Resetting the Conversation on Race - Coleman Hughes and Kenan Malik | Intelligence Squared

foreign and welcome to this intelligent squared event with Coleman Hughes and Ken and Malik it was recorded here in London last week when Coleman was over from New York and they were talking about Canon's new book not so black and white which is a history of the ideas of race and it is really brilliantly researched and utterly fascinating highly recommended Coleman is the host of the award-winning podcast conversations with Coleman and you can find out more about his work at Coleman hughes.com hope you enjoy the conversation Canon Malik thanks so much for coming on my show pleasure and we are simultaneously airing this with Intelligence Squared so welcome to that audience as well and the subject of today's conversation is your wonderful book called not so black and white and uh first question I want to ask you is just a little bit about you before we get into the topic what brought you to the topic of race and maybe say say a little bit about how you came to be interested in the subject well it's impossible for someone like me um brown person in in in Britain not to be brought into the topic of race it's you know I live the topic of race but I came to Britain when I was about six and the Britain I grew up in was very different from the Britain it is today in those days racism was vicious um visceral in a way that's barely imaginable now um race the attacks were daily in this hard to think of of a time I didn't come back from school having been in a fight um racism drew me into politics I got involved in a whole host of campaigns about deportations about racist attacks about um racism in the workplace and so on but if it was racism that Drew me into politics it was politics that made me see beyond racism to see um that there were broader issues of social justice and that thinking about social justice simply in terms of my experiences was insufficient I came to read people like Marx and Mill Baldwin and arent um who drew me into an entirely different Universe I began to see um the world in in a different in a different way and it was at that time um the left was still what one might call it the Universalist left there were still universally strands to um the idea that uh what we're fighting for was not simply shaped by one's identity but had um was about creating coalitions and movements that went across identities um and that is only in transforming everybody's lives that one gets to transform one's own life um but you know within about this we're talking about here about the early 1980s but within about a decade about you that had changed that um the the left became much more rooted in identitarian Notions the the big issue for me was the Salman Rushdie campaign um in 1988 1989 um which um where a lot of my friends who'd been on the left um suddenly became opponent of Rushdie uh thought the Satanic Verses should be censored um supported the burning of the book um and he got me to thinking about what had happened why that was the case why the left has changed so much um and it got me thinking about identitarian politics and that's what I've been thinking about and arguing against for the best part of 30 years yeah so one thing that's interesting about this is is I I'm American and and you're you grew up in Manchester and have lived in London for a very long time and there are striking similarities between how the conversation has evolved in America and in Britain we've seen the same move from a Universalist left from a left in America that could really claim to live by Martin Luther King's you know Universalist message if we are all brothers in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew black nor white he would say things like that to a left that is much more focused on as you call it stay in your lane arguments which I think is a great summary of the ethos of the left right if you're black stay in your black Lane if you're white stay in your White Lane if you're Mexican stay you know is that we all have these racial lanes and roles to play and beliefs and politics that come sort of as a package deal with the race or ethnicity that you're born into and that's often called identity politics uh there are also differences though between America and the UK one which is that uh in America we had you know slavery within our own borders and you know often that historical episode is at the center of some of our deepest controversies and the other difference is that we've long been a nation of immigrants a nation with massive immigration in the mid 19th century um and and so I guess the pattern of immigration and backlash and more immigration and backlash is old is very old in America but it's I think it's newer um in in the UK I'm curious how you view the differences between America and the UK when it comes to the issue of racial identity I think one of the problems we have is that um because of the economic social cultural heft of America what happens in America tend to shape what happens elsewhere so attitudes about race arguments about race in America are simply taken on and applied to other countries where they're less applicable one of the reasons that the book concentrates on America is precisely that that because the the the arguments about race in America are so influential to the rest of the world that um that it's important to challenge it in its own terms to unpick them and therefore to show why they're they're not so applicable not just in in the rest of the world but to America itself um I think that the identitarian strain is probably much stronger in America than it is elsewhere I mean you can see it elsewhere but it is probably much stronger in America um and to me to explain the the shift to an identitarian turn you have to understand two things firstly that anti-racist movements anti-colonial movements have always had an identitarian aspect to them um there's always been a tension within um anti-racist movements