Author Archives: Kenan Malik

MORE THAN ONE WAY OF BEING REACTIONARY

May 14, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate over Kanye West’s comments about Donald Trump and about slavery, was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the new working class.) It was published in the Observer, 13 May 2018, under the headline ‘Are rightwing black people traitors to the cause? Of course they’re not’. ‘I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny/ And what do I do? Act more stupidly’, rapped Kanye West on […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, donald trump, kanye west, race traitor, racism, slavery, ta-nehisi coates

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #38

May 11, 2018 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . Why replacing politicians with experts is a reckless idea David Runciman, Guardian, 1 May 2018 Epistocracy remains the reckless idea. There are two dangers in particular. The first is that we set the bar too high in politics by insisting on looking for the best thing to do. Sometimes it is more […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

THE MUDDLE OVER THE ‘GAY CAKE’

May 7, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the row in debate about Ashers, the Northern Irish bakers that refused to make a cake with a pro-gay marriage slogan, was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the changing attitudes of left and right towards the House of Lords.) It was published in the Observer, 6 May 2018, under the headline ‘The ‘gay cake’ fight: why the bakers had a right to refuse this order’. […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: ashers, censorship, discrimination, equality, free speech, gay cake, gay marriage, gay rights, northern ireland, peter tatchell, religious freedom

ALTAB ALI AND BRICK LANE, 1978

May 5, 2018 by Kenan Malik

40 years ago, on 4 May 1978, a Bengali garment worker in East London was brutally murdered by racist thugs. It was but the latest in a series of racist attacks on Asians, at a time when racism in Britain was vicious, visceral and often fatal. Altab Ali’s murder became, however, a spark for new anti-racist mobilization, especially among local Bengali communities. Ten days after the murder, Brick Lane and surrounding areas closed down as 7000 people, mainly Bengalis, marched […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: altar ali, anti-racism, brick lane, britain, racism, tower hamlets

MORALITY, THE LAW AND THE DEATH OF A CHILD

April 30, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay on the Alfie Evans case was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the IAAF’s new regulations on women athletes with elevated testosterone levels.) It was published in the Observer, 29 April 2018, under the headline ‘A court is an unfit place for a case like Alfie Evans and its moral complexity’. It would be difficult not to share the heartbreak of Alfie Evans’ parents. Alfie was a 23-month-old child […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alfie evans, best interests, death, harm, justice system, law, medical ethics, morality

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #37

April 27, 2018 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . RSF Index 2018: Hatred of journalism threatens democracies Reporters Without Borders, April 2018 The climate of hatred is steadily more visible in the Index, which evaluates the level of press freedom in 180 countries each year. Hostility towards the media from political leaders is no longer limited to authoritarian countries such as […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

ELITE RACISM AND THE WORKING CLASS AS ALIBI

April 23, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was my column in the Observer, 22 April 2018. It was published under the headline ‘Elites still use the working class as an excuse for their own prejudices’. The ‘white working class’. It has become, in recent years, almost a synonym for ‘racist’. The belief that racism is a working-class problem, and that many in the white working class voted for Brexit for racist reasons, has become widely accepted among liberals (and not just among liberals). So, where […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, elite, enoch powell, immigration, immigration controls, racism, theresa may, windrush, working class

REMEMBERING THE DEATH OF JOY GARDNER

April 20, 2018 by Kenan Malik

The scandal of the government treatment of the Windrush generation has caused outrage. I have written an essay, for my column in the Observer tomorrow, putting the scandal in the context of the history of elite attitudes to race and immigration in the postwar period. It is worth remembering that there is a long history to the callous, cruel and inhuman treatment of migrants deemed ‘illegal’. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Joy Gardner, killed during […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: britain, immigration, joy gardner, racism

ON THE ASSASSINATION OF KATIE HOPKINS

April 15, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the row over the BBC’s broadcast of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood speech’). It was published in the Observer, 15 April 2018, under the headline ‘Why provocateur Katie Hopkins is the perfect symbol for our tribal age’. I have not seen the play. But I am going to write about it. Which seems an apt metaphor for the current state of […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: free speech, hate speech, immigration, katie hopkins, liberal hypocrisy, the assassination of katie hopkins

A DIFFERENT AMERICAN LANGUAGE

April 13, 2018 by Kenan Malik

Cecil Taylor, the great jazz pianist, died last week. I write ‘jazz pianist’ but he was, in truth, uncategorisable, working in the left-field of free jazz, experimental contemporary music and classical. A great rhapsodic, abstract improviser, his work was always a challenge to orthodoxy as well as to the listener. His piano playing is a complex, improvised sound, highly percussive, ‘eighty-eight tuned drums’, as Val Wilmer put it in her book As Serious as Your Life. He was as influenced […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: cecil taylor, jazz, music

THE LOST LEGACIES OF MALCOLM AND MARTIN

April 9, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on EU moves to reform copyright law). It was published in the Observer, 8 April 2018, under the headline ‘If only we could revive the fruitful tension between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X’. Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead in Memphis by a white segregationist and fugitive, James Earl Ray. Three years earlier, on 21 February 1965, […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: adolph reed, african americans, anti-racism, equality, freedom struggles, identity politics, liberalism, malcom x, martin luther king, racism, usa, working class

PLUCKED FROM THE WEB #36

April 6, 2018 by Kenan Malik

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . The ISIS files Rukmini Callimachi, New York Times, 4 April 2018 The disheveled fighters who burst out of the desert more than three years ago founded a state that was acknowledged by no one except themselves. And yet for nearly three years, the Islamic State controlled a stretch of land that at […]

Categories: Pandaemonium

RELIGIOUS FAITH AND FAITH IN HUMANITY

April 2, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 1 April 2018, under the headline ‘Yes, we’ve lost our faith in God, but we’ve lost our faith in reason too’. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. So runs the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Through those gates walks Dante with his guide Virgil: Now sighs, loud wailing, lamentation Resounded through the starless air, So that I too began to weep. Unfamiliar tongues, horrendous accents, Words of suffering, cries of rage, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: catholicism, christianity, dante, hell, human agency, humanism, inferno, pope francis, religion, the divine comedy, viktor frankl

THE MEANING OF HERITAGE IN AN AGE OF IDENTITY

March 30, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my keynote address to the Interpret Europe conference on ‘Heritage and Identity’ held in Kőszeg, Hungary, 23-26 March 2018. The skeleton was discovered in 1903 at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, in south-west England. He became known as Cheddar Man, and is the oldest almost complete skeleton of Homo sapiens ever found in Britain. In the 1970s, radiocarbon dating suggested that he lived around 10,000 years ago, shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aya sofia, christianity, clash of civilizations, cordoba, cultural diversity, cultural heritage, culture, diversity, enlightenment, hagia sophia, herder, ibn rushd, identity politics, islam, istanbul, multiculturalism, romanticism, unesco

SHOULD OFFENCE BE BANNED? OR HATE?

March 25, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a shorter piece on the necessity of abortion rights). It was published in the Observer, 25 March 2018, under the headline ‘The ‘Nazi pug’: giving offence is inevitable and often necessary in a plural society’. Does making a film of a dog giving a Nazi salute constitute a hate crime? And should high street retailers stock racist and Nazi books? Two questions raised this week […]

Categories: Britain, Free Speech • Tags: anti-racism, anti-semitism, censorship, free speech, hate speech, hope not hate, left, offence, pluralism