Questions of privilege

In his forthcoming book Everyday Hate, Dave Rich recounts an incident in which the senior leadership of a “major national institution” met to discuss the organisation’s anti-racist efforts. One of those present argued that the organisation, whose industry has had several recent, high-profile incidents of anti-Semitism, should not limit its discussion to skin-colour racism. The chair refused to consider it, “to the surprise of many around the table, Jewish and not”. 

Like so much of the anti-Semitism Rich describes in his brilliantly thorough, data-driven and at times very witty book, this story is exactly as the title says: something that happens every day. As Rich writes, anti-Jewish hatred has been “tragically separated” from our understanding of race and racism.

One major reason for that disconnection is that, as Kenan Malik writes in his new book Not So Black and White, “debates about racism have become framed largely through discussions of whiteness and of white privilege”. This, as the author puts it, is the idea that “white is a useful category in which to place everyone from Elon Musk to a cleaner in a Tesla factory”: that skin colour is the most important factor driving inequality, past and the present. It casts racism as an enduring and inevitable part of life, and argues for a strictly hierarchical understanding of race and racial inequality with black people at the bottom and white people at the top. It focuses less on individual characteristics and more on that of groups, and is the central feature of many of the debates dividing western society today.

There are evident flaws in such an approach. Although not all Jews have pale skin, a view of anti-racism that sees “whiteness” as the major explanatory lens to understand race and racism by necessity excludes and flattens the Jewish experience. At the start of the 20th century, Jewish people across most of the world enjoyed the same rights as their fellow citizens. In 1905, their right to immigrate freely into the British empire was sharply curtailed by the Aliens Act.

And, as Andrew S Rosenberg details in his engaging history of border control, Undesirable Immigrants, by 1924, Jews, along with other “undesirables” from southern and eastern Europe had their right to immigrate to America limited too. Only people from the so-called “Nordic” group (a definition that bizarrely included not only the actual Nordic countries but people from the UK and Germany, too) could travel to the US without restriction.

To describe as ‘privilege’ the fact that one is not being denied equal treatment is to turn the struggle for justice on its head

Even the “Nordic” would not have passed muster had Benjamin Franklin had his way. As Malik recounts, the founding father was not only a polymath in the fields of science, political philosophy and statecraft. He was also a pioneering racist. He complained that the US risked being overwhelmed by non-whites, a group that included not only “all Africa” which was “black or tawny”, Asia which was “chiefly tawny” but also the Spanish, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, who were “generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans”. Only the English and “the Saxons” managed to climb past Franklin’s colour bar.

We Jews have a wry joke that we are “Schrödinger’s whites”. When it suits the motivations of one group of anti-Semites we are white, when it suits the motivations of another, we aren’t. But as both Rosenberg and Malik’s books demonstrate, quantum whiteness is not a condition that is confined to Jews. “Many, perhaps most, whites in the 19th century were in a similar position of being white and not-white at the same time,” writes Malik.

That the currently dominant theory of racism struggles to incorporate the Jewish experience is not a mere historical oddity or a problem confined to the Jews. In the UK, according to the government’s race disparity audit, the ethnicity that currently has the worst outcomes, across employment, life expectancy and access to basic goods and services, are those from a Gypsy Roma or Traveller background: a group that, like the Jews, cannot distinctly be described as “non-white”.

And, just as Italians in 1920s America or Jews throughout much of the western world in the first half of the 20th century found, the UK’s GRT population is living through the erosion of hard-won rights. The idea that “white privilege” is the chief determinant of outcomes cannot be reconciled with the historical account in Rosenberg’s work of how rights have been bestowed and then removed on racial grounds. Nor can it easily explain or combat the terrifying rise in anti-Semitic attitudes among Britain’s young as revealed in Rich’s book: a third of people aged 18-24 consistently agree with anti-Semitic remarks in polling, far above that found among older generations.

