Tag: 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

THE BIGOTRY AND THE SILENCE

August 20, 2018 by Kenan Malik

As I am away for a couple of weeks, and so am not posting new material on Pandaemonium. I am taking the opportunity to publish some of the shorter pieces from my Observer column that I don’t normally post here. This short piece, the last before normal service resumes on Pandaemonium, was published in the Observer on 24 June 2018 under the headline ‘Persecution of the Roma brings shame on Europe’. ‘The majority [of Roma] should be delivered back to the […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: france, italy, manuel valls, matteo salvini, racism, roma

BANNED IN PAKISTAN

July 20, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This post is about readers in Pakistan. Unfortunately readers in Pakistan won’t actually be able to read this. Which is what this post is about. Pandaemonium is a WordPress site. This week WordPress received an email from the ‘Web Analysis Team’ of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) ‘The webpages hosted on your platform are extremely Blasphemous and are hurting the sentiments of many Muslims around Pakistan’, it read. What particularly seemed to concern the PTA were my articles about Charlie […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: blasphemy, censorship, charlie hebdo, free speech, liberal hypocrisy, pakistan, racism

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

LOOKING CLOSER TO HOME

June 11, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my opening keynote talk at the ‘Dehumanising the Other’ conference at the CEU in Budapest. It was called ‘Looking Closer to Home: How mainstream politics paved the way for the demonization of migrants’. A shorter version of the talk was published as the Sunday essay in the Observer on 10 June 2018. In October 2013, a ship carrying migrants sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Some 300 people drowned. It was not the first […]

Categories: International, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: africa, britain, emmanuel macron, european union, far right, fortress europe, greece, immigration, italy, lesbos, liberalism, populism, racism, theresa may, victor orban, windrush generation

MORE THAN ONE WAY OF BEING REACTIONARY

May 14, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate over Kanye West’s comments about Donald Trump and about slavery, was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the new working class.) It was published in the Observer, 13 May 2018, under the headline ‘Are rightwing black people traitors to the cause? Of course they’re not’. ‘I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny/ And what do I do? Act more stupidly’, rapped Kanye West on […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, donald trump, kanye west, race traitor, racism, slavery, ta-nehisi coates

ALTAB ALI AND BRICK LANE, 1978

May 5, 2018 by Kenan Malik

40 years ago, on 4 May 1978, a Bengali garment worker in East London was brutally murdered by racist thugs. It was but the latest in a series of racist attacks on Asians, at a time when racism in Britain was vicious, visceral and often fatal. Altab Ali’s murder became, however, a spark for new anti-racist mobilization, especially among local Bengali communities. Ten days after the murder, Brick Lane and surrounding areas closed down as 7000 people, mainly Bengalis, marched […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: altar ali, anti-racism, brick lane, britain, racism, tower hamlets

ELITE RACISM AND THE WORKING CLASS AS ALIBI

April 23, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was my column in the Observer, 22 April 2018. It was published under the headline ‘Elites still use the working class as an excuse for their own prejudices’. The ‘white working class’. It has become, in recent years, almost a synonym for ‘racist’. The belief that racism is a working-class problem, and that many in the white working class voted for Brexit for racist reasons, has become widely accepted among liberals (and not just among liberals). So, where […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, elite, enoch powell, immigration, immigration controls, racism, theresa may, windrush, working class

REMEMBERING THE DEATH OF JOY GARDNER

April 20, 2018 by Kenan Malik

The scandal of the government treatment of the Windrush generation has caused outrage. I have written an essay, for my column in the Observer tomorrow, putting the scandal in the context of the history of elite attitudes to race and immigration in the postwar period. It is worth remembering that there is a long history to the callous, cruel and inhuman treatment of migrants deemed ‘illegal’. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Joy Gardner, killed during […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: britain, immigration, joy gardner, racism

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

THINKING ALLOWED ON THE WHITE WORKING CLASS

March 2, 2018 by Kenan Malik

. This is a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme on ‘the white working class’ , in which I took part with Gurminder Bhambra and Noam Gidron. . The painting is ‘The Workers’ by Walker Scott.

Categories: Class, Politics • Tags: brexit, donald trump, identity politics, racism, white working class, working class

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

THE ART & POLITICS OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

December 8, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The latest issue of Art Review carries, under the headline ‘The truth about “cultural appropriation”‘, an edited version of my recent talk on cultural appropriation at London’s Rich Mix. Here is an extract: One of the key arguments of many such critics is that one speaks through one’s identity; that one speaks, as writer Nesrine Malik has put it, ‘as a’: ‘as a woman’, ‘as a Muslim’, ‘as an immigrant’. And those who are not ‘as a’ must take their cue […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: amiri baraka, cultural appropriation, culture, dana schutz, emmett till, henry taylor, identity politics, kamila shamsie, racism

LESS A DEBATE THAN POLITICAL TROLLING

December 3, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of an article published in the Observer, 3 December2017, under the headline ‘When crude tweets set the global agenda we are surely in a new age of politics’. The most powerful leader in the world tweets like a teenage Nazi on 4chan whose sole aim is to create outrage. Three retweets of anti-Muslim hatred first tweeted by the deputy leader of a British neo-Nazi group do indeed cause global outrage. British politics becomes consumed by […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Politics • Tags: alt right, anti-muslim hatred, donald trump, far right, islamophobia, muslims, racism, twitter, usa

RETHINKING THE CHALLENGE OF ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY

November 15, 2017 by Kenan Malik

In 1997 the British anti-racist organisation the Runnymede Trust published its highly influential report Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. The report both brought to public consciousness the reality of anti-Muslim bigotry and framed it in terms of ‘Islamophobia’ – indeed, it played a significant role in establishing the term as legitimate and important. Twenty years on, the Runnymede Trust has brought out a follow-up report Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All, which is a stock-take on current views, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, british politics, diversity, free speech, gill valentine, hate speech, iqbal sacranie, islam, islamophobia, multiculturalism, muslims, offence, racism, runnymede trust