race | Pandaemonium

FROM EQUAL RIGHTS TO STAYING IN YOUR LANE

September 24, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on racial categories and social identities, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the Labour Party’s proposal to ban pregnant women from discovering the sex of their unborn child). It was published in the Observer, 23 September 2018, under the headline ‘Racial equality once meant tearing down barriers, not doing a DNA test’. Until about five years ago, Ralph Taylor did not consider himself black. He lived as a white […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: ancestry, anti-racism, cultural appropriation, equality, genealogy, genetic testing, identity politics, race, racial categories, racism, stay in your lane

BACK TO SCHOOL ON RACE AND CLASS

January 7, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 7 January 2018, under the headline ‘In British education, the central issue is class, not ethnicity’. The white working class. It’s a phrase that has become so commonplace that few recognise the sheer oddness, and indeed odiousness, of the concept. It denotes both pity and contempt. On the one hand, it is a description of the ‘left behind’, sections of the population that have lost out through globalisation and deindustrialisation. On the other, […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Race & Immigration • Tags: angela rayner, british politics, Class, education, race, racism, white culture, white working class, working class

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

ECHOES FROM THE PAST: CREATING THE UNDERCLASS

August 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Continuing the series of extracts from my books on the theme of historical fears of the masses and of democracy, this third extract from The Meaning of Race explores the late twentieth century ‘underclass’ debate, and what it tells us about the changing character of the perceptions of race and class. The Meaning of Race was published in 1996 and, to a degree, shows its age. It discusses issues specifically of that time; in the 20 years since, much of […]

Categories: Class, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: charles murray, conservatism, dangerous classes, elitism, liberalism, michael katz, poverty, race, racial science, the bell curve, underclass, working class

ECHOES FROM THE PAST: THE RACIAL VIEW OF CLASS

August 18, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I am publishing through August on Pandaemonium a series of extracts from my books on the theme of historical fears of the masses and of democracy. This second extract (the first is here), from The Meaning of Race, is not about democracy as such but about how the Victorian elite saw class in racial terms (I have not included full references here, but they are in the book). When I wrote The Meaning of Race, I wanted to challenge conventional ways […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: harriet beecher stowe, henry mayhew, kenan malik's books, liberalism, race, racial science, slavery, working class

WHAT DOES SCIENCE TELL US ABOUT RACE?

November 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

I took part last week in a discussion at the Royal Institution in London entitled ‘What does science tell us about race and racism?’. The other participants were geneticist Aoife McLysaght, sociologist Heidi Mirza, and the writer and broadcaster Adam Rutherford, who chaired the event. None of us gave a formal talk as the evening was more a free-flowing conversation. But here are roughly the points I was trying to make about the complex relation between scientific research and the reality […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Race & Immigration, Science • Tags: genetics, race, racial science

THE PROBLEM IS NOT IMMIGRATION. IT’S THE OBSESSION WITH IT.

April 20, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In 2004, David Goodhart wrote an essay called ‘Too Diverse?’ in Prospect magazine, of which he was then editor. Liberals, he suggested, had to face up to a ‘progressive dilemma’. Too much immigration undermined social solidarity, particularly in a welfare state. We had to choose between the two. The essay caused considerable controversy, but became a key point of reference for many communitarian thinkers, both Labour and Conservative. Goodhart, now director of the centre-left think tank Demos, has developed that essay […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, david goodhart, immigration, labour party, multiculturalism, race, racism

THE MAKING OF THE IDEA OF RACE

February 17, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In my last post, on The Enlightenment’s “Race Problem”, I questioned the idea that the modern roots of the idea of race lie in the Enlightenment. The relationship between race and the Enlightenment is, I argued, far more complex than much contemporary discussion allows for. It was the transformation of Enlightenment attitudes through the course of the nineteenth century that helped mutate the eighteenth century discussion of human variety into the nineteenth century obsession with racial difference. This is the […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration, Science • Tags: cuvier, enlightenment, herder, positivism, race, racial science, romanticism, samuel morton, thomas huxley

ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT’S ‘RACE PROBLEM’

February 13, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In an essay this week in New York Times, the philosopher Justin Smith tells the story of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former slave who defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled On the Impassivity of the Human Mind. A dedicatory letter was attached to the dissertation from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who, Smith observes, ‘praised the “natural genius” of Africa, its […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration, Science • Tags: blumenbach, buffon, enlightenment, hume, linnaeus, locke, race, racial categories, racial science

ANCIENT RACE WARS AND MODERN RACE SCIENCE

December 18, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I published last week an extract from my book Strange Fruit which looked at the ‘Kennewick Man’ controversy and at what that controversy told us about contemporary ideas about cultural identity and cultural ownership. The Kennewick Man debate gets also to the heart of another major contemporary controversy: that over the meaning of ‘race’. In this extract from Strange Fruit, I look at how discussions about a 9000-year old skeleton laid bare our understanding (and misunderstanding) of race. My own […]

Categories: Race & Immigration, Science • Tags: anthropology, craniometry, earnest hooton. ainu, human origins, kennewick man, native americans, race, racial categories, racial science

HUMANISM, ANTIHUMANISM AND THE RADICAL TRADITION

November 6, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Back in September, I wrote an essay about Judith Butler and the controversy over her winning the Adorno Prize. It touched off a debate in Pandaemonium, less because of my defence of Butler’s right to win the prize than my criticism of her work and, in particular, of her poststructuralism. I noted then that I have written little directly on Butler’s main theme, gender, but much, in the context of the debate about race, on poststructuralist / postmodernist conceptions of […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, antihumanism, claude levi-strauss, enlightenment, frantz fanon, freedom struggles, holocaust, humanism, imperialism, liberalism, lukacs, marx, marxism, nazism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, race, sartre, theodor adorno, tzvetan todorov, universalism, zygmunt bauman