between identitarian and Universalist perspectives so you know you go back to the 19th century and you had the back back to Africa movements in America um and then you had Marcus Garvey in the early 20th century negritude pan-africanism and so on so that those have always been there but not till relatively recently had they become the dominant Force within um anti-racist discourse and the reason they've become the dominant force is a thing to do with the social pessimism that has developed over the last uh half century to to adopt a Universalist perspective to think that you can build coalitions across the fishes of race and class and ethnicity and so on to think that you can radically transform Society requires a certain degree of optimism social optimism and much of that test ebbed over the last uh half century so more and more people cling on to what they have they cling on to their particular identities their particular the boxes into which we've been put and and see the world more and more through those identities through those boxes so I think it's important to to to locate where we are um it's not as if we've suddenly become all-identitarian it's always been there but that the wider shifts The Wider economic political social shifts um and in particular the way that um the labor movement has lost influence has lost force over the past half centuries played it an important part in in what we're seeing now so let's rewind um a lot of your book deals with the history of the idea of race this idea of of humanity being separated into five or six distinct groups that concept has not been around forever it has an origin story like any other idea does and and so I'm curious uh in your view when did the idea of race begin and how did it evolve from its first date into what it is today that's obviously a very big question I make the argument that a lot of people have made this argument of course that race is a product of modernity um it's not that in Pre in the pre-modern world there wasn't bigotry or there wasn't a sense a belief that other groups may have been subhuman um there wasn't uh a lack of huge intolerance um against other groups clearly there was but the what there wasn't was the sense that um humans were equal and there was a single Universal uh uh sense of humanity that was what developed largely in the 18th century and we think about the Enlightenment and the enlightenment Notions of equality and universalism and against the background of societies that broadly accept the idea of equality of universality the notion of race racism the notion of um inequality racial inequality becomes something very different um what you have from the from the late 18th century onwards is our our societies um that are rooted in the idea that all humans are equal all men are equal as the American Declaration of Independence broadly says um or the uh French uh Declaration of Rights of Man which broadly says much the same um so the idea of equality becomes a defining feature of uh post-enlightenment societies Western societies but that um abstract belief in equality is set against the practice of inequality the social practice of inequality of enslavement of the refusal to Grant rights to women to minorities to work in class and so on and race develops in the modern world um out of that contradiction as a way of almost of making sense of that contradiction that race becomes a way of saying um certain people are by Nature unequal and therefore not deserving or not worthy of equality and that became an explanation for slavery for instance it what black people the ancestors of today's African Americans weren't enslaved because they were black slavery has existed well before modernity um and it and its and in both blacks and whites were enslaved in those days so the the ancestors of today's African-Americans weren't enslaved because they were black but there came to be deemed as racially distinct and racially inferior as black people as a way of justifying their their enslavement so race becomes a means of of explaining and justifying the the continuation of inequalities in societies that had that had proclaimed their Fidelity to equality and what's important to recognize is how different say 19th century views of race were then um contemporary abuse of race we think of race largely in terms of skin color or continent of origin black white asian and so on queries for 19th century thinkers race was primarily a description of social inequalities so yes black people Asians Chinese Indians and so on we've seen as inferior but so was the working class I mean it may be difficult to to to to comprehend now but 19th century thinkers saw Factory workers and and farmhands as racially distinct from themselves as many see white and black um as racially distinct and their inability to be any more than Factory workers or farmhands was attributed to the fact that they were racially inferior yeah so there's a few things there one is the difference between an ethnic group and a race there as you point out in the book at that time ethnic groups often viewed themselves and talked about themselves as distinct races you know people that would be considered the same race today like the Irish and the British or the Normans and you know the Gauls people that would all be described today are seen as as white at the time had you know bitter hostility rivalries and conceptions of themselves as different races on the other hand I do feel that there is a difference between ethnic differences and and racial differences which is that the more that people look very different at a glance the easier it is for those hostilities to persist over very long periods of time and then the harder it is for groups to truly meld into one so for example the Enlightenment thinkers some of the Enlightenment thinkers that I admire and I'm sure you do too like Frederick Douglass one of the major things they were wrong about in the case of Douglas is that they thought by now there would be