Sara Wajid
No other single action on the world stage has mobilised second and third generation British Asians as quickly or fiercely as the invasion of Gaza. Not Iraq, not 9/11, not the de Menezes shooting, nothing.
Within hours the call to join demonstrations started, by text, email and Facebook. My invites came only from British Asian friends—mainly, but not exclusively, from “cultural” Muslims like me; often from the normally politically inactive, even from politically dormant suburban young mums. Old family friends who hadn’t contacted me for years, and who couldn’t possibly know where I stood on Palestine, got in touch, secure in an unspoken assumption that any right-thinking Asian would be on their side.
Although I was shocked by the civilian deaths in Gaza, this assumption quickly rankled. I stopped opening the bloodied baby corpse attachments. The unsubtle antisemitic undertone of calls for a Donna Karan boycott didn’t help.
Read more »
Mary Fitzgerald
A Mercy
by Toni Morrison (Chatto &?Windus, £15.99)
As Toni Morrison knows, remembering in America can be an act fraught with difficulty. Because of the near universal illiteracy of slaves, the firsthand voices of black Americans are rare before the civil war. For writers like Poe, Twain, Hemingway and Cather, blacks often served as white freedom’s antithesis: they embodied what Morrison termed in one of her essays “the terror of darkness, slavery, and nature.” Long-lauded as the “voice of America’s conscience” or, perhaps more appropriately, the “laureate-poet of America’s pain,” Morrison has laboured since her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970)—inspired by a (black) childhood friend’s desire for blue eyes—to push beyond this limiting stereotype and the weight of its tradition.
Some critics have labelled her “racism’s avenging angel,” and see her 1993 Nobel prize as an exercise in political correctness. She has been accused of inverse racism. Yet since that debut—and its visceral rage at the “universal love of white baby dolls and Shirley Temple”—her characters have proved diverse, their perspectives nuanced. Morrison has been compared with Faulkner and Emily Dickinson, but the writers who have influenced her most are African—Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Léopold Senghor, champion of the pan-African negritude movement—and she has drawn on African traditions of oral, collective storytelling to create narratives that are elliptical and fragmented rather than merely polemical.
Read more »
Jonathan Derbyshire
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
In 1963, the African-American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin took issue with Bobby Kennedy’s prediction that a black man would be president within 40 years. Kennedy assumed, he said, that blacks would be ready to “accept and adopt white standards.” Whites, Baldwin argued, thought of themselves as possessing some intrinsic value that black people wanted or needed.
There was a reminder of this on the morning after Obama’s election victory, when conservative black intellectual Shelby Steele argued in the LA Times that Obama’s success lay in his ability to tell white Americans what they want to hear: that racism is no longer a barrier to black advancement. By presenting himself as a screen onto which whites could project their anxieties, Obama offers redemption for America’s original sin of slavery.
Read more »
Jonathan Derbyshire
For his article “Post-racial kitsch?” (Prospect, December), Jonathan Derbyshire interviewed a number of leading African-American thinkers, both before and after the US election, about how an Obama presidency would affect America’s fraught racial politics.
His conversations with Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanian-American philosopher and theorist of identity, John McWhorter, an African-American linguist who has attacked “black victimology,” and Tommie Shelby, a historian of the black solidarity movement, are recorded in full here.
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
3rd November 2008
Conversation between Jonathan Derbyshire and Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a philosopher, cultural theorist and novelist. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University
Read more »
Andrew Gilligan
Discuss this article at First Drafts , Prospect’s blog
If anyone doubted the need for that much-mocked practice, race awareness training, or the distance that it seems to have carried the Metropolitan police in the past 25 years, they should read the following quotes from a 1983 report, “Police and People in London,” by the Policy Studies Institute.
“I call them niggers myself,” said one Met officer. “Whilst not being very intelligent, they have this low animal cunning,” was how another put it. A third said: “Well, they’re used to running round in the jungle, plucking what they want from the trees…”
Read more »
Myron Magnet
Barack Obama says America needs to have a conversation about race. In fact, one is already in full swing—and it is happening among African-Americans. Its spark was a speech that television star Bill Cosby gave in 2004. In books and articles, on talk shows and in town meetings, at barbecues and barber shops, African-Americans have been arguing over his words ever since. Their discussion is the most hopeful development in race relations in years.
With a 50 per cent high school dropout rate and a 70 per cent illegitimacy rate, with African-Americans convicted for half the nation’s murders though making up only 13 per cent of the population, black America—despite the rise of a large middle class—is in trouble. “We can’t blame white people,” Cosby said in his contentious speech, which marked the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs Board school desegregation ruling, “it’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing.” Cosby went on to quote Jesse Jackson’s words, “No one can save us from us but us.”
Sure, racism hasn’t vanished, as Cosby acknowledges in his 2007 book Come On People, a follow-up to his speech written with Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. “But for all the talk of systemic racism… we must look at ourselves and understand our own responsibility.” Even with lingering discrimination, “there are more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before.” When people tell you, “‘You can’t get up, you’re a victim,’” Cosby warns, “that’s when you know it’s the devil you’re hearing.”
Read more »
Kamran Nazeer
Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience
by Ziauddin Sardar (Granta, £20)
In Pakistan, a balti is a bucket. In Britain, it’s a dish served in Pakistani restaurants. So it is, as Ziauddin Sardar spends the first 30 pages of this book explaining, emblematic of British Asian identity: it’s not British, it’s not Asian, it’s British Asian. That’s a trivial insight, but I mention it to warn the reader that Sardar—a major Asian and Muslim commentator, a columnist for the New Statesman, a maker of programmes for the BBC and Channel 4—often spends a long time presenting arguments that no one disputes.
One other general assessment: Sardar can’t write. He renders interesting people into dull, overused adjectives. For example, the smart women that he meets are invariably “slim” (the slim women are invariably “smart”). And, once he has listed his four adjectives, all that remains of the people he introduces is the dull dialogue he gives them. As Sardar quotes himself asking, “Where does Afghan-ness feature in your mental makeup?” No one talks like this, and no one ought to write like this either.
Read more »
Max Nathan
Since 2003, immigration has been one of the top three issues in every one of Mori’s monthly surveys of public opinion. The government has changed immigration policy four times since 2001. Now, with the economy in trouble, some people are worried that immigration is effectively coming to an end, as recent arrivals from eastern Europe head back home. Others still feel that Britain has too many immigrants. Last month MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames called for an overall “migration cap”—an idea rejected in this month’s Prospect by then home office minister Liam Byrne.
But debates tend to focus on the short term—about the numbers coming in and out of the country. There is a larger, long-term trend: many migrants settle, and migration is helping create bigger, more diverse societies. There are two main effects of this. First, diversity and population growth help drive each other. Migrants are helping grow the British population, and those who stay are helping to raise the birth rate. Population growth is now at its fastest for 30 years; the most recent figures suggest that Britain now has about 61m people.
Second, this diversity is heavily urbanised. Most migrants and ethnic minority communities are in cities, especially big ones. London accounted for over half of net immigration in 2002-03; other big cities took 69 per cent of the rest. And in some urban areas—particularly London—over half of all births were to non-British born mothers. Similarly, our existing ethnic minority communities are largely found in and around the cities.
Read more »
Mark Pagel
Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate
by Kenan Malik (Oneworld, £18.99)
Trust: Self-interest and the Common Good
by Marek Kohn (OUP, £10.99)
Read more »
Kenan Malik
The debate about race has traditionally pitted so-called “race realists” against anti-racists. Race realists argue that races are natural divisions of humankind, anti-racists that race is a social construction of little biological value.
My new book Strange Fruit is an attempt to rethink this debate and show why both sides are wrong. Races are not natural divisions, but they do have biological consequences and can be of practical use in scientific and medical research.
I was intrigued when I heard that Mark Pagel was going to review Strange Fruit for Prospect. Pagel is a race realist. I hoped that he would help move the debate into fresh territory. What I didn’t expect was that he would write about the book without seemingly having read it. Pagel simply assumes that I am regurgitating old-fashioned anti-racist criticism and responds with old-fashioned race realist rebuttals.
Read more »
Post a comment »
