adolph reed | Pandaemonium

MORALISING POVERTY AND MISTRANSLATING EQUALITY

February 2, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the problems in the ways we think of poverty and indequality, was my Observer column this week. It was published 29 January 2023, under the headline “Focusing on diversity means we miss the big picture. It’s class that shapes our lives”. “There is no primary poverty left in this country,” Margaret Thatcher told the Catholic Herald in 1978, five months before she became prime minister. “There may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: adolph reed, diversity, individualism, inequality, margaret thatcher, moralising poverty, poverty, walter benn michaels

WHAT DON’T WE TALK OF IN TALKING OF DIVERSITY?

June 18, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the row between Lionel Shriver and Penguin Random House and on what we mean by ‘diversity’, was my Observer column this week. It was published in the Observer, 17 June 2018, under the headline ‘We’re now confusing diversity and equality. Which is our priority?’ What do we mean by diversity? And why is it good – or not? For all the myriad debates about diversity today, such questions are rarely addressed in any depth. The latest hoo-ha […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: adolph reed, conservatism, david lammy, diversity, equality, immigration, inequality, lionel shriver, mslexia, oxford university, penguin random house, racism, sivanandan

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

APPROPRIATING CONFUSION

September 20, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The radical magazine Current Affairs recently published an essay by Briahna Joy Gray critical of critics of the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’. Gray was particularly disparaging of an essay that I had published in the New York Times. I enjoy Current Affairs, and it often carries insightful articles. I thought, however, that Gray’s piece, while raising some important points, was confused and tendentious in its criticisms. Current Affairs refused me a reply; I did not need a right of reply, the editor Nathan Robinson […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: adolph reed, chris ofili, chuck berry, cultural appropriation, dana schutz, elvis presley, inequality, mf husain, racism

GILROY AND REED ON RACE, CLASS & CULTURE

July 6, 2017 by Kenan Malik

I have written much recently on questions of race and culture, as reflected through issues ranging from adoption to cultural appropriation to patriotism to diversity to identity. The common theme has been the way that those who call themselves ‘progressive’ or ‘anti-racist’ often draw upon ideas that are deeply regressive and rooted in racial ways of thinking; and that the consequences of identity politics and of concepts such as cultural appropriation is to bring about not social justice but the empowerment […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: adolph reed, anti-racism, black culture, black identity, class politics, cultural appropriation, hip hop, identity politics, paul gilroy, race, racism