no such thing as black people and white people that we would have intermarried and intermingled to such a point where we would all kind of look like a fairly undifferentiated Mass yet the the patterns of people looking different and and you know based on where their ancestors are from has persisted to to a degree that they didn't predict right um and it seems to me you know when we talk about how ethnic groups in the American case which I know the most about such as Irish Americans Italian Americans polish Americans Etc by now white Americans my age they don't most of them don't care where their ancestors are from they're just vaguely European I don't really care and the white identity has subsumed all of these formerly super important differences whereas the difference between white and black as a socially important category has has remained and it seems to me the key difference it's it's not that it's not that uh for instance the bitterness between you know the Irish and British were any less real they're you know huge but it's that when people look the same or not the same but when people look rather similar it's easier for for them to blend over the course of hundreds of years um in a way that it it just is harder when there are actual uh you know color differences does that seem like a fair analysis to you there are a number of points here the first is that if you go back to the 19th century people saw the Irish of the working class physically distinct sure um you know in a way we would find it absurd today um that was the case um so it's not the it's not purely the quest of looking different um that's an issue here but it is true that that um that the fat that black people are easily distinguishable from Heights plays an important part in this one of the reasons um that slavery was racialized for instance at the end of say the it's the 17th century early 18th century with it there were continual um struggles against both slavery and indentured servitude which is what um white poor whites faced in in in America um in those days um that blacks and whites used to get together and Str and and and and challenge their um enslavement or servitude and that uh it became easier it was a lot easier to distinguish um say a runaway slave if that slave was black and if that slave was white and so um partly to to break up that Coalition between blacks and whites um slavery became increasingly racialized you can see that in America at the end of the 19th century too when you had in the post-reconstruction world you had diffusion movements between uh poor whites and blacks which challenged the the the elite particularly in the south in North and South Carolina in um Virginia and so on um challenge them by by presenting a broader more equal motion of what kind of society they want to live in the um the challenge particularly the the Democrats who were the elites and the pro-slavery um party in the South um and in order to break up that Coalition against quite deliberately in order to break up that Coalition between uh whites and blacks um Jim Crow was introduced in a most ferocious way to allow for certain types of privileges for whites and to segregate blacks and so you can see how racism becomes a means of uh of breaking up uh cross cross-racial coalitions class coalitions um against the elite the idea of going back to to your argument about about skin color it's only in the early 20th century that whiteness as we understand it and Blackness as we understand it became Consolidated that what you call ethnic groups um the Irish the Slavs and so on we see became seen as white um and that the major division was purely between black and white um and there were two reasons for that one was the extension expansion of democracy within Western Nations so that um the working class which had largely been excluded from the Democratic process was now brought in um given the vote brought into Democratic process and it became much more difficult to talk about the working classes racially uh inferior um when they're part of the democratic process and the second reason was the expansion of imperialism the new imperialism scrambled for Africa um from the 1880s onwards um said it the Scramble for Africa divided up Africa among the European nations um America seized uh parts of the Pacific and so on um and that's that new imperialism redrew what uh Dubose calls the color line um and made wraith much more what as we see it now um as a uh issue of race uh issue of skin color of a black and white issue that it had been previously yeah it seems to me when there is that skin color difference they're always when there's always something visual to appeal to for the people that want to divide uh you know for whatever reason the ability to point to a vis a visual difference is an immense tool in the in the in the hands of racists where uh where you know just if there isn't that kind of difference I mean so so for example in in America there's quite a big cultural difference and historical difference between black Americans who descend from slavery like me and recent African immigrants um not only is there somewhat of a difference in an appearance there is a difference in cultural heritage and all kinds of stuff in any other situation these these would be groups that you would expect to just conceive in themselves as just like two different groups of people and you know whatever comes along with that but because there is a color similarity over time you do see like a to some extent a kind of merging um and it wouldn't surprise me if a few Generations down the line you have recent African immigrants simply conceiving of them of themselves as African-Americans and we've already seen that with like immigrants from the West Indies so that assimilation which has become a bit of a dirty word uh for for some people but that uh that that process of two groups that view themselves as different eventually coming to view themselves as the same it seems is enabled or made