Kenan Malik: Not so black and white #DeBalie

With his most recent book Not so Black and White (2023) the renowned writer and lecturer Kenan Malik provides clarity on today’s heated debates around race, culture and identity. How should we think about race, and how does the debate relate to class? Malik travels back to the Enlightenment, tracing back the real origins of ‘race’ in Western thought, to challenge current assumptions about identity politics, white privilege and cultural appropriation.

What can Malik’s argument for an anti-racist politics informed by class and solidarity mean for our current polarized political climate?

The Dutch writer and political scientist Kiza Magendane (born in Congo and living in the Netherlands since 2017) will react to Malik’s lecture with a column and will enter into conversation with him.

About Kenan Malik
Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer, broadcaster and Observer columnist. He has written for The Times, the Guardian, Prospect, and New Statesman, and has made a number of acclaimed TV documentaries. His books include The Quest for a Moral Compass, and From Fatwa to Jihad, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

[mjleger]

Good talk but the emphasis on the shift from race in the 19thC to culture in the 20thC tends to obscure the class critique, and so much of what is said in the lecture would be fine with most liberals. The moderator is very shrill and makes things more confusing - ostensibly more lively. Kiza Magendane's anti-Enlightenment metaphysics is academically a propos - more sophist than solidaristic, and Fanon's work is already far more helpful. Notions like Spivak's strategic essentialism are not very helpful and simply dodge the main issue. Intersectionality is not socialist. The working class is the majority everywhere and that's due to the capitalist mode of production and (global) divisions of labour - not due to race, or gender, or sexuality. That's why socialists are internationalists and not allies, which is a matter of relativistic morality (and moralism). Identity politics is essential to the NSM New Left and the postmodern left, but it isn't central for the radical "old" left, which is universalist. In his critiques of fascism, Leon Trotsky rejected this kind of "zoological materialism" (identity reductionism) that is now taken for granted by the professional-managerial class in business, academia, the media and government. It's sad that many well-intentioned leftists, like some of the people at Status Coup New, don't understand these issues.