How Identity Politics Aids the Right and Divides the Left
A review of "Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics" by Kenan Malik
Over the last decades in Europe and the U.S., economic inequality and insecurity have risen while the left has lost support—particularly among working-class and low-educated voters who have suffered most from these trends. A disproportionate number of these voters now support nativist, nationalist right-wing parties. How can we understand these developments?
One way, dominant on the contemporary progressive left, is to blame psychological or cultural pathologies of white people: in this view, declining support for the left and rising support for a nativist, nationalist right is a consequence of the continuing, perhaps even growing, power of racism or “white supremacy” in Western societies.
This argument has obvious empirical problems: racism has been declining in the United States and Western Europe for decades, while the cross-national correlation between the level of racism in a particular country and the amount of support received by nativist, nationalist parties is low.
But putting aside these and other empirical problems, a small but growing chorus of voices on the left argue that this argument is plagued by a more fundamental flaw: it ignores the role the left’s identitarian politics has played in facilitating many economic, political and social pathologies bemoaned by the left today.
Among the most powerful of these voices is Kenan Malik, one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals. A remarkable polymath, Malik has authored books, newspaper and magazine columns, and documentaries on topics ranging from race, religion, and colonialism to human nature, bioethics, and political philosophy. His latest book, Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics, is a tour-de-force of intellectual history as well as a political polemic and a plea to the left. Malik takes many of his leftist confreres to task for misunderstanding the causes and function of racism and thereby, unwittingly and unintentionally, contributing to the maintenance of an unjust and unequal status quo.
For most of history, the concept of race did not exist—but group distinctions and inequality were the norm. Christian societies discriminated against Jews and Muslims; Islamic societies discriminated against Jews and Christians. In Europe, birth into a noble or a peasant family determined everything from access to property and the payment or non-payment of taxes to the type of justice system and punishment an individual was subjected to.
This began to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment spread the idea that all individuals were created equal, endowed from birth with certain inalienable rights. (This idea, of course, was central to the American and French Revolutions.) At the same time, however, capitalism began to spread across the West, creating new inequalities and forms of exploitation. Here lies a great paradox of the modern era: the idea of equality and natural rights became increasingly accepted intellectually and politically while at the same time economic development generated new socioeconomic divisions and forms of injustice. Modern racism, Malik argues, grew out of the need to understand and justify these contradictions.
Different contexts produced different racial distinctions. In Europe, for instance, laborers and the poor were the main subaltern groups up through the nineteenth century and were accordingly often portrayed as physically distinct as well as intellectually and morally inferior. As Malik notes, for Victorian elites “the working class was as racially distinct from the middle class as blacks were from whites, while also possessing many of the same traits as blacks.” The Irish, subject to British colonialism long before Africans, Indians, and others, were similarly viewed as “evolutionarily inferior,” and as having “bestial, ape-like or demonic features.” After the unification of Italy in the 1860s, economically advanced northern Italians regularly looked upon the underdeveloped southern regions of their new country as racially distinct, “barbaric,” “primitive,” “irrational,” and in need of subjugation and colonization. Such prejudices followed the Irish, Southern Italians, and others to the New World, leading them to be viewed as “non-white” up through the twentieth century.
Since slavery and colonialism created the most glaring contradiction between the purportedly universal values of the Enlightenment and the reality of extreme inequality and exploitation, racism assumed its most extreme and barbaric form in places where this contradiction was most acute.
Europeans justified the economic extraction and brutal violence carried out in their colonies by recategorizing their inhabitants as members of a different race, rather than as members of a common human family against whom such cruel practices could not be justified. Malik quotes the German military commander Lothar von Trotta, who rationalized the almost complete extermination of the Herero people in the German colony of Namibia on the grounds that “Against Unmenschen [“nonhumans”] one cannot conduct war ‘humanely.’”
In the United States, Malik observes, arguing that Africans belonged to a different race than white Americans became “the means to bridge the contradiction between the assertion that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ the claim of the American Declaration of Independence, and the reality of a slave-owning nation. The contradiction was waved away by insisting that certain people were by nature unequal and not deserving of liberty and equality.” After the abolition of slavery, racism persisted since it retained the “useful” functions of enabling Southern elites to justify the continued subjugation of black Americans while also thwarting the type of cross-class solidarity that could have threatened the political and economic status quo. As the great African-American activist and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois despairingly noted in 1935, “There probably are not today in the world two groups [poor black and white workers] with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.”
Even in the eighteenth century, there were those who recognized and bemoaned the contradiction between the proclaimed universal values of the Enlightenment and the reality of extreme inequality and exploitation. Within this category, two main approaches to dealing with this contradiction developed. One insisted on the inviolable nature of Enlightenment universalism, denying that birthplace, skin color, religion, culture or anything else was more fundamental than our common humanity; everyone, in this view, was entitled to the same inalienable rights. This universalist approach was associated with the left up through the 20th century.
Alongside this universalist tradition, Malik traces another approach back to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). Herder rejected the idea of race, but believed communities (or Volk) joined together by particular histories, cultural values, languages and so on were the fundamental building blocks of humanity. Herder did not view these communities hierarchically; he believed all were distinct and worthy. However, precisely because he valued the existence and distinctiveness of various Volk so highly, he abhorred, as Malik puts it, migration and mixture since they were “detrimental to… the beauty or uniqueness of a people.” Only when a people stayed attached to the geographic region of their ancestors could they remain “whole.” Only then could the Earth be “considered as a garden, where in one spot one human national plant, in another, another, bloomed in its proper figure and nature; where in this spot one species of animal, in that, another, pursued its course, according to its instincts and character.” To put it in language more familiar to Americans, Herder truly believed in the doctrine of “separate but equal.”
Herder supported Enlