whiteness | Pandaemonium

DIANE ABBOTT AND A BLACK AND WHITE WORLD

May 4, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate about Diane Abbott’s views on race and the Holocaust, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 April 2023, under the headline “Diane Abbott’s letter shows how antiracism has been reduced to decrying ‘white privilege’”. In 1996, Diane Abbott wrote a column for the Hackney Gazette objecting to the recruitment of Finnish nurses to work in a local hospital. The NHS, she argued, should be employing local people, not importing them from abroad. It’s a familiar claim, though […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: antisemitism, bernie grant, channel migrants, diane abbott, holocaust, identity politics, immigration panics, racial categories, racism, robert jenrick, universalism, white privilege, whiteness

BENEATH THE SKIN OF OUR OBSESSION WITH WHITENESS

August 11, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the contemporary obsession with whiteness, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 7 August 2022, under the headline “Beneath the skin of our obsession with whiteness lie deeper fears about our place in the world”. It is Viktor Orbán’s worst nightmare: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” It is the opening line to Mohsin Hamid’s new novel The Last White Man, a line that deliberately echoes […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: critical race theory, derrick bell, franz kafka, identity politics, mohsin hamid, racism, ta-nehisi coates, the last white man, viktor orban, white identity, whiteness

NOT JUST A BLACK AND WHITE ISSUE

February 9, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the controversy over Whoopi Goldberg’s comments about race and the Holocaust, was my Observer column this week. It was published 6 February 2022, under the headline “Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust remarks drew on a misguided idea of racism”. “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all gonna fight amongst yourselves.” Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on ABC’s The View about the Holocaust being not “about race” but “white on white” violence that exposed “man’s inhumanity to man” has drawn a slew of condemnation. […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration • Tags: holocaust, jews, jim crow, nazism, nuremberg laws, race, racism, usa, white privilege, whiteness, whoopi goldberg

CONTESTING FREEDOM AND “WHITE FREEDOM”

January 4, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the historian Tyler Stovall and the idea of “white freedom”, was my Observer column this week. It was published 2 January 2022, under the headline “We talk a lot about freedom – but not enough about whose freedom is at stake”. “For me, history is the record not only of how things change, but how people make things change, how they act individually and collectively to create a better world.” So wrote American historian Tyler Stovall about his approach to his […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Justice & Liberties • Tags: abraham lincoln, enlightenment, france, freedom, freedom struggles, french colonialism, french revolution, kant, liberalism, putney debates, race, race and class, radical enlightenment, tyler stovall, white freedom, whiteness

THE MAGICAL QUALITY OF WHITENESS

September 7, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on immigration, identity and the obsession with whiteness, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 5 September 2021, under the headline “To be truly British, the country needs to stay largely white. Really, Lionel Shriver?” “They have seen the passing of the American Indian and the buffalo; and now they query as to how long the Anglo-Saxon may be able to survive.” So wrote William Ripley in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly in 1908. Ripley was one of […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: britishness, conservatism, douglas murray, identity politics, immigration, lionel shriver, racism, white decline, white identity, whiteness, william ripley

THE WOKE AND THE UNWOKE

February 16, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the polarisation between “woke” and “anti-woke” arguments, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 14 February 2021, under the headline “Woke warriors on the march? Don’t forget the bigotry of the ‘unwoke’”. Want to rid an Oxford college of a statue of an imperialist? That’s “wokery”. Too many immigrants? Blame the woke. Insufficiently appreciative of the British empire? You’re in the “Woke Orthodoxy”. Want to strangle Andrew Neil’s new radio station even before it airs? That’s the “woke warriors”. Joe […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: anti-semitism, anti-woke, anti-zionism, brian eno, british empire, cecil rhodes, cynical theories, david baddiel, frankfurt school, free speech, james lindsay, ken loach, nigel biggar, racism, unwoke, white privilege, whiteness, winston churchill, woke, wokeness

DECOLONIZING OUR MINDS?

February 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 19 February 2017. ‘They Kant be serious!’, spluttered the Daily Mail headline in its most McEnroish tone. ‘PC students demand white philosophers including Plato and Descartes be dropped from university syllabus’. ‘Great thinkers too male and pale, students declare’, declared the Times. The Daily Telegraph, too, was outraged: ‘They are said to be the founding fathers of Western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society. But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that […]

Categories: Academia, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: decolonising, diversity, enlightenment, frantz fanon, identity politics, jonathan israel, kant, kwame anthony appiah, locke, racism, radical enlightenment, soas, toussaint l'ouverture, university, whiteness