Re - Kenan Malik: Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics

[cornelius...@gmail.com]

Kenan Malik: Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics

https://www.facebook.com/nathan.hamelberg

Abe Bergegårdh: There is a lot to be said about Kenan Malik and his Not So Black And White. Fortunately, I know Nathan Hamelberg who talked to him yesterday (thanks, then I could drink beer instead), so this will be short.
Malik touches on the question of race when it comes to the American (US) prison industry. He means that class ("socio-economic factor") is rather governing, not that he denies racism in the United States, but makes it more complex. It was updated around black lives matter and George Floyd. The author's point is that when you study it more closely, other ethnicities are also affected to the same extent by deadly police violence. I myself tried to count on it when it went, it was difficult when the American statistics are happy about race but not when it comes to class. Instead, it was to count backwards (yes, swaying), but what came up was just that. Poor white, Hispanics are killed to the same extent as blacks by the police in the United States. Class does matter. Dave Zachariah has raised similar figures regarding incarceration seconds in the United States, where Malik also points out that the quota of whites was lower before 1970. That there is a greater risk of ending up in the joint for a white drop out from college than a non-white with a degree. Osv.
Why am I making a point for that? As Marxists, we not only want to understand society, but also change it. Then the map must be as similar to the terrain it can become.
But read the book (now in Swedish).

Nathan Hamelberg: Yesterday, the Indian-British writer and journalist Kenan Malik visited Stockholm on the occasion of his new book "Not so black and white: a story of race from white supremacy to identity politics" which has just been published in Swedish at Daidalo's publishing house translated by Johan Wollin. I had the opportunity to talk to him at Kulturhuset in a conversation moderated by Sara Kristoffersson. I have been following Malik's writing in The Guardian, The Independent and TLS etc. since the turn of the millennium, and he is such a thinker that it is easy to agree with and, perhaps even greater, a writer that you can disagree with on a factual and honest basis way for him to state his thoughts in a strict manner. Previously, I was annoyed that it felt like he made it easy on himself with talking about "both sides are wrong" - because it rarely deals with two sides in conflicts and it is supposed to emphasize himself as standing outside - but it can be partially boiled down to the bear services of editors. Here it is more like he goes back and looks at movements in recent history and puts them next to greater historical events and traces. In the book, there are still a few times where I felt he is a little hilarious, or presents a pretty weak equivalence between phenomena - most sadly when he puts some radical student's tweeting in one scales and Trump's politics in the other. But during the conversation, it became much clearer that his case is not to equalize, but rather to point out how universalism is in retreat for particular political solutions. His view of identity and essentialism also became much more concrete when he got to focus in speech (he claimed he is better in writing, cannot claim that means he was bad at reasoning in speech).

I think the book is a pretty important post in a debate that is going on in Sweden and is largely "imported" from the USA and Britain. So incredibly much of our contemporary politics, including government politics, are imported from the US, UK and even Hungary tactics for exercise of power rather than constructive social reforms. As far as everything is bad, what is worse, I think resistance to those tactics to a worse degree than grassroots activists in the United States under Trump have managed to gather wide resistance. And part of it can probably be said because the particular is often seen as the most radical. Malik traces the tone for the particular to a more widely widespread pessimism and cynicism, where cynicism may replace organization and where symbols may replace concrete victories. It's a little nerve-racking to hope that a book that travels more questions than it serves answers will become a vitamin injection for fighting, but I think it's a pretty good sparring partner. Before the conversation, I had a burning concern that Malik sometimes feels like the kind of "it was better before" leftist guy who can tactically be hugged by conservatives to paint today's left as the cause of the decline of society in the same way they can selectively quote Orwell, but the Tidöit who reading this book from ear to ear risks aneurysm.

On the other hand is the book, Malik's conclusions and positions aside, a formidable review of the history of racism, the Rushdie affair, the Haitian Revolution, Fredrerick Douglass and abolitionism, the NAACP, Fanon and the anticolonial movement's relationship to the Enlightenment tradition and Europe's cross-braking in front of the Enlightenment promises for the liberation of women and colonies and much, much more. Will read the book more carefully in the future, but overall it is not the irony that provokes, but the sharpness with which Malik presents how we arrived at the station we are now at. One moment he is like a slightly more energetic Göran Greider with personal experiences of life in the marginalization of the British Empire, the next moment he is like Wendy Brown looking for a way out of essentialist snow forests.

The call was recorded by the Culture House, puts a link below in the comments

  ·   · 

[Biko Agozino]

William Julius Wilson, author of The Declining Significance of Race, called it in another book, Not Just Race, that matters at a time, in yet another book, When Work Disappears from poor neighborhoods where, in another book, The Truly Disadvantaged live. Stuart Hall clarified that what they are getting at is the articulation of race-class-gender domination in societies structured in dominance, calling for coalitions and alliances in the struggle for survival.

Biko

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