easier by kind of visual similarity um and that's a like I said I think that was one thing that even some of the brightest Enlightenment thinkers maybe did not predict sufficiently quite often though we impose um the idea that people look dissimilar when we put people into separate categories Jews for instance um people are sure they can tell at you because they're belonging to a different category one of the um the fact that anti-Semitism um continues despite most use being visually not that dissimilar to the the population in which they live is a an aspect of the way we categorize people without necessarily there being visual markers I mean we impose with visual markers or racist imposed visual markers on Jews but that's not the same thing um and it's true that um that the kind of black white difference has come to predominate uh much of our thinking um but it's interesting how those categories work for instance many now look at Latinos in America as white um and talk about Multicultural whiteness for instance um in a way because or look at Asians as surrogate whites um because what's important it's not actually the the physical distinction people can tell the difference if they wish between um white Americans and uh Asian Americans but or Latinos um but what matters is the kind of story you say you tell about about different groups and the categories into which you put those groups um and yes the the difference between um immigrants from Africa up to the Caribbean and African African-Americans is is can be quite large in terms of um their place in society the kinds of jobs they have the wealth they possess and so on all those kinds of the degree of poverty and so on um this it's similar in in Europe too you have a similar kind of distinctions between um uh African Caribbeans in in in in in in in in Britain and and African migrants um but because we have this notion of Blackness um every everything gets delighted into a single category and it's the way we look at the world and the way we categorize the world um more as much as any kind of visual distinction that is important I think [Music] so a topic that I've talked about and and just wrote a column about for the Free Press is the notion of color blindness and this is something I think is widely misunderstood and maligned I think um you know color blindness is often summarized as just this idea that you're gonna we're gonna pretend not to notice race and then racism is going to disappear and no doubt there have been some people that expressed that kind of idiotic or naive let's say take but I think properly understood color blindness is really just a commitment to try your very best to not treat people according to the race and to also enshrine that principle in our politics like we want to get to a place speak for myself I want to get to a place where we are not thinking about putting racial categories into law or into policy for any reason obviously societies have done this for just plain old bigoted reasons but we also do this in America certainly for reasons of quote-unquote social justice um you know in my view almost anything you want to achieve in the name of uh increasing equality reducing the difference between the Haves and the have-nots can be done on the basis of a metric like income or or class more precisely and more justly and more rationally than it could be done on the basis of we're going to separate people by race and give whatever resources to this race over that race we're going to do some kind of racial triage um so I'm just teeing up that concept for you of colorblindness right how do you understand color blindness and do you think that it is in general a good value to promote do you think it's something that's naive and should be relegated to the Dustbin of History I think colorblindness is has come to be a kind of um shorthand for a former liberal universalism um and I think that's what it's it's come to mean for many people I know and at one level you'd say this it's what you want to uh to to to to to to go towards that um the idea that uh you have a world in which race or color doesn't matter part of the problem though I think is that universalism itself comes in different forms and um historically as I show in the book there's a distinction between um liberal and radical forms of universalism and liberal universalists were often attached um had an attachment to universalism but were often um willing to to accept exceed to all forms of discriminatory practices um whereas it it was those who challenged um not just race them but but but with the whole social structure which gave gave rise to racism um the radical universalists um who took that argument further so for instance um to give a historical example the Haitian revolution is to me hugely important um the Haitian revolution is the third great revolution of of the 18th century but compared to the American and French we barely know about it um but it was a Haitian revolution where slaves on the French island of sandoming um challenged first their enslavement and then created uh the the um the new nation of Haiti and in the process um defeated the armies of France and Britain and Spain and so on what um what the the Haitian revolution showed was that was the first but we showed they showed both the importance and the shortcomings of Enlightenment Notions of universalism because the French revolutionaries um who had created the French Revolution on the basis of the Rights of Man of universal rights nevertheless are willing to accept slavery and colonialism and it and it was only through the um the the actions of the enslaved on Sunday Ming that uh slavery was at first overthrown uh and that in a sense they forced French revolutionaries to take their own ideals seriously so we're not debating the ideals the ideals are are important um but how you challenge them and how you go about it is um is also important so if you again historically um if you go back if you take a figure like John Stewart Mill