history that has been more debated and contested than the Enlightenment. For some, it is the foundation of modern ideas of liberty and equality. For others, the source of racism and bigotry.

The Enlightenment was not, however, a singular blob with a single set of views and ideals. It was cut through with conflicts and contradictions.  At the same time, ideas of race derived not just from a set of ideas but also from material reality and social practices. It is both the contradictions within the Enlightenment and the tension between abstract ideals and social practices that gave rise to the paradox of modernity as the source both of modern ideas of equality and of racial inequality.

The eighteenth century was an age in which ideas about equality and a common human nature became widely accepted, and in so doing transformed our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to each other. It was also an age of slavery and colonialism. Many Enlightenment philosophers combined a defence of liberty and equality with racist attitudes and even an acceptance of slavery.

Here are the beginnings of a contradiction that would shape the modern world; between an abstract belief in equality and the reality of a deeply unequal world. Between societies that defined themselves through a commitment to equality – such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the American Declaration of Independence – and social practices that denied such equality to the majority of people, not least in the maintenance of slavery.

The divisions that rent the post-Enlightenment world, both within Europe, and between Europeans and non-European peoples, would have seemed unremarkable in the premodern world. But in societies that now defined themselves by their attachment to equality and liberty these inequalities and injustices posed fundamental problems.  “Race” became the means to bridge that contradiction by insisting that certain people were by nature unequal and not deserving of liberty and equality.

There is a common assumption that racism emerged when members of one race began discriminating against members of another; that racism is what develops when races collide. In fact, the opposite is the case. Race did not give birth to racism. Racism gave birth to race. The ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black. They became classified as a distinct, and inferior, race as a means of justifying their enslavement. Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in societies that had accepted the concept of equality.

The response to the contradiction between an abstract belief in equality and social practices that enforced inequalities became a central divide within the Enlightenment, most notably between what are often now called the mainstream and the radicals.

The mainstream Enlightenment consisted of the figures with whom we are most familiar – Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Jefferson, and so on.  They attempted to reconcile abstract belief and social practice by seeking to make universalism less universal. Only certain people, they argued, were worthy of equality and liberty. The radicals, lesser-known figures such as Diderot, d’Holbach and Spinoza, were intransigently hostile to racism, slavery and colonialism and insisted that liberty and equality were the prerogative of all, not the privilege of the “civilised” few. Colonialism, Diderot wrote, had brought little but disaster, “vast tracts… cemented with blood”. He is not, he insists, being a moral relativist. He does not prefer “a savage to a civilized state”. But, he asks of European colonialists, “Do you see here civilised people arriving among savages, or savages received by civilised people?”

The struggle between the mainstream and the radicals was key in shaping the character of the Enlightenment and in framing subsequent debates about race and colonialism.  It gave birth to two different universalist traditions, the liberal and the radical, the liberals willing to restrict the meaning of universalism, the radicals pushing to expand it. A good example in the nineteenth century of the different responses of liberals and radicals came with the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, which was in fact an early nationalist insurrection.

John Stuart Mill was the lodestone of Victorian liberalism. He was also a supporter of colonialism, an employee of the East Indian Company. Mill believed, like all classical liberals, that “the individual is sovereign… over his own body and mind”, and that such sovereignty could be curtailed only “to prevent harm to others”. This doctrine, applied, however, neither to children nor to those whom he considered to be “childish” peoples. “Despotism”, Mill believed, “is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians”. And after the Mutiny, Mill wrote a long memorandum for Parliament defending British rule by listing the advances he believed it had brough to India.

For liberals like Mill, their universalism was compatible with colonial rule.  Working-class radicals thought differently. The People’s Paper, the voice of the radical Chartist movement – Chartism as a movement had largely disappeared by the end of the 1850s but publications such as the People’s Paper, insisted that the struggle in India was no different to struggles for freedom by European peoples. Many Britons had supported Poles in their conflict with Russia. And Hungarians in their struggles with Austria. They should equally support the struggles of Indians against Britain.

For liberal imperialists, the so-called “backwardness” of non-Europeans validated colonialism. For radicals, liberty and equality were the prerogative of all, not the privilege of the “civilised” few. A century and a half later, we still often have similar debates.

