racial 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

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

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

WHY BOTH SIDES ARE WRONG IN THE RACE DEBATE

March 4, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Is race a biological reality? Or is it a social construction? It is a debate that shows no sign of being resolved. The more that we know of the genetics of human differences, ironically, the more fractious the debate seems to get, and the more entrenched the various positions seem to be. The latest issue of the magazine American Scientist contains a review by the biologist Jan Sapp of two books that insist that race has no biological validity. Sapp agrees. ‘The […]

Categories: Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, cavalli-sforza, ernst mayr, genetics, jerry coyne, jon entine, population genetics, race realism, racial categories, racial science, sally satel, scientific classification

THE TROUBLE WITH RACE: SCIENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF RACIAL CATEGORIES

March 14, 2011 by Kenan Malik

I gave a talk last week on ‘Why both sides are wrong in the race debate’ at a conference hosted by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. For the full argument (not just about the science, but also the history and politics of race) see my book Strange Fruit. THE PROBLEM FOR SO-CALLED RACE REALISTS TODAY IS THE VERY OPPOSITE OF that for nineteenth century racial scientists. Then racial scientists ‘knew’ the significance of race but could find no way […]

Categories: Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: genetics, medical research, racial categories, racial science, scientific classification