Author Archives: Kenan Malik

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

FROM ANTI-RACISM TO PSYCHOBABBLE

July 14, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the degeneration of anti-racism into ‘unconscious bias’ training, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Hagia Sophia.) It was published on 12 July 2020, under the headline ‘Enough of the psychobabble. Racism is not something to fix with therapy’. Are you racist? And, if so, how would I know? I used to think that a good gauge may be whether you call me a ‘Paki’, or assault me because of my skin […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: anti-racism, anti-racist training, black lives matter, elisabeth lasch-quinn, iat, implicit association test, police killings, police racism, racism, sivanandan, stop and search, therapy, unconscious bias, unconscious bias training

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #74

July 12, 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. . China forces birth control on Uighurs to suppress populationAssociated Press, 29 June 2020 The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

POLITICIANS, VOTERS AND THE VALUES GAP

July 7, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the values gap between voters and politicians, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 5 July 2020, under the headline ‘What are politicians for if they can’t change public opinion?’ ‘We look towards the other England and wonder how it could be so provincial, so backward, so completely out of step with the times. And then we turn our backs on it… That is the really alarming thing about this national division.’ That might have been […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Politics • Tags: british politics, conservative party, labour party, social liberalism, values gap, working class

EVERTON WEEKES AND THE PASSING OF AN ERA

July 4, 2020 by Kenan Malik

To the outsider, cricket is a bafflingly genteel game. But those who know the game, know also that few sports so seethe with political tension. In the nineteenth century, MCC Secretary Lord Harris called cricket ‘the building block of Empire’. As governor of Bombay in the 1890s, Harris introduced cricket to India to teach ‘moral lessons to the masses’. In the twentieth century it became a vehicle for forging anti-imperialist consciousness and a sense of national pride. And nowhere more […]

Categories: Sport • Tags: beyond a boundary, clr james, cricket, everton weeeks, three ws, west indian cricket

THE NEED TO TRANSFORM THE IMMIGRATION MINDSET

June 30, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the fundamental problem with the way British officials view immigration, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 28 June 2020, under the headline ‘That Clayton Barnes is still not a citizen shows the ongoing cruelty of ‘hostile environment’. Clayton Barnes came to Britain from Jamaica in 1959. He spent a lifetime in this country, working, paying taxes, raising a family. He was in his mind British, as he was in the eyes of his family, his […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, clayton barnes, colin yeo, hostile environment, immigration policy, priti patel, windrush scandal

THE EPIC OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

June 27, 2020 by Kenan Malik

José Clemente Orozco, along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, is one of the triumvirate of Mexican muralists deeply influential on 20th century art. Orozco was not as fine a painter as Rivera, but there is a greater ambiguity in his work. The Epic of American Civilization is probably his most celebrated work. It was commissioned by Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, after recommendation by two of its art historians, Artemas S Packard and Churchill P Lathrop. Painted between 1932 […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: art, dartmouth college, free speech, jose clemente orozco, mexican art, murals, the epic of american civilization, usa

CULTURE WARS CAN MAKE YOU BLIND TO SOCIAL CHANGE

June 23, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on how the fog of culture wars can obscure the degree to which societies have become socially liberal, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 21 June 2020, under the headline ‘Culture wars risk blinding us to just how liberal we’ve become in the past decades’. ‘Prime minister Boris Johnson stirs culture war over Churchill statue.’ So ran a recent New York Times headline. The Washington Post agreed. As ‘counter protesters’ took to the streets to ‘protect’ statues and as controversy […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: black lives matter, british politics, culture wars, immigration, racism, social liberalism, statues, usa, working class

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #73

June 21, 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. . Shouting into the institutional voidGeorge Packer, The Atlantic, 5 June 2020 The urban unrest of the mid-to-late 1960s was more intense than the days and nights of protest since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman. More people died then, more buildings were gutted, more businesses were ransacked. But those years had […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

RACISM IS A PROBLEM, WHITE PEOPLE ARE NOT

June 16, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on racism and ‘white privilege’, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 14 June 2020, under the headline ”White privilege’ is a distraction, leaving racism and power untouched’. The transformation has been bewilderingly swift. Six years ago, most Americans thought that police killings of black suspects were ‘isolated events’. Now, three out of four accept that there exists a systemic problem. Support for Black Lives Matter has risen more in the past two weeks than over the past two years. And […]

Categories: Class, International, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, black lives matter, identity politics, police killings, police racism, racism, usa, white guilt, white privilege, working class

IDENTITY POLITICS: THE INTERVIEW

June 13, 2020 by Kenan Malik

Last year, I gave an interview to the philosopher Stine Jensen, for a series she was making for the Dutch TV company Human on the politics of identity called Dus Ik Volg (‘So I Follow’). The programme in which I appear is broadcast this Sunday, and here’s a video of the whole of my interview uncut (including the coughing fit…).

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: identity politics

A HUMAN NECESSITY NOT A PROFIT-MAKING MACHINE

June 9, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the dysfunctional pharmaceutical market, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 7 June 2020, under the headline ‘If drug firms take public funds they must make their finds available to all’. ‘It’s tragic that we won’t have a vaccine ready for this epidemic,’ Peter Hotez told a US congressional committee in March. Tragic, because we could possibly already have had one. Hotez is director of the Center for Vaccine Development at the Texas Children’s Hospital. In 2016, he and his team […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: astrazeneca, cepi, coronavirus, gavi, global south, jenner institute, just treatment, market ideology, medical research, msf, nationalisation, oxford university, peter hotez, pharmaceutical companies, sars, vaccine nationalism, vaccines, wellcome trust, world health organization