* * * *

Today, we think about race in terms of skin colour or continent of origin (“black”, “white”, “Asian”). But it was very different in the nineteenth century. Race was a question not just of skin colour, but primarily of social differences. It may be difficult to comprehend now, but for 19th-century thinkers, the working class was as racially distinct from the middle class as blacks were from whites.  

Philippe Buchez was a French physician and sociologist, a Christian socialist, and briefly president of the French National Assembly. The people of France, Buchez observed in a lecture in 1857 were “possessed of a powerful civilization… among the highest ranking in science, the arts and industry”. How was it possible,  he asked, “that within a population such as ours, races may form – not merely one, but several races – so miserable, inferior and bastardized that they may be classed as below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure?” He was talking not of African or Asians peoples but of the working class and rural poor at home.

A vignette of working-class life in the London newspaper Saturday Review described “The Bethnal Green poor” were “a race of whom we know nothing” adding that “distinctions and separations like those of the English classes” were little different from “the separation of the slaves from the whites”. In both cases, “the relation… is that of perpetual superior to perpetual inferior, of chief to dependant, and no amount of kindness or goodness is suffered to alter this relation”.

These were not metaphors or analogies. The working class was really seen as physically, anthropologically, racial distinct. Sociologists developed the argument that class divisions were in reality racial divisions. For Lester Ward, for instance, the first president of the American Sociological Association, “the genesis of society… has been through the struggle of races”. “The conquering race looks down with contempt upon the conquered race and compels it to serve it in various ways”, Ward believed. Here, for Ward, lay the origins of social class.

Not just the working class, but many populations now seen as “white” were certainly not viewed as such 150 years ago. The Irish, Jews, Slavs and southern Europeans were seen as distinct races, and often as non-white.

Race, in the contemporary sense, and whiteness, as we understand it, emerged only in the early decades of the twentieth century, propelled by two developments: the coming of democracy and a new imperialism, exemplified by the “scramble for Africa.” As Western nations became more democratic with the eventual extension of suffrage to the whole adult population, so the racial view of the working class, which had dominated 19th-century elite consciousness, slowly faded from public view.

The widening of suffrage coincided with the expansion of imperial rule in a frenzy of land-grabbing by European nations from Africa to the Pacific. In the coincidence of democracy and imperialism, racial thinking evolved from being an elite ideology to becoming part of popular culture. The language of race became refocused more exclusively on skin colour. And whiteness was extended to all classes and most Europeans.

That we still view race in this fashion should not blind us to the fact that it has not always been so, and that our perception of race is the product of social negotiation and conflict.

* * * *

If much of this history of race has been forgotten, so, too, has much of the history of the challenge to racism and to racial categories.  Until relatively recently, radicals challenging inequality and oppression did so in the name, not of particular identities, but of a universalism that fuelled the great radical movements that have shaped the modern world – from anti-colonial struggles to the movements for women’s suffrage to the battles for gay rights.

That universalism was perhaps best expressed in the Haitian Revolution of 1791, which revealed both the necessity for, and the shortcomings of, the Enlightenment. It was one of the three major revolutions of the eighteenth century, but one which, when compared to the place that the American and French Revolutions occupy in our culture, is barely remembered.

Yet, it was through the Haitian Revolution, in which the slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue dismantled their chains and declared an independent nation, that the emancipatory logic of Enlightenment universalism was pushed much further than many Enlightenment thinkers desired or intended.

The French revolutionaries who overthrew the old regime in 1789 did so in the name of the “Rights of Man”. But the National Assembly in Paris decreed that those rights did not apply to the colonies, ensuring, as historian Laurent Dubois sardonically notes, that “the colonies were safe from the dangers of universalism”. Slavery was maintained, as was colonial rule. 

It was the 12-year-long revolution that transformed the meaning of universal rights, forcing the French to abolish slavery. The insurrectionists compelled French revolutionaries to take seriously their own revolutionary ideals.

