Author Archives: Kenan Malik

WORTHY BOTH OF CELEBRATION AND CONDEMNATION

September 22, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate about the legacy of David Hume, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) It was published on 20 September 2020, under the headline “David Hume was a complex man. Erasing his name is too simplistic a gesture”. “Learn, Mr Hume, to prize the blessings of Liberty and Education, for… had you been born and bred a slave, your Genius, whatever you may think of it, would never […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: david hume, david hume tower, edinburgh university, enlightenment, jonathan israel, racism, radical enlightenment, slavery

‘SCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THE SKY

September 19, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. A shorter version of this article appears in the Observer, 20 September 2020 It is one of the defining moments in the story both of rock and of black expression. Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock 1969, finishing his set by deconstructing the Star Spangled Banner. A black man on stage, claiming the anthem as his own, stripping it of its reverence, and, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War – in the midst of the song Hendrix recreated the sound of […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: blues, eric clapton, jimi hendrix, mitch mitchell, music, noel redding, racism, rock, usa, woodstock

TURNING INHUMANITY INTO POLICY

September 15, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on what the fire at the Moria detention camp on the island of Lesbos tells us about migrant policy, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short tribute to Toots Hibbert.) It was published on 13 September 2020, under the headline “Moria’s only success has been to turn inhumanity into policy”. A fire rips through a refugee camp. Migrants are blamed for starting it. Outraged locals vent their fury and demand that the migrants be removed. […]

Categories: International, Race & Immigration • Tags: angela merkel, asylum seekers, deterrence, eu, fortress europe, greece, immigration policy, moria, pull factors, refugees

WHEN MONUMENTS FALL

September 12, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This is the opening section of my essay in the New York Review of Books‘ NYR Daily on the statues debate. Read the full article on NYR Daily. “We stand today at the national center to perform something like a national act—an act which is to go into history.” So said the great nineteenth-century former slave and staunch abolitionist Frederick Douglass at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., in 1876. “That we are here […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: abraham lincoln, black lives matter, boris johnson, confederate statues, edward colston, emancipation memorial, frederick douglass, iconoclasm, racism, statues, toppling statues, winston churchill

HANDING OUT SWEETIES IN THE COMEDY WARS

September 8, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on the debate about BBC comedy being too leftwing, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on protests, persuasion and coercion.) It was published on 6 September 2020, under the headline “Our culture has lost its appetite for risk and making people feel uncomfortable”. “A real comedian – that’s a daring man,” Eddie Waters, an old standup turned evening class tutor, tells a group of would-be comics in Trevor Griffiths’s brilliant, mordant […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: bbc, bernard manning, chris gethard, clapter, comedians, culture wars, geoff norcott, have i got news for you, nish kumar, racism, simon critchley, tim davie, trevor griffiths, wokeness

PANDAEMONIUM WHILE WRITING A BOOK

September 6, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This is just a short note to apologize if posting on Pandaemonium is slightly erratic over the next year. I have started work on a new book which unpacks ideas of “whiteness” – white supremacy, white identity, white privilege. More details in due course. But working on a book may mean that posts are a bit more irregular than normal. My apologies, but I hope you continue enjoying what is posted here – and the book, too, when it […]

Categories: Kenan Malik, Pandaemonium

RACE, CLASS AND WHITE PRIVILEGE: A RESPONSE

August 30, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. The political philosopher Chris Bertram published two posts last week on Crooked Timber, the philosophy and social science blog, the first challenging critiques of the concept of “white privilege”, the second arguing that certain claims about race and class are irrational. As I was one of the targets of these articles (Chris linked to one of my posts as exemplifying the problem, and we had previously debated the issue on Twitter), this is a response. (It has been published on […]

Categories: Class, Philosophy & Ethics, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, chris bertram, inequality, police killings, racism, school exclusions, white identity, white privilege, working class