kind of the great Victorian um defender of liberalism he was also a defender of colonialism whereas the radical Universalist in in Britain at that time where Mill defended the East India Company and and and the um colony and the Britain uh colonizing India the radical universalists challenged um that very idea defended the rights of Indians to their own Nation the same way as they defend the rights of poles or hungarians and so on and so and in a sense that comes through today as well because one can think about color blindness or or a liberal Universalist perspective um from an individualist uh Viewpoint and one can think of it from a collective Viewpoint and if we're going to think that the relationship between race and class is important and the class um place an important part of of a struggle to create a better world then we we can't think about um colorblindness in an individualist sense but only in in the sense of a collective struggle to transform the world and part of the problem I think with the the colorblindness perspective today is that it is rooted in in a form of individualism that doesn't allow us to to challenge and change the world so I'm I'm detecting like an undercurrent of uh of class politics in your perspective have you ever been a Marxist are you do you think of yourself as a Marxist or have you ever thought of yourself that way oh I was I was with um in a number of far left organizations back in the 80s in my youth um uh uh a class is is important and shapes the way um much of the world is and if you if you look at everything from Health disparities to uh uh to um disparities of income to to take an initial in America um the the the mass incarceration of people in America you can do you can um explain mass incarceration in America actually far better um by class and you can buy a race I mean there's a lot of discussion of mass incarceration as the new Jim Crow in America as you know um the the the the the name of Michelle Alexander's book but it's a it's a much older idea but if you actually look at look look at the the the the the figures um you find that incarceration rates are defined by um income and by class then much more than they are by race at every income level the incarceration rates of blacks and whites are almost same whereas in a cross income levels um there are huge disparities so yes class is hugely important um and I think that challenging uh racism also requires us to challenge um the class disparities and the class um differentials that exist in society so in my view one of the the great failures of Marxism over the many many decades has been it's uh it sense that it would be easy to for for you know the workers of the world to unite across racial and ethnic lines the sense that if we just you know agitate and argue in the right way people will really see that the poor of the world of different races that speak different languages and different ethnicities different cultures will unite against the bourgeoisie and and create a better world and in my view maybe this was not a ridiculous assumption but it certainly hasn't been borne out is he I mean over and over again you see how easy it is for people at the top to you know quote unquote divide and conquer um to to pit different ethnic group groups of poor people against one another and um you know prevent that kind of formation of a common cause it proves extraordinarily easy just over and over again in different societies and and so I'm curious what what do you make of that as someone who I guess used to be broadly speaking a Marxist but also promotes a kind of universalism well box is to promotes a kind of universalism um so that that's not the distinction in a sense the Practical failure to achieve that kind of aim the the um it's true that there are it's been very easy to break um cross-racial class coalitions um through the use of ideas of race or ethnicity and so on that doesn't mean that that aim is is false or wrong it just means that it is very difficult to do so or it becomes very easy to break those kinds of class coalitions and if in fact um a cross-racial class coalitions and in fact that what that shows is the importance of um creating those kinds of coalitions the importance of uh arguing against and and and taking a stand a not just arguing against but taking a practical stance against um those kinds of Divisions that are imposed upon us um and the fact that those kinds of cross-racial coalitions do exist and have existed historically shows what may be possible and what is possible so uh in America the um the Fusion movements as I was talking about in the in in the late 19th centuries uh the the way that um famous New Orleans general strike 1892 where blacks and whites came together to take on employers the the work of um this what what we now call civil rights unionism in the interwar Years um which brought together the struggle of uh blacks and the stuff of work of work of workers and brought them together in in the in a single struggle and and saw them as part of the of the same um challenge to uh to iniquity so all those things show um or in Britain if you if you want if you want to look in Britain um the support that Lancashire cotton workers gave to the American North during the Civil War um or the grunwick strike a famous scrum re strike in the 1970s where a group of Asian women went out on strike and was supported by thousands upon thousands of workers across the country um all those things show the possibility the possibilities of such coalitions what is possible um so in a sense while it is easy and it has been his easy to um to break such coalitions out to use ideas of race and ethnicity and gender and so on to break down those those coalitions um that only shows that um how what um the problems of of thinking of our of our struggles in those terms in identitarian terms and it shows even more that the necessity for going Beyond identitarian terms um identity and categories um to to create those those wider