In the debate over the Enlightenment, supporters and critics both present it as a peculiarly European phenomenon. For one, a demonstration of the greatness of Europe; for the other, a reminder that its ideals are tainted by racism and colonialism. Both miss the importance of the non-European world in shaping many of the ideals we associate with the Enlightenment. It was through the struggles of those denied equality and liberty by the elites in Europe and America, both within and in the colonies, that ideas of universalism were invested with meaning.

The consequence of historical amnesia about these struggles and traditions is to erase universalism as a global project and as a tool of social transformation, a tool at the heart of struggles for social justice. Instead, universalism, and Enlightenment ideals, come to be rejected as “white” or Eurocentric philosophies. The irony is that hostility to universalism is also rooted in European philosophies, but deeply reactionary ones.

If radicals challenging inequality and oppression did so in the name of  universalism, nevertheless from the earliest days of resistance to racism and colonialism, there were movements rooted in a racial or identitarian viewpoint, from nineteenth-century “Back to Africa” campaigns to Garveyism and Negritude in the twentieth century. It is important to recognize this because contemporary identity politics is often seen as something new that has suddenly erupted on the scene. The real story is of identitarian strands, which had long been relatively marginal, becoming increasingly dominant in the postwar world.

Such movements were not just relatively marginal, they were also often deeply reactionary.  Marcus Garvey, for instance, opposed “race-mixing” and regarded the Klu Klux Klan as “better friends of the race” than any other whites. Leopold Senghor, one of the founders of Negritude, saw black and white forms of thinking as distinct. “European reasoning is analytical, discursive”, he wrote, “Negro-African reasoning is intuitive”.

Such arguments drew fierce criticism from figures like Frederick Douglass, Claude McKay, Pauli Murray and Frantz Fanon. Fanon, for instance, was a close friend of Aimé Césaire, a founder of Negritude, but also opposed to the movement. “I am not”, he insisted, “the Slave of the history that dehumanised my ancestors.”

So, how did identitarian strands they become dominant? There are many reasons. One is something I have already touched upon: the contradiction between Enlightenment ideals and the reality of racism and colonialism. If Europe was responsible for the subjugation of more than half the world, many asked, what worth could there be in its political and moral ideas, which at best had had failed to prevent that subjugation, at worst had provided its intellectual grounding? Non-Europeans, the critics argued, had to develop their own ideas, beliefs and values rooted in their own cultures and histories. These arguments would lay the ground for what we now call the radical politics of identity.

A second major reason was the emergence, in the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust, of culture rather than race as the lens through which discussions of human differences and similarities were refracted.  In the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust, racial ideas that had dominated the prewar world became discredited. Racism did not, of course, disappear. But where ideas of racial superiority, and of white supremacy, had been, in the prewar world, not just socially acceptable but largely uncontested within elite circles, now ideas of racial equality came to occupy the moral high ground.

In the early twentieth century the German American anthropologist Franz Boas and his circle of students, that included such stellar names as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, had transformed concepts of race and culture. Influenced by both German Romanticism and liberal egalitarianism, and repelled by racial science, Boas took the vision of a plurality of separate, authentic cultures, developed at the turn of the eighteenth century by the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder and turned it into an anthropological concept, a concept that eventually came to underly postwar ideas of multiculturalism and ethnic pluralism. It was a vision of cultures as fixed self-contained units; of every individual as belonging to a distinct culture, within which all share a common and unique set of references about the world; of every culture as defined by its unique history and heritage; of humanity as divided into discrete groups and shaped more by its differences than by its commonalities.

It is a vision of culture functionally equivalent to that of race except in viewing the essence of a people as rooted in history rather than in biology. The ideas of cultural pluralism helped dismantle old ideas of racial difference. But they also carried with them many of the ghosts of racial thinking.  The embrace of pluralism became intermixed with essentialist notions of culture and identity. Boas, and his intellectual descendants, helped construct the bridge over which the ghosts of racial thinking were smuggled into the body of cultural pluralism in the postwar world.