Class remains the most important factor driving inequalities

Nor does the idea of “white privilege” provide a useful programme for the lives and prospects of the non-white. As Malik writes: “To describe as ‘privilege’ the fact that one is not being denied equal treatment is to turn the struggle for justice on its head.” Yet this is the ahistorical and unambitious place that so much racial advocacy finds itself in the third decade of the 21st century: with a governing theory about racial injustice that neither fits the established facts — past and present — and offers little in the way of meaningful ambition about the future.

Malik’s aim is to set out why this has happened and how it can be reversed. He has two big arguments. The first is that “race did not give birth to racism. Racism gave birth to race.” As he demonstrates, the ancestors of today’s African-Americans were not enslaved because they were black: “blackness” was invented to justify the peculiar atrocities of the modern slave trade. Rosenberg’s work shows, too, that “race” has largely been constructed to justify harsh border regimes, in ways that are often arbitrary and unclear.

It is not a novel insight. But it is one worth repeating, and Malik manages to compile an exhaustive list of facts and stories without the book feeling laboured or dull.  

It is also an argument that can be found in the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a commentator who, like Malik, ranges across topics but who writes on the opposite “side”. Where Malik is ultimately an optimist about the ability of liberal and universalist ideas to transcend racial categories, Coates is a pessimist. But the same Coates who, as Malik quotes, wrote of the struggle against racism that “the earthquake cannot be subpoenaed, the typhoon will not bend under indictment” also wrote that “race is the child of racism, not the father”. So why have Malik and Coates reached different conclusions?

Malik’s argument is that what unites both the racist far-right and the dominant modes of thinking on the anti-racist left is they are both “post-liberal” ideologies. They are driven by what they see as either the excesses, or the shortcomings of liberalism. These philosophies are by their nature pessimistic: on the right, they are pessimistic about the ability of different “races” to thrive and live together, on the left, they are pessimistic about eradicating racism.

Malik’s historic heroes are thinkers he classifies as liberal universalists — James Baldwin, John Stuart Mill, CLR James, Hannah Arendt — but the culprits in the collapse of universalist politics are for him also liberals. It is, in his telling, the union-breaking of Margaret Thatcher, the class-free politics of Tony Blair, and the dominance of “neoliberalism” that creates the world we live in.

He sees the critical decade in the UK as the 1960s: a decade in which the-then Labour government legislated to decriminalise homosexuality and to allow limited access to abortion and brought forward the first laws against racial and sexual discrimination, but also proposed measures to limit the rights and privileges of trade unions. While welcoming those achievements in the social sphere, Malik argues that they have been undermined by liberal excesses in the economic one. Only social movements and a return to class politics, he says, can bring about a return to broad, effective and ambitious campaigns for racial justice.

Drawing on numerous case studies, Malik demonstrates that class remains the most important factor driving inequalities, and that the aim of campaigners for racial equality should be cross-racial and colour-blind movements based on class.

But the problem, surely, is not one of liberalism’s failure but of its success? It has helped create a class of people of all colours whose direct experience of race and racism is not of street violence or significant economic disempowerment, but of poor representation in the boardroom or careless language in the C-suite.

As Malik argues convincingly, the individualistic mode of seeing racial inequalities offers little to the poorest and most disadvantaged, and is a poor way to understand racial inequalities. But to the risen class of successful ethnic minorities it is, frequently, the mode that speaks the most to their concerns and needs.

What is needed is, yes, a return to class-based politics. But to accomplish that, Malik needs to find a way to convince those who have done well out of individualism and the economic changes of the past half-century that class politics doesn’t represent a fatal challenge to their own privileges. That might well be an impossible task.

Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics by Kenan Malik Hurst £20, 328 pages

Everyday Hate: How Anti-Semitism is Built into Our World — And How You Can Change It by Dave Rich Biteback £20, 320 pages

Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration by Andrew S Rosenberg Princeton £98.50/$120 384 pages

Stephen Bush is an FT columnist and associate editor

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