Tag: racial science

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

THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF WHITE IDENTITY – THE VIDEO

April 18, 2020 by Kenan Malik

I gave a talk last year on ‘The history and politics of white identity’ to the Literarisches Colloqium Berlin. This is a video of the talk and the discussion afterwards.

Categories: Kenan Malik, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: democracy, enlightenment, haitian revolution, herder, identity politics, immigration, nouvelle droite, racial science, racism, talks, universalism, white identity, working cla

THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF WHITE IDENTITY

March 16, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave to the Literarisches Colloqium Berlin on 5 March 2019. Identity politics is one of the defining – and one of the most divisive – issues of our age. And no identity is more contested or fought over than white identity. For some it is a means of giving voice to a group whose identity has previously been denied. For others it is simply as an expression of racism. The political context […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: black identity, blumenbach, democracy, enlightenment, governor eyre, haitian revolution, herder, identity politics, immigration, immigration controls, imperialism, nouvelle droite, racial science, racism, universalism, white identity, working class

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

ECHOES FROM THE PAST: FEAR OF THE MASSES

August 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

A system in which ‘confidence tricksters, rich men, quacks may be given power by the votes of an electorate composed in great part of mental Peter Pans, whose childishness renders them peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of demagogues and the tirelessly repeated suggestions of the rich men’s papers’. That could have been any number of contemporary commentators, from Richard Dawkins to Andrew Sullivan, expressing their fears about democracy after the Brexit vote in Britain or the rise of Donald Trump […]

Categories: Britain, History, Politics • Tags: aldous huxley, beatrice webb, crowd psychology, democracy, elitism, emile zola, fabians, freud, gustav lebon, liberalism, racial science, vilfred pareto, 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 & Technology • Tags: genetics, race, racial science

BATTLES OVER ANCIENT BONES AND MODERN IDENTITIES

June 24, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Last week a paper in Nature by Rasmussen et al threw new light on the question of the genetic origins of Kennewick Man, a 8,500 year old skeleton whose bones were discovered in July 1996 by two teenagers in the Columbia River, near Kennewick, Washington State, in north-west USA. It was a rare find, nearly a complete skeleton, and one of the oldest human discovered in North America. The bones became the focus of an intense, fractious battle, both scientific and […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, cultural ownership, cultural repariation, david hurst thomas, human remains, identity politics, indigenous culture, kennewick man, nagpra, native americans, racial science, unesco, vine deloria

THERE BE MONSTERS

July 11, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The philosopher John Gray, in his review of my book The Quest for a Moral Compass, claimed that I ‘airbrush, Soviet-style’ all ‘repugnant and troubling elements of rationalism’ that I ‘prefer not to know’ about ‘sleazy side of rationalism’, such as racial science or the history of slavery. It is a strange claim given that the thread that runs through virtually all my work has been the paradoxes of modernity, and the contradictions within rationalism and liberalism. Hence two books of […]

Categories: History, Human, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: apes, blumenbach, buffon, edward tyson, great chain of being, kenan malik's books, linnaeus, racial science, scientific classification

A FAIRY TALE BUT, OH, SO FEEBLE

June 28, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Review of A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade (Penguin) Jews are adapted to capitalism. The Chinese have evolved to be conformist. Iraqis lack the genetic mechanisms necessary for democracy. It is not difficult to find such claims in the darker recesses of the Internet. It is more surprising, though, to find them at the heart of a much-heralded new book by the former science editor of the New York Times. Yet, not only does Nicholas Wade make these claims, they […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: clash of civilizations, gregory clark, nicholas wade, population genetics, racial science

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE DEATH OF GOD

June 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week at the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna. It is part of a series of lectures the Foundation is organising on the ‘Enlightenment and its legacy’. . 1 No Enlightenment philosophe talked of the ‘Death of God’. The ‘Death of God’ is a nineteenth century phrase, which we know of today largely through Nietzsche (though it was not Nietzsche who coined it). ‘God is dead’, as he put it The […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: 1848 revolutions, atheism, christianity, comte, death of god, enlightenment, french revolution, hume, jonathan israel, locke, marxism, morality, nietzsche, positivism, racial science, radical enlightenment, reason, reformation, spinoza

THE FORGOTTEN ROOTS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

May 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This essay is published in the summer issue of New Humanist. The nations of the world, claimed Lord Salisbury in a speech to the Primrose League at the Albert Hall in 1898, were divided into the ‘living’ and the ‘dying’. The ‘living’ were the ‘white’ nations – the European powers, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ‘dying’ comprised the rest of the world. ‘The living nations’, Salisbury claimed, ‘will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’ and from […]

Categories: Britain, History • Tags: britain, first world war, germany, imperialism, opium wars, racial science, racism

FROM THE VAULTS: DARKNESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY

March 4, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I am in the death-throes of finishing a book, so have little time to tend Pandaemonium. Rather than abandon it, however, I thought I would raid the vaults, as it were, for old material that I have not published here. Given that it is book-writing that is keeping me away from blog-writing, it seemed only appropriate that I republish some old book reviews. And given thecurrent controversy over Napoleon Chagnon, both over his new book Noble Savages, and his election […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, derek freeman, margaret mead, napoleon chagnon, racial science, scientific bias, sociobiology, yanomamo

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 & Technology • 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 & Technology • Tags: blumenbach, buffon, enlightenment, hume, linnaeus, locke, race, racial categories, racial science