A third, and perhaps most important, reason for the growth of identitarian viewpoints has been the intensification of what we might call social pessimism. Radical universalism was rooted in the belief that it was possible to build movements of solidarity that could overcome the fissures of race and identity, movements that could radically transform society. That belief has ebbed over the past half century.  The Keynesian postwar order has eroded and given way to the era of “neoliberalism”: the unleashing of free-market economics, deregulation and globalization, the creation of more atomised and unequal societies. Wider social movements and radical struggles have disintegrated.  The labour movement and trade unions have been gravely weakened. The left has lost influence.  The possibilities of radical social transformation have seemed to fade. And social conversations about politics and class have given way to increasingly fraught exchanges about culture and identity.

As hopes for social change have eroded, many have been led to cling ever more fiercely to own identities as places of refuge. Through these changes the meaning of belongingness and of solidarity transformed. An important distinction historically has been that between the inward-looking “binding” politics of identity, and the outward-looking “bridging” politics of solidarity. The former mobilizes by emphasizing shared membership of a particular identity, be that gender, sexuality, race or nation. The politics of solidarity also stresses collective endeavour, but views commonality as emerging not from particular identities but out of a shared set of values and beliefs, and the struggles to win acceptance for those values and beliefs. The distinction is not always clear-cut – elements of both co-exist in many forms of collective politics. It is, however, the politics of solidarity that has crumbled over the past three decades as radical movements have declined and the power of organized labour drained away. For many today, the only form of collective politics that seems possible is that rooted in identity.

Identities are, of course, of great significance to all of us. They give each of us a sense of ourselves, of our grounding in the world and of our relationships to others. Politics, though, is a means, or should be a means, of taking us beyond the constricted sense of identity given to each of us by the specific circumstances of our lives and the particularities of personal experiences. Today, increasingly it is not that our identities are defined by our values and beliefs but rather what we imagine to be our identities that defines our values and beliefs. What we are defines what we should cherish or value or believe.

And this has inevitably shaped the character of antiracism, prompting a shift from campaigns for material change to demands for symbolic gestures and representational fairness. The arguments against cultural appropriation, the demand that people “stay in their lane”, the claim that conservative or reactionary people of colour, whether Suella Braverman or Kanye West are “betraying” their race, that they are not really black or Asian but straining to be white – all show how antiracism has too often become reduced to a kind of public performance or finger-wagging at white people or, at best, an attempt to make the unfairness a little less unfair.

* * * *

Consider a movement like Black Lives Matter. For some, the movement represents a critical reawakening of antiracist consciousness and of black self-expression. For others, it is a divisive organization that betrays the legacy of the 1960s civil rights struggle. I see it as neither but rather a movement, and a debate around it, that has given voice to the tension between a desire to create more universal perspectives and a retreat into a narrow, racialized sense of identity.  It shows, too, how the dominance of the politics of identity betrays those most in need of solidarity.

“We see ourselves as part of the global Black family” reads a key BLM statement of belief. The trouble is, the “global Black family” is a confected unity that serves only to obscure divisions with black communities and makes the creation of solidarity across racial lines more difficult.  

A good illustration of this is the New Orleans sanitation strike of 2020. In May of that year, sanitation workers in the city walked out on strike because of poverty wages, lack of safety equipment and the refusal to recognize unions. Virtually all the workers were black. So were the employers.  New Orleans had outsourced sanitation to a black-owned company as part of the city’s antiracist drive. But “Black Lives Matter” meant something different on the two sides of the picket line, the two sides of the class divide. “Black exploitation”, as one black union leader put it, “does not end because the company is black”.

The sanitation workers came out on strike three weeks before George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis; the murder that energised a global movement behind the banner of Black Lives Matter.  They remained on strike throughout the swathe of protests that swept the nation and the world that summer, and brought racism to the forefront of global consciousness. Yet, despite that being the year of Black Lives Matter, the black sanitation workers were forced back to work by the September, having won virtually none of their demands. The black employers won, the black workers lost.

It’s a reminder that to assume that there exists a common set of interests, or an identity, that binds together black people, is to reinforce the power of the black elites and to diminish the voices of black workers. It is to conflate the necessity of challenging racism with the building of racial solidarity. Pursuing the second aim makes achieving the first more difficult. Why? Because it creates a sense of unity where there is none – as between black workers and black employers. And it creates obstacles in establishing solidarity across racial lines because solidarity becomes increasingly understood in racial or identitarian terms.

