Tag: racism

ON BEING WHITE AND ON BEING WORKING CLASS

October 20, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate about the “white working class”, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 18 October 2020, under the headline “Being white won’t hold boys back. Being working class just might”. White, working-class boys fare badly at school. About that, almost everyone is agreed. More contested is the reason why. Last week, the first witnesses gave evidence to the commons select committee on education’s investigation into “Left Behind White Pupils From Disadvantaged Backgrounds”. The hearing made […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Race & Immigration • Tags: brexit, education, identity politics, inequality, left behind, racism, schools, white privilege, white working class, working class

FROM PETERLOO TO THE MANGROVE NINE

October 13, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Steve McQueen’s new film Mangrove and “black history”, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the public being more liberal than the government on immigration.) It was published on 11 October 2020, under the headline “Mangrove isn’t simply a ‘black story’, but central to our country’s history”. “It’s quintessentially a piece of British history. It is about British citizens who dealt with injustice and triumph.” So says director Steve McQueen about his new film, Mangrove, which […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Race & Immigration • Tags: black history, black history month, bristol bus boycott, british history, clr james, ep thompson, haitian revolution, identity politics, mangrove, mangrove nine, paul stephenson, peterloo, police racism, racism, steve mcqueen, the black jacobins, the making of the english working class

WELCOME TO FLATLAND

October 6, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on the shallowness of cultural and political debate, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Home Office plans for asylum seekers.) It was published on 4 October 2020, under the headline “Welcome to Flatland, where shallow appeal ousts substance and reason”. Four international art galleries decide to “postpone” a controversial exhibition. Donald Trump and Joe Biden take part in what has aptly been called a “shitshow” of a presidential election debate. Celebrity activist Laurence Fox […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: black lives matter, donald trump, joe biden, laurence fox, philip guston, polarisation, presidential debate, racism, reclaim, usa

WORTHY BOTH OF CELEBRATION AND CONDEMNATION

September 22, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate about the legacy of David Hume, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) It was published on 20 September 2020, under the headline “David Hume was a complex man. Erasing his name is too simplistic a gesture”. “Learn, Mr Hume, to prize the blessings of Liberty and Education, for… had you been born and bred a slave, your Genius, whatever you may think of it, would never […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: david hume, david hume tower, edinburgh university, enlightenment, jonathan israel, racism, radical enlightenment, slavery

‘SCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THE SKY

September 19, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. A shorter version of this article appears in the Observer, 20 September 2020 It is one of the defining moments in the story both of rock and of black expression. Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock 1969, finishing his set by deconstructing the Star Spangled Banner. A black man on stage, claiming the anthem as his own, stripping it of its reverence, and, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War – in the midst of the song Hendrix recreated the sound of […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: blues, eric clapton, jimi hendrix, mitch mitchell, music, noel redding, racism, rock, usa, woodstock

WHEN MONUMENTS FALL

September 12, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This is the opening section of my essay in the New York Review of Books‘ NYR Daily on the statues debate. Read the full article on NYR Daily. “We stand today at the national center to perform something like a national act—an act which is to go into history.” So said the great nineteenth-century former slave and staunch abolitionist Frederick Douglass at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., in 1876. “That we are here […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: abraham lincoln, black lives matter, boris johnson, confederate statues, edward colston, emancipation memorial, frederick douglass, iconoclasm, racism, statues, toppling statues, winston churchill

HANDING OUT SWEETIES IN THE COMEDY WARS

September 8, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on the debate about BBC comedy being too leftwing, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on protests, persuasion and coercion.) It was published on 6 September 2020, under the headline “Our culture has lost its appetite for risk and making people feel uncomfortable”. “A real comedian – that’s a daring man,” Eddie Waters, an old standup turned evening class tutor, tells a group of would-be comics in Trevor Griffiths’s brilliant, mordant […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: bbc, bernard manning, chris gethard, clapter, comedians, culture wars, geoff norcott, have i got news for you, nish kumar, racism, simon critchley, tim davie, trevor griffiths, wokeness

RACE, CLASS AND WHITE PRIVILEGE: A RESPONSE

August 30, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. The political philosopher Chris Bertram published two posts last week on Crooked Timber, the philosophy and social science blog, the first challenging critiques of the concept of “white privilege”, the second arguing that certain claims about race and class are irrational. As I was one of the targets of these articles (Chris linked to one of my posts as exemplifying the problem, and we had previously debated the issue on Twitter), this is a response. (It has been published on […]

Categories: Class, Philosophy & Ethics, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, chris bertram, inequality, police killings, racism, school exclusions, white identity, white privilege, working class

MIGRANT INVASIONS AND CULTURE WARS

August 18, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate over undocumented Channel migrants , was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Kamala Harris, birtherism and identity.) It was published on 16 August 2020, under the headline ‘Inventing a “migrant invasion” is part of a toxic rhetorical ploy’. It’s a title of which Captain Mainwaring would have been proud: ‘Clandestine Channel Threat Commander‘. The man responsible for saving Britain from the threat of a migrant invasion. If you invent an invasion, […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, channel migrants, colin yeo, immigration policy, paulette wilson, priti patel, racism, undocumented migrants, windrush scandal

FROM RACISM TO WHITE PRIVILEGE

August 15, 2020 by Kenan Malik

John Amaechi, former NBA basketball star, now a psychologist, recently produced a shot video for BBC Bitesize on ‘white privilege’ which has caught a lot of attention. I was asked on Twitter where I disagreed with it which led to a long thread. I am reposting that thread here, cleaned up and turned into paragraphs; I will write a proper essay on this soon, but in the meantime this will have to do. Before starting, can I say that John […]

Categories: Class, Race & Immigration • Tags: adam rothman, barbara j fields, john amaechi, racism, white privilege, working class

HIROSHIMA AND THE MORALITY OF VICTORS

August 11, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 August 2020, under the headline ‘Don’t let the victors define morality – Hiroshima was always indefensible’. ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945. LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who […]

Categories: International, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: a bomb, chester nimitz, curtis lemay, douglas macarthur, eisenhower, harry truman, hiroshima, japan, john dower, manhattan project, martin harwit, nagasaki, nuclear weapons, racism, robert mcnamara, second world war, war crimes, william leahy

ILLUMINATING AND OBSCURING

August 8, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This is a review of Pankaj Mishra’s Bland Fanatics, published in the Observer, 2 August 2020. ‘What is it’, the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth asked rhetorically in 1927, in a preface to his book The Wandering Jews, ‘that allows European states to go spreading civilisation and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?’ Forty years later, as American cities burned while American bombs rained down on Vietnam, James Baldwin made a similar point, though reversing Roth’s formulation. ‘A racist […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: anti-imperialism, bland fanatics, imperialism, liberalism, pankaj mishra, racism, the age of anger

BLAMING THE POOR

August 4, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the history of blaming the poor, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 August 2020, under the headline ‘Illness, obesity, racism; who gets blamed for our crises? The poor of course’. The role of government, the US political scientist Lawrence Mead wrote in his 1986 book Beyond Entitlement, is to ‘persuade [people] to blame themselves’. Mead is the godfather of workfare (schemes that make welfare benefits conditional on the claimant working) and a key proponent […]

Categories: Class, Politics • Tags: african americans, coronavirus, culture, culture of poverty, george orwell, inequality, lawrence mead, obesity, poor, poverty, racism, underserving poor, working class

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

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