Not So Black and White - book review by Graeme Kemp
Kenan Malik has written a detailed, disturbing examination of how racism was born and developed across the years to oppress people who are black or Asian – he analyses how such racism has been challenged and repulsed, often through black and white uniting against economic exploitation. While not everyone may agree with his political conclusion in the final chapter, this is a fascinating dissection of dangerous ideas throughout human history. While this book may at first seem like simply an explanation of the history of racism, Kenan Malik also explores the problem with much contemporary ‘anti-racism’. It is a thorough and nuanced book.
The problem we have today, as Kenan Malik admits, is a postmodern, contemporary obsession with identity politics that has created a kind of anti-racism that is deeply reactionary and distorted in its thinking; this is the world of Critical Race Theory and related ideas. While previous centuries saw genuine anti-racists refuse to be categorised, or put in boxes, particularly if they were black, the obsessions of contemporary identity politics undermines this genuine progress:
“Today, the willingness to cling to one’s pigeon-hole, one’s identity, to categorise myself and others, is all that we seem to possess. As hopes for social change have eroded, many have been led to hunker down in their separate laagers; and the more one hunkers down, the more the laager becomes the only way through which to perceive the world, the more that one’s race or identity looms ever larger in one’s consciousness” (Page 289).
This postmodern pessimism about progress and social change has created a mind-set that allows identity politics – of left or right – to flourish. Indeed, genuine political solutions to current social problems can get marginalised. Working people are encouraged to define themselves in terms of race, rather than class. Paradoxically today, we hate racism – but cannot think of a world without racial categories to make sense of it. Yet, as Kenan Malik points out, to move beyond the concept of ‘race’ we need to embrace a radical universalism - and break the limits imposed by identity politics.
The radical, Universalist tradition we should embrace according to Malik, can be seen in the ideas of Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, WEB Du Bois, CLR James and James Baldwin. Indeed, we can travel further back in time, he points out, to explore this radical universalist tradition that offers genuine liberty and freedom: “the Radical Enlightenment, shaped by…figures such as d’Holbach, Diderot and Spinoza that endowed the Enlightenment with its heart and soul” (page 24). The figures of the Radical Enlightenment pushed Enlightenment ideas further in their quest to give a liberated humanity power and control over its destiny. Malik is all too aware that many mainstream, more conservative Enlightenment thinkers sometimes displayed rather reactionary, racist views at times. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) does not escape criticism – and neither does David Hume (1711-76).
However, our sense of liberty and opposition to racism and colonialism has also developed and grown, Kenan Malik argues, by the hard, physical struggle for political freedom – not just through the spread of progressive, rational ideas. He highlights the role of the Haitian Revolution, of 1791, as one of the most significant Enlightenment revolts, following the American and French revolutions. It became a fight for national liberation after starting as a slave revolt. And as Malik points out, slaves have frequently revolted against their oppression throughout history – these revolts often became more than just a means for slaves to escape the restrictions imposed on their individual freedom – they became a way to change society itself.
Malik points out how ideas that endorsed white supremacy were used to divide off and control the exploitation of black people during the transatlantic slave trade era – justifying the cruel and brutal treatment of those enslaved in Africa. Europe and its elites benefitted. This attempt to divide on racial grounds allowed racial pseudo-science and theories to gain ground as explanations for how inequalities persisted in societies, even when equality was seemingly a dominant idea.
Malik is also clear in how colonial oppression restricted African self-determination, often in brutal ways such as the Belgian colonisation of the Congo. It makes for chilling reading. He goes into detail about how racism fuelled injustice and created miscarriages of justice, as well.
Yet, as Kenan Malik points out, there is also a proud history of white radicals campaigning against racism across history. For example: in the USA: “…there were working-class organisations that sought to break down the barriers of Jim Crow segregation. Through the 1930s and 40s, there developed what historian Robert Korstad called “civil rights unionism” – the linking of working class demands to the struggle for black rights” (Page 209). This unity was always fragile though - and subject to challenges and reversals. For Malik though, class solidarity between black and white workers was key to liberation – and remains so. Indeed, he is honest and open about how workers who were white were often exploited or oppressed.
The book contains a fascinating section on how the ideas and beliefs of both Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) and Martin Luther King, changed and developed. Malcolm X moved, for instance, from a black nationalist position found in the Nation of Islam to a more universalist position that placed more emphasis on class, rather than race. Both men, argues Malik, came to see class politics as a path to radical progress in society.
Yet the belief in pro-Enlightenment thinking began to decay in the 20th century as new ideas and movements started to question its legacy. Indeed, it was the Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School who were one such group doing this. They were later joined by postmodern thinkers who undermined Enlightenment ideas, too. The ideas of the Enlightenment were always fragile, as Malik points out, but were now in real danger. The same applies to ideas about class solidarity as a way to challenge racial and economic oppression. The New Left from the 1950s onwards started to see solutions to social problems in capitalist society differently - with the working class seen less and less as the main engine of radical change. And now, today….
“…there is a new set of elite gatekeepers, but their authority is rarely challenged. Meanwhile, the meaning of antiracism has shifted from demands for political rights and material improvements to calls for the recognition of identity.” (Page 225).
The dominant emphasis intellectually shifted to cultural explanations of social issues, which often resembled previous racial explanations promoted by elites. The promoters of cultural studies as a discipline in higher education added to this decay of Enlightenment ideas. The development of Critical Race Theory in academic circles only fuelled this pessimism about race and inequality. CRT thinkers developed ideas about ‘white fragility’ and something called ‘white privilege’. Such new theories as structural racism started to spread to the media, education and health service.
And as Kenan Malik points out:
“The idea that all those deemed white have a common identity and set of interests which may conflict with those of non-whites is, of course, an argument long deployed by racists…” (Page 252).
Yet, again, as Kenan Malik points out – the fact that white people don’t (usually) suffer racism (while black and Asian people do) is hardly a form of ‘privilege’ in any real sense. As he also points out, in the USA, poor whites are more likely to be killed by the police that wealthy blacks. Class and inequality still matter argues Malik. And yes, racism can still exist. It’s just that contemporary identity politics is regressive.
The answer according to Kenan Malik…
“To transcend race, to break the bounds of identity politics, requires us to resurrect radical universalism not as an idea but as a social movement. It, requires us to think of racism, not as a singular problem, but in its connection to other forms of inequalities. It requires us to restitch the economic and the political. To transcend the concept of race requires not just an intellectual revolution, but a social one, too.” (Page 293).
Kenan Malik has written a history and analysis of politics that has real depth and understanding of its complexities. It may surprise some that he critiques right-wing critics of identity politics, such as Douglas Murray, seen as promoting a kind of right-wing version of the left-wing identity politics Murray claims to oppose. And there is, I think, some truth in Malik’s argument about some of Douglas Murray’s thinking. However, I’m not sure that the ideas of David Goodhart (former editor of Prospect magazine) about the ‘Somewheres’ vs. ‘Anywheres’ is also a part of some backward-looking, anti-universalist perspective to the extent Malik thinks. I’m not sure a sense of place or nation always has reactionary consequences or bad results for different groups in society – Malik sees a racial aspect to Goodhart’s ideas that I don’t think is really there. The thinking of writers such as Maurice Glasman (a Blue Labour thinker) should not really be seen in such a negative, reactionary way either. The title of Glasman’s recent book Blue Labour: the politics of the common good suggests something more positive. I don’t think Malik sees the nation as having any progressive function or role, unlike Glasman or Goodhart. Ultimately, it’s up to readers of ‘Not So Black and White’ to decide.
And I really wish Kenan Malik would use the term ‘sex’ instead of ‘gender’….