* * * *

The rise of identity politics has transformed not just notions of who we are, and how we relate to each other, but also our conception of what racism is. Racism has become reframed as “white privilege”, a concept that has become entrenched and almost unquestioned among antiracists and on the left. Yet, it is a questionable concept.

Underlying the white privilege thesis are two basic claims. First, that “white” is a useful category in which to place everyone from Elon Musk to a cleaner in a Tesla factory. And, second, that being in such a category imbues people with privileges denied to those not in that category.

The idea that all those deemed white have a common identity and set of interests which may conflict with those of non-whites is, of course, an argument long deployed by racists.  It’s a claim that most antiracists would reject, recognizing that the interests of white factory workers or shelf-stackers are not the same as those of white bankers or business owners, but are far closer to those of black factory workers or Asian shelf-stackers.

Why ignore this, then, when it comes to the question of “white privilege”? Because, many argue, white people do not have to endure the discrimination suffered by non-whites by virtue of their skin colour. At one level, this is true. Projecting this in terms of “white privilege” is, however, flawed.

First, it is not a “privilege” not to have to face discrimination or bigotry; it should be the norm. To describe as a “privilege” the fact that one is not being denied equal treatment is to turn the struggle for justice on its head.

Second, the concept of white privilege fails to distinguish between “not being discriminated against because of one’s skin colour” and “having immunity from discrimination or bigotry because one is white”. Many whites, because of privileges afforded by wealth and class, do have immunity against discrimination. But many others, who are poor or working class, do not. Their experiences of state authority is often similar to that of non-whites.

Consider the issue of incarceration rates in America. America locks up more of its citizens than any other nation, and has hugely increased the rate of incarceration since the 1970s.  African Americans have disproportionately borne the brunt of the brutality – they are five times as likely to be imprisoned as white Americans.  Many view mass incarceration as “the new Jim Crow”, most notably Michelle Alexander who adopted that phrase for the title of an influential book.

Yet, the issue is more complex. Studies show that at any given income level there is little difference in the incarceration rates of whites and black but that there are huge differences between income levels – unsurprisingly the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be imprisoned, whatever your race.  

Studies also show that what has risen dramatically since the 1970s has been the incarceration rate among high school dropouts, while the rate among college graduates (black and white) has declined. In 2017, one study notes, “a white high school dropout was about fifteen times more likely to be in prison than a black college graduate”.

The reason for the rise in incarceration is the emergence of a system of militarised policing to contain poor and working class areas. Because of racism, African Americans are disproportionately poor and working class, so they are disproportionately more likely to be imprisoned. But having a white skin does not necessarily provide materially significant “privilege” against imprisonment, whereas being wealthy may do so even if black.

Similarly with an even more explosive issue: that of the disproportionate killings of African Americans by US police; the issue that led to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement Again, the figures are stark: black Americans are at least twice as likely to be killed by police as whites. Paradoxically, though, that disparity should not be seen simply in racial terms. Police violence is, again unsurprisingly, correlated with poverty – the poorer a neighbourhood, the greater the risk of an individual being killed by the police. More than half of those killed by US police are white.  Studies show that someone poor and white is more likely to be killed by the police or face imprisonment than wealthy African Americans.  

What we are talking about, in other words, is a complex relationship between race and class. Mass incarceration and police brutality are the products not of racism as such but of the militarised policing and control of the poorest sections of American society, black and white. The reason they disproportionately impact African Americans is not because simply racist policy but because African Americans are disproportionately working class and poor. That certainly is largely the product of racism. But if we see police brutality and mass incarceration simply as the product of racism then we fail to understand the real reasons for such brutality and incarceration rates.

We also ignore many of the victims of such brutality. I often ask my audiences if they can name African American victims of police violence. And most audiences can name half a dozen or more – George Floyd, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor, Tyre Nichols, and so on. Then I ask how many white people killed by US  police over the past decade they can name. The answer usually is none. And that despite the fact that, in absolute numbers, far more whites are killed by the police than blacks. 

Anyone who makes these kinds of arguments knows the pushback from critics that one is “denying racism” or falling into the trap of “class reductionism”. In fact, given that the majority of African Americans – or blacks and Asians in Britain – are working class, to ignore the question of class when addressing the issue of racism is to ignore the needs and experiences of the majority of people who face racism. Indeed, the needs and aspirations of working class blacks or Asians are often closer to those of working class whites than to those of middle class blacks or Asians. Yet the categories we use to think about social relations often obscure those commonalities. We tend to think of minorities as belonging to almost classless “communities”, whereas “class” is something applied primarily to white populations. It’s a perspective that ignores social divisions within minority groups while also racialising class distinctions.

* * * *

The other side of the breakdown of the radical universalist tradition, and the triumph of essentialist notions of identity, is the embrace of “white identity”. It has become a means of rebranding racism in identitarian terms.

The marginalization of the working class over the past half century has been the product largely of economic, social and political changes – the erosion of trade union power, the transformation of social democratic parties away from traditional working class constituencies, the growth of inequality, the atomization of society.  

But the very decline of the economic and political power of the working class has helped obscure the economic and political roots of social problems. And as culture has become the medium through which social issues are refracted, so many within the working class have also come to see their problems in cultural terms. They, too, have turned to the language of identity to express their discontent. Class has come to be seen not as a political but a cultural, even racial, attribute. Hence the notion of the “white working class”, in which whiteness often seems more important than class.

All this has opened the door to the identity movements of the far right which link a reactionary politics of identity, rooted in hostility to migrants and Muslims, to economic and social policies that once were the staple of the left: defence of jobs, support for the welfare state, opposition to austerity. The result is a new kind of mass politics and the refashioning of the original reactionary politics of identity for a new age.

At the same time, many far right tropes, such as the “Great Replacement”, a conspiracy theory about the elites replacing indigenous Europeans with immigrants, and calls to resist the loss of the European “homeland”, have become common currency in mainstream conservative discussions. The novelist Lionel Shriver believes that white Europeans are being forced “to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired”. Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator, and one of Britain’s leading conservatives, fears that “London has become a foreign country” because “‘white Britons’ are now in a minority”’. He believes, too, that soon “the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.”

The irony is that Murray and Shriver, like many conservatives, are fierce critics of identity politics. Except when that identity happens to be white. The mainstreaming of identity politics has allowed conservatives to give racism a new legitimacy by normalising “white identity”, while at the same time criticising the very politics they are embracing.

* * * *

The concept of race emerged as the medium through which could be understood many of the contradictions of modernity. Most importantly, it made sense of, and provided a justification for, the persistence of inequalities and enslavement in societies that had proclaimed their fidelity to equality.

The most cogent, deep-seated, far-reaching challenge to racial ideas came through the radical universalist tradition. A tradition that included such disparate, and politically distinct, figures as Frederick Douglass and WEB Du Bois, Sylvia Pankhurst and CLR James, Pauli Murray and James Baldwin.

What linked such diverse leaders and activists is an insistence on the universal application of equality and a desire to build solidarity across the fissures of race and identity. It is a tradition that challenged both racism and the racialization of people; that is, both the practice of discrimination and the imposition of racial categories on people, often as a means of justifying such discrimination.

The erosion of that tradition has created a social space that has come to be filled by identity politics.  It has left us in a paradoxical space, in which our moral abhorrence of racism too often expresses itself through an obsession with putting people into racial, cultural and other identitarian boxes. That is the paradox we need to untangle. The lesson that explodes from the histories both of race and of antiracism is that we cannot challenge racism by reinforcing racial categories. “My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values”, as Fanon put it.

Yet, thanks to the wider social, political and economic shifts that have led to the rise of social pessimism and the death of radical universalism, that is precisely what today we too often seek to do. Untangling that paradox requires us not just to rethink differently about racism and antiracism but also to confront the social pessimism that has led us to where we are; to reconstitute what I have called the radical universalist tradition but in new forms that speaks to our age.