Is identity politics the answer to racism? Irish weather

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Discussing ideas about racism as a white person can be tricky. Am I inadvertently offending? Will I be told to stay in your lane? What first-hand knowledge do I have of racial discrimination?

In his new book on race, acclaimed author Kenan Malik describes something this journalist never experienced when he was beaten because of his skin color. Malik can’t remember the first occasion but: When I was a teenager it was hard to think of many days when I wasn’t in a fight with racists, he writes in Not So Black and White.

However, Malik does not see the lack of shared experience as a barrier to common understanding. If the reformers of previous centuries had insisted that people stick to type, enlightened men would never have supported women’s liberation and democratic populations would never have supported minority rights. The demand to stay in your lane is the antithesis of politics; it’s avoiding forms of political engagement that can be socially transformative, says Malik.

In this spirit, Unthinkable is addressing this week the British writer of Indian origin whose book is sure to provoke a lively debate. As a columnist at the Observer, Malik has separated himself from many left-wing travelers, he is a vocal advocate of free speech, criticizes identity politics and has highlighted a tolerance for anti-Semitism in circles. progressive. However, his default tone is one of encouragement rather than warning as he seeks to navigate a better path for egalitarian campaigns.

Most of my work, he explains, is about putting contemporary issues into historical context to allow us to see to allow me to see how we got to where we are, which is too little of a question. posed.

Not So Black and White focuses on what Malik calls an account of the history of race.

Obviously in the 19th century the Irish were seen as racially backward…and it’s a complex story of how the Irish became white

The short version is that racism emerged as a way to justify inequality. It was as much about class as it was about skin color and the early campaigns for equality reflected that. In recent years, class politics has been replaced by identity politics, which Malik says has led new anti-racists to speak in racial terms. Analyzing the notion of white privilege, for example, he questions whether white is a useful category in which to place everyone from Elon Musk to a cleaner at a Tesla factory.

This, however, is an abridged version of his book. He further explains:

How was racism initially linked to classism?

Kenan Malik: It’s not that race is an economic concept. Rather, it emerges from an attempt to make sense of societies that declared equality to be the most important issue…and at the same time were deeply unequal, that were invested in slavery, in colonialism, and more broadly than that were unequal in terms of class, gender, etc. Race appears as a kind of way to bridge this chasm…

For example, the ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black; they were considered a distinct black race to justify their enslavement.

You highlight the complexity of identity and race in the case of the Irish and the Jews. Can you say a bit more about this.

Obviously in the 19th century the Irish were seen as racially backward… and it’s a complex story of how the Irish became white and it’s been told very well many times over, especially in context from America. A significant aspect of the whitewashing of Irish immigrants is partly because of the political power they gained, but partly also because they helped enforce the color bar against black workers.

The question of Jews and racists is much more complex, but what happens is that Jews only became white very recently, only in the post-war world, and there is what some call a hyper-whiteness attached to them. One of the problems we have now is that because Jews are seen as white and privileged, there is a tendency to ignore the issue of anti-racism when it comes to Jews.

Kenan Malik: “Imagining that racism is permanent and yet we have to do something about it has inevitably shaped the character of anti-racism.

Is identity politics entirely new?

No…There have always been identity streams in anti-racist, anti-colonial movements…that have sought to use racial consciousness as a way to bind communities together in the fight against racism. But they were largely marginal until the post-war period…There is a complex set of changes that have taken place [since] pushing identity to the forefront of the fight for minority rights.

Is the idea of ​​staying in your lane part of this change?

The sense of staying on track is the product of pessimism, of the collapse of more universalistic perspectives. You take an issue like Critical Race Theory (CRT), and there are all kinds of criticisms of CRT both progressive and reactionary, but I think one problem that we’re overlooking that underlies in much of it is all social pessimism… [the idea] that racism is permanent in a certain sense; that there is no way to dislodge him; that equality is a chimera.

Imagining that racism is permanent and yet we have to do something about it has inevitably shaped the character of anti-racism. It helped move from campaigns for material change to largely symbolic gestures and fair representation because, you know, if racism is permanent and all attempts to eliminate it are futile, then the anti-racism boils down to little more than some kind of public performance, or wiggling your fingers, or at best trying to make injustice a little less unfair.

It also becomes something to be guarded and monitored because if racism is permanent and irreducible, then fighting it cannot be about winning equality but about carving out a space where you can assert some degree of power and autonomy, and that’s really where it gets in your way. of.

It expresses this passage from the material to the symbolic in the fight against racism. We find comfort in our own identity rather than in the struggle to overcome those identities and the boxes we have been put into.

Your take home message is that there has been an economic and political disconnect and that we must try to reverse this trend. But how?

There is no easy answer to this. In a sense, what you are asking is: how can we restore a class politics, but a class politics that is universal and that takes all struggles seriously and does not ignore questions about racisms and the rights of women…and who also takes seriously the divisions within minority groups, and the struggles that focus on material issues and political inequalities, rather than the cultural and the symbolic.

Speaking of cultural debates, one issue being discussed in Ireland is whether to remove the name of philosopher George Berkeley from the library named after him at Trinity College Dublin because of his past as a slave owner when he lived in the United States. Where would you stand on that?

I think a lot of the questioning of the past driving many of these campaigns is important and necessary because mainstream narratives often whitewash the toll of racism and empire, and whitewash how Enlightenment philosophers both proclaimed the importance of equality, but also were willing to accept slavery, colonialism and racism.

But we risk ending up with an equally cartoonish view of history, guided by contemporary means and ignoring all its complexities.

[ TCD invites views on dropping Berkeleys name from library over slave ownership ]

There is also the danger that we are not fighting the struggles of the present but the struggles of the past… It is important to recognize that the struggles we face today are different and that renaming a building or tearing down a statue does not Nor does it add anything to our understanding of any particular philosopher or take anything away from the racism black people face today.

Not So Black And White by Kenan Malik is published by Hurst (20)

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