Kenan Malik

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

BLACK TO BAME

July 28, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on the ways we categorise people, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short tribute to Paulette Wilson.) It was published on 26 July 2020, under the headline ‘Don’t call me BAME. We need a new political language.’ ‘I hate being described’ as one, tweeted Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Sunder Katwala, founder of the thinktank British Future, doesn’t identify as one. And last week Coventry’s Belgrade theatre promised never to use the description again. What they are all talking about is […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: bame, black identity, crime, marian fitzgerald, racial categories, racism, school exclusions, statistical racism

SAX IN A PIPE

July 25, 2020 by Kenan Malik

Almost by accident, the German musician and sculptor Armin Küpper came across a set of huge gas pipes. Yelling into them, he discovered the beauty of natural delay and reverb. So, he returned with his sax, and later with a guitar – and a new genre of call and response was born. The sounds he creates, and the accompaniment of the perfect-pitch echo, is quite extraordinary. Küpper has posted a series of YouTube videos of his pipe gigs. Enjoy. .

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: armin kupper, jazz, music

CENSORSHIP AND THE VOICE OF PRIVILEGE

July 21, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the importance of free speech for those without power, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Shamima Begum and British citizenship.) It was published on 19 July 2020, under the headline ‘It’s the powerless who suffer when free speech is threatened’. The cartoon shows a bearded man in paradise, reclining on a couch in a tent, with a virgin on either arm. God pokes his head in. ‘Do you need anything?’ he asks. ‘Yes, […]

Categories: Free Speech, Justice & Liberties • Tags: arab world, cancel culture, censorship, charlie hebdo, free speech, freedom struggles, joking about jihad, naked hattar, privilege

IN PLACE OF HOPE

July 18, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening section to my essay in Prospect on white identity politics. Read the full article in Prospect. ‘White Lives Matter Burnley!’ ran the banner trailed by a plane above the Etihad stadium, Manchester City’s ground, during a match with Burnley in June. Since the Premier League resumed after the coronavirus hiatus, players and officials have ‘taken the knee’ at the start of matches in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement against racism and police brutality. The […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: alain de benoist, black identity, black lives matter, enlightenment, identity politics, nouvelle droite, racial science, racism, universalism, white identity, white working class, working class