um uh coalitions and struggles so in your book you basically you know it seems like there's this dividing line and on one side of it is all of the race-based politics of history and the present which is you know in the past and to some degree still in the present would be white supremacy and white identity politics and also black identity politics and uh minority identity politics in general and then on on the other side of that dividing line is a Universalist message that we are all the same race there's only one race the human race and the politics of identity and race in general are to be avoided uh because of their divisiveness their Reliance on this social construct and so forth some people would take issue with that history because they would not want white identity politics and black identity politics to be put on the same side of any line they would say no actually the history should be written this way it should be written the bad kinds of identity politics white racism Etc are on one line and all the good kinds are are virtuous and are fighting against the evil this is a simple story of good receival and the Universalist colorblind sort of message is is some third category right so how would you respond to that critique of the way that you are writing history the the idea that there's good identity politics and bad identity politics and and um you can Define these things as good identity politics these things it's bad identity politics um simply misunderstands the problem there's there has I I don't think it's as simple as as you were proposing it there is identity Politics on this side in the Universalist Politics on the other and that that's always the case historically historically um all struggles against race against colonialism and so on have embodied in a sense of both there's always been um uh identitarian strains um in those struggles and they've always been Universalist strains in those struggles and and until recently the Universalist aspects of those struggles was the dominant one but it's not to say that they were kind of completely separate um the way I'd look at it is this that people don't live in either the particular or the universal um we we have each of us have particular identities we each of us you know we are um black Jewish Muslim um support Liverpool Football Club um watch um genre Goddard films whatever though we all have certain things that define we think Define who we are we kind of have those particularities um from which we emerge but at the same time those particularities only make sense because we live in a broader Society in a in a broader world where um one can reach across one's narrow particularities um and talk to other people and make common cause with other people there's a distinction between identity and identity politics we all have identities identities are are crucial to groundeth in this world to allow us to relate to other people but the politics should be a means of overcoming or going beyond the narrow sense of of of identity that we all possess of linkiness across those identities but in order to do that you need to have that broader sense of politics sense of engaging with the world and through engaging with the world and finding that that wants narrow identities isn't a sufficient way of understanding the world but um and those those broader um struggles um whether they're um struggles uh uh of Lancashire cotton workers in in the 19th century of of um the gromwick strikers and and the support they had um in the 1970s of the support that um Ukrainian refugees have today or the campaigns against uh the the oppression of uyghurs in China it's through those struggles that our particular identities become part of a broader um a wider Coalition a set of interests and more Universalist way of looking at the world but the opposite is always also true that where um politics phrase where politics becomes much more difficult to pursue where the idea of a radical transformation of the world um uh becomes much less plausible then we tend to retreat away from those Universal perspectives into particular ones and that's really what has happened over the past half century it's a point I was making earlier that but um what underlines contemporary identitarianism is that sense of social pessimism the belief it is impossible to radically transform Society um it's interesting if you go back to if you take up an issue such as um critical race Theory yeah which which is uh which is a buzz issue today and if you look at a figure like Derek Bell who was you know in a sense a founder of critical race Theory this view was that racism was ineradicable that it was permanent it could not be changed and you can see that kind of argument in some in a kind of a writer-like um Tennessee coats for instance um who who draws from that or uh and so that I don't think anybody went as far down that kind of pit of existential despair as as Derrick building I mean Derrick Bell's well worth reading um but it it it he represents that view of racism as permanent and nothing to there's nothing to be done about it so when that happens the question if racism is permanent if there is no way of challenging it or overcoming it the question then is what do you do and at that at that point any kind of anti-racist activity becomes performative because if if if you're not going to actually transform racism um what you're actually doing is saying let's make it a little bit better let's um find something that allows us a greater recognition um there's a shift from wanting to materially change society to wanting to achieve greater recognition or greater representation um and so uh or making um white people feel guilty and so on and those are all the tropes that you see in contemporary anti-racism and so I see it as the the product of um trying to fight racism while feeling that you can't actually overcome racism and so you you end up having um both an auditory identitarian Viewpoint and a kind of performative form of