Kenan Malik - The Story of Race: White Supremacy to Identity Politics.

On Tuesday 7 February we hosted an important talk by Kenan Malik.
Malik challenges the conventional histories both of the idea of race and of the struggles to confront racism. Discussing his new book Not so Black and White, Malik asks: Is white privilege real? What’s wrong with identity politics? And why is it that the more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to racial identities?

[@tomspaghetti]

Wonderful lecture, the speaker begins and ends with affirmative quotations of Franz Fanon in making an appeal to a return to Solidarity, as apposed to the contemporary currents of identitarian reduction.

[@nigelralphmurphy2852]

These arguments were old and completely discredited 50-60 years ago. He's deliberately ignoring the very real issues that are unique to the many groups he says should assimilate. Assimilation has been proven to be a form of identity death. The answer to this was multiculturalism. These identities he complains of were chosen by the groups involved. They were not forced onto people. His argument is weak as he flounders during his talk and during his answers during question time. Allowing people to be themselves does not weaken a society, it makes it more cohesive. I think he's actually advocating a monocultural England and perhaps advocating a very strict immigration policy that excludes migrants who are not the same as white Britons. He wants to go backward to some mythical golden age. If this past golden age was brought back, there would be no place for him in it. Question: in his world do brown people fit into England and English society?

[@ThePhantomTerror]

You’re dead wrong: Kenan Malik has criticized Europe’s strict immigration policy. He has written many articles on the Guardian about this.

[@Tannhauser108]

You've got quite the imagination, Nigel. You've literally got everything wrong.

[@Timur21]

Who is speaking of assimilation? You’re confusing identity with identity politics.. It is fine for groups to maintain their identity and have their own demands.. The main cohesive framework within a multicultural society still needs to be more universalist than identitarian. Were much better off with an anti racism that sees everyone as “bleeding red”: we’re all essentially the same and have more in common than we think, than with an anti racism that sees groups as static oppressors and victims.. The first is a formula for coalition building and unity. The second is the formula for war and violence, or at the least “divorce”.