“Strange Fruit” by Kenan Malik: A polemic against racism and identity politics

Kenan Malik has situated himself in the crosshairs of the dispute over the nature of race... His latest book, Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate, was long listed as the British Royal Society’s 2009 science book of the year. It is a wide-ranging polemic against those who claim that race is a biological fact...

Malik points out that identity politics mimics racism itself. The two outlooks, he emphasizes, share the claim that one’s political, social and cultural viewpoints should derive from one’s sex or ethnic identity. Liberal thinking, he says, has become infected with a racial view of the world. “Out of the withered seeds of racial science have flowered the politics of identity. Strange fruit, indeed,” he observes...

Malik concludes that race did not cause inequality, but that the persistence and growth of inequality provided the basis for the growth of racial thinking. This profound point, well worth emphasizing, is at the center of his prior volume, The Meaning of Race...

While there are many complex intellectual strands that influence the rise of ideas, at bottom they reflect the movement of social forces. At critical historical junctures, certain ideas are “selected,” or found to express the interests of social forces, particularly those of the dominant class. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” said Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto...

As a book emphasizing the implications of racial thought for science, Strange Fruit lays less emphasis on this relationship between rise of ideologies and class forces than Malik’s prior work. Nevertheless, the growth of racism historically did not reflect the state of biology. It was the reverse — biology was often interpreted in the service of prevailing social interests, a point he himself refers to.

The origins of racist ideology were complex and multifaceted; the ruling classes seized upon this outlook repeatedly to try to control rising class tensions using Jim Crow in the US in the aftermath of the rise of organized working class, anti-Semitism in Europe, particularly in France and Russia for the same reasons, and various formats around the world, such as “White Canada” and “White Australia.” Moreover, the persistence of this racial ideology, although sometimes transformed into various culturally or politically correct formulations, expresses the continued need to suppress the class contradictions within modern society.

In conclusion, Malik returns to the reactionary impasse of identity politics and multiculturalism. In a very valuable section, he indicts the postmodernists for their inability to confront the problem of social inequality and their pessimism, pointing to the role of the New Left and the Frankfurt School.

He denounces the viewpoint that the Holocaust was rooted in the Enlightenment, as well as the position of post-World War II radicals who despaired of the role of the working class. As he correctly puts it, the New Left turned to surrogate proletariats — Third World liberations struggles, feminists, etc. — while its supposed anti-racism turned against rationalism and all that was progressive in the Enlightenment.

Notes:

1. Identity politics, the promotion of racial, ethnic or sexual group identity as a social interest group, arose as a major middle class phenomenon in the 1970s under conditions of the failure of the war on poverty, general economic stagnation and the overall collapse of liberal reformism. Significant sections of the middle class swung behind affirmative action and similar policies that dispensed privilege among elite layers of various ethnic constituencies. Living standards of the broad masses of working people, African-American and Latino as well as white, women and men, stagnated or continued to decline...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/frui-m08.shtml