anti-racism so so you've said a few times now that pessimism is what's at the bottom of the recent turn towards identitarianism is that people do not feel that it's possible to create a truly non-racist society and so the logical option is just well listen if it's if it's a war of all against all what is there to do but stick with your race stick with your family and try to get the most right indeed that is um an attitude many people have for me that you know what's what's wrong with that is it really it's an attitude that seems impervious to to evidence right impervious impervious to change by changes in reality so one of my one of the most uh one of the examples I think about most often is the election of President Obama so before Barack Obama was elected and if you were to run the clock back to like 2006 or seven what you basically heard was a chorus of people um a chorus of black writers saying he won't win he can't win and he he won't win precisely because America is too racist to elect him that's a prediction based on a theory of the country like any good scientist when your prediction gets refuted you're supposed to update the theory right so Barack Obama wins handily twice but the theory was never updated right what what actually happened is the second he won the same people who were saying he couldn't win because he were too racist said well don't you go thinking that this actually means anything we're still just as racist as as we were before um which is uh which is to me and insisters an insistence on your pessimism in the face of contrary evidence it's a it's a proof that your pessimism is actually just a a commitment that you have regardless of how the world changes it's it's almost part of your personal character um a psychological complex even like it's like it's not something based on or maybe maybe it's just based on this individual's experience of the world but um the the pessimism seems to me to be impervious to to evidence and it's also I guess it's also worth commenting that it's it's not a general it's often not a general pessimism about the ability to change society because often these are the same people that that you would say oh well we can get rid of the police and I'm optimistic that we'll create out of the ashes of the chaos a a beautiful and peaceful society which is a certain kind of optimism right so it's a pessimism really just with respect to the ability of of the world to get Beyond race there are people that have have accepted that that will never ever happen any example of it seeming to happen such as Obama getting elected we are going to find some way in which this is actually not the optimistic punch line that you're looking for um you know and I've seen this over and over again and you know I'll give another example because you know I think these examples they just happen in the news and people don't actually grasp their true significance uh in America we now have Juneteenth is a Federal holiday which is which celebrates the true end of slavery uh when when slaves in Texas actually received the news that slavery was abolished and that they were free I think it makes perfect sense as a Federal holiday should have been one a long time ago because it is one of the most important moments in American history but it's worth looking at you know what was said before it was a holiday and now how what it is like after right before it was made a Federal holiday you had I think it was a USA Today article saying exactly the same thing people said before Obama was elected there's we they basically said Juneteenth should be a holiday but it's not going to happen because Americans are just far too racist Americans do not want to acknowledge the real history of slavery and it's going to be a huge uphill battle if it happens and it just probably won't at all you know cut to a few months later bipartisan bill passes Juneteenth as a federal holiday with essentially no resistance and it's sort of forgotten about right the whole cynical argument in advance is not tossed out the window it's just recycled um and you know we we make all of these gains and then put them in our pockets as if they were not significant and and the pacifism persists uh this is a dynamic that I've noticed and I'm curious if it's a dynamic you've noticed as well it's it's true um much of what you say but it's possible to to both to say that um American cited British Society have a completely different now from what they were 50 60 years ago when it comes to race attitude to race uh the place of black people and minorities in society and so on um and that uh the election of Barack Obama was a a symbolic uh expression of that a symbolic expression of how much American society has changed but also to say actually it hasn't created the election Barack Obama did not create a post-racial world that um in in that sense um not that much happened um uh it was symbolically hugely important um but in in material terms uh not that much happened um and I think it's possible to say both of them because um we we can look at the important significance of Barack Obama not simply in terms of his skin color um but also the fact that he is a a liberal politician of of a particular uh Viewpoint um uh and a lot of his views um uh are um are not radical in any sense and so um it's possible to uh and in part of the problem is that um those who argue that the election of Barack Obama changed things hugely are as invested in the idea of of skin of the importance of skin color as those who say um it didn't change anything at all um and I think it's the point the the the the the the the I suppose the the thread running through our conversation has been the um let's not get so obsessed with a question of of race as uh as a category there are other categories are important and the fact that you put that you have black people in positions of power in City Halls in police forces in the white house um doesn't necessarily change things whether we're talking about