FAIRNESS IS A POLITICAL JUDGMENT, NOT A THING IN ITSELF

August 25, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on algorithms, political judgments and fairness, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 August 2020, under the headline ‘The cruel exams algorithm has laid bare the unfairness at the heart of our schools’. . What children know and too many politicians seem not to: a few years ago, the psychologists Alex Shaw and Kristina Olson ran an experiment in which they told young children about two boys, Dan and Mark, who had cleaned up their […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: algorithms, boris johnson, british politics, education, fairness, michael gove, ofqual, scottish qualifications authority

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #75

August 23, 2020 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . ‘The biggest monster’ is spreading. And it’s not the coronavirus.Apoorva Mandavilli, New York Times, 3 August 2020 Until this year, TB and its deadly allies, H.I.V. and malaria, were on the run. The toll from each disease over the previous decade was at its nadir in 2018, the last year for which data […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

MIGRANT INVASIONS AND CULTURE WARS

August 18, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate over undocumented Channel migrants , was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Kamala Harris, birtherism and identity.) It was published on 16 August 2020, under the headline ‘Inventing a “migrant invasion” is part of a toxic rhetorical ploy’. It’s a title of which Captain Mainwaring would have been proud: ‘Clandestine Channel Threat Commander‘. The man responsible for saving Britain from the threat of a migrant invasion. If you invent an invasion, […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, channel migrants, colin yeo, immigration policy, paulette wilson, priti patel, racism, undocumented migrants, windrush scandal

FROM RACISM TO WHITE PRIVILEGE

August 15, 2020 by Kenan Malik

John Amaechi, former NBA basketball star, now a psychologist, recently produced a shot video for BBC Bitesize on ‘white privilege’ which has caught a lot of attention. I was asked on Twitter where I disagreed with it which led to a long thread. I am reposting that thread here, cleaned up and turned into paragraphs; I will write a proper essay on this soon, but in the meantime this will have to do. Before starting, can I say that John […]

Categories: Class, Race & Immigration • Tags: adam rothman, barbara j fields, john amaechi, racism, white privilege, working class

HIROSHIMA AND THE MORALITY OF VICTORS

August 11, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 August 2020, under the headline ‘Don’t let the victors define morality – Hiroshima was always indefensible’. ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945. LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who […]

Categories: International, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: a bomb, chester nimitz, curtis lemay, douglas macarthur, eisenhower, harry truman, hiroshima, japan, john dower, manhattan project, martin harwit, nagasaki, nuclear weapons, racism, robert mcnamara, second world war, war crimes, william leahy

ILLUMINATING AND OBSCURING

August 8, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This is a review of Pankaj Mishra’s Bland Fanatics, published in the Observer, 2 August 2020. ‘What is it’, the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth asked rhetorically in 1927, in a preface to his book The Wandering Jews, ‘that allows European states to go spreading civilisation and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?’ Forty years later, as American cities burned while American bombs rained down on Vietnam, James Baldwin made a similar point, though reversing Roth’s formulation. ‘A racist […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: anti-imperialism, bland fanatics, imperialism, liberalism, pankaj mishra, racism, the age of anger

BLAMING THE POOR

August 4, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the history of blaming the poor, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 August 2020, under the headline ‘Illness, obesity, racism; who gets blamed for our crises? The poor of course’. The role of government, the US political scientist Lawrence Mead wrote in his 1986 book Beyond Entitlement, is to ‘persuade [people] to blame themselves’. Mead is the godfather of workfare (schemes that make welfare benefits conditional on the claimant working) and a key proponent […]

Categories: Class, Politics • Tags: african americans, coronavirus, culture, culture of poverty, george orwell, inequality, lawrence mead, obesity, poor, poverty, racism, underserving poor, working class

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #74

August 1, 2020 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . The triumph of American idealismAlex Hochuli, Damage, 17 June 2020 What has motivated people from Sweden to New Zealand to take to the streets, for non-Americans to express solidarity with an American cause? We are all horrified to see police brutality and think racism is bad, of course, but that hardly suffices as […]

Categories: Pandaemonium