Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics
Kenan Malik, Hurst, £20

EVENTS have not gone as Kenan Malik would have liked since about the 1960s and definitely not since the late 1980s and the Salman Rushdie affair. As an anti-capitalist activist, journalist, academic and broadcaster, the disarray and ineffectiveness of the left has been a major concern. 

The problem has been the disappearance of class-based solidarity in favour of identity-based solidarity, and although he left the left (or perhaps, as he might put it, the left left him) he now explains the intellectual threads which brought the cleavage between class-based politics and culture-based politics.  

Today’s “culture wars” are the present tail-end of this phenomenon. This book is a remarkable help in untangling some present threads and themes, although it doesn’t quite give us Ariadne’s thread out of the Labyrinth. 

The central point is the conflict between Enlightenment secular universalism and what actually happened. The Enlightenment had many radical tendencies including the proposition of the universal nature of humanity. 

This is perhaps best expressed in the American Declaration of Independence, that all men are born equal. It won’t escape many that this equality did not include blacks, women or Native Americans, but the idea itself was new and powerful. In the existing, dying, feudal order, inequality was the expected norm: you were born into a station and you died in it. 

Nonetheless, the technical advances which were brought at least in part through the Enlightenment brought yet more tensions, most clearly between the new ideas of equality and the reality of slavery. Malik charts us through the muddy waters of race science and its attempts to explain inequality through nature. He does, however, highlight, that in the early stages of capitalism racial inequality didn’t just apply to people who, as a group, merely looked different. 

The farm hand and factory worker were also racially lower down the hierarchy of life, the Englishman was superior to the Irish, and in the pre-civil war US, indentured whites faced conditions which were only marginally different from that of slaves. 

Racism arose in this context as a means of smashing emerging class solidarities and limiting the extent of the expansion of democracy. Thus was whiteness created out of a mass of different categories of ethnicity, with solidarity extended to masters rather than comrades.

Anti-semitism is reborn in the late 18th century, with its old characteristics but also with new: inserted into race science as Asiatic interlopers, with the birth of ideas of Volk, and as a turning against modernity, cosmopolitanism and capitalism. 

This culminated in the notion that Germans were pure Teutons and Jews an infiltrating biological threat. The Nazi Party picks up the baton, and Malik details exactly how the Nazis sought out inspiration from “the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law,” the US.

The mid-20th century saw not only wars where the idea of race was central but also the advance of class solidarities. Malik relates how the Communist Party is credited with successfully defending the Scottsboro Boys and putting white supremacy on trial when even the NAACP was loathe to get involved. 

However the US’s vicious class war saw many unions succumb to racism in a “Faustian pact” that white workers struck with employers, where they would not face black competition if they accepted non-unionising and terrible conditions. 

Where racism died, identity arose, with near identical arguments, and a slight change of the cast. Culture and indigenous identity became huge amorphous battlegrounds, but on the same precepts as biological race theories and often taken up as anti-racist standards by the left. In Europe, Muslims became the new group to fear. Where not terrorists, they were plotting to outbreed and replace the “native” population. 

But the politics of identity was based on the most reactionary of ideas: “that one’s political beliefs and ways of thinking should be derived from the fact of one’s birth, sex or ethnic origins.”

Thus, as Malik put it succinctly elsewhere, “political struggles unite across ethnic or cultural divisions; cultural struggles inevitably fragment.” Class solidarity cuts across cultural solidarities, whereas cultural solidarities leave class hierarchies untouched. How do we get out of the labyrinth of competing identity expressions? There is no easy answer from Malik: we must rediscover radical universalism. 

The Enlightenment project has yet to be finished.