race or class sure yeah that I mean that's a drum I've been beating for a long time the the idea that to put a black person in a position of power has any relation to what they are going to do for the black community right I mean this is this is one of those opinions that even the people that think they disagree with it don't actually disagree with it because the moment you start talking about someone like Clarence Thomas they'll be quick to say well that's a guy that's never done anything for black people and then I'm like wait hold on a second two seconds ago you were saying we need to elect more black leaders and it's important that Kamala Harris is a black woman it's like well what what is the actual cash value of her being black other than some combination of her beliefs values proposed policies and if that's what we're talking about well let's just skip the race and skin color thing and go straight to those that's always been my attitude right even if you even if your politics are and explicitly race for his politics right if I'm gonna say basically I'm a one-issue voter and my vote my issue is what are you going to do for my community whether that is black Muslim Asian Latino Etc there are many people like that even still you would want to Simply really go to the policies and the beliefs and the values of a person much more than you would the skin color um I mean this this brings up a kind of larger question or Paradox of the conversation which is it seems to me what you know the values that you and I share or that race in itself is not a meaningful or significant trait it does not tell me what you think it does not tell me who you are it does not tell me what you stand for it doesn't tell me whether you're a good person or a bad person it doesn't tell me whether your opinions are right or wrong it doesn't tell me if you have a sense of humor or a sense of wit or a deep level of empathy right like you could go on listing the hundred most important character traits of a human being and you wouldn't you could not even get to race in in the first hundred and it seems in other words it's a book written about race by someone that thinks race is not inherently meaningful that's interesting because most people who write books about race write it because they think race is super meaningful so I think we're both in the position of often talking about race but from the perspective of you know wanting it to matter less not more which is um which I think puts us in the minority of people that talk about race you know there's a selection bias right the people that talk about race usually come into it because they're really interested in race whereas um you said something at the very beginning which I I resonate with which is that as as a very small minority in in Britain that was attacked for your race constantly you could not help but think about race right but that's that's quite different than coming to it voluntarily right you you sort of had to think about it as a matter you were forced to think about it as a matter of everyday social life right but it's not inherently a fascinating subject to you right like racial differences don't seem to be inherently fascinating to you and and so and and at least that's my perception you can correct me if I'm wrong and I've very much felt the same way as a as a half black half Hispanic person in America I felt like I never was very interested in the race of any of my friends or or frankly in my own racial identity until I I entered an environment where suddenly race is being talked about it's it seems like every fourth word out of people's mouths is identifying my race as a black person and recruiting me to racial organizations and suddenly I now cannot help but think of myself in those terms because everyone is thinking of me in those terms but it's not anywhere from an interest that I had intrinsically as a human being so I'm curious what you make of being in the situation of you know a race writer that doesn't it doesn't think Race Matters to put it too crudely the way I look at it is that one can Define solidarity or social affiliations in two kinds of ways one can say that what matters are the values that people hold they're ideal the kinds of society they want to build or one can say what matters is there race ethnicity culture faith and so on and building solidarity is often there's a element of both in that but to me I would far rather make common calls with somebody whose views are in fact I would only make common calls as somebody whose views and ideals are similar to mine and somebody who's racer ethnicity or culture are similar to mine and part of the problem is that we've shifted from the first to the second or rather we've come to see um that being black or white or Muslim or european or English somehow defines one's ideals one's values about the world and I I'm trying to separate those two things out and say what matters are the values that you hold the ideals that you have the kind of society you want to build and not where you come from in terms of race ethnicity um uh history Heritage whatever it's where you're going to that matters not where you've come from all right kind of Malik thank you so much and uh thanks to the audience and the people at Intelligence Squared for setting up this double release podcast thank you it's a pleasure being here the book one more time is not so black and white available in fine bookstores everywhere thank you Cannon

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 6,572

Keywords: intelligence squared, debate, intelligence squared debate, top debates, best debates, most interesting debates, intelligence2, intelligencesquared, iq2, iq2 debate, iq squared, resetting the conversation on race, race, racism, coleman hughes, Race discussion, debate competition, kenan malik debate, kenan malik race, kenan malik multiculturalism, kenan malik

Id: Dp8w9h-qTK8

Length: 65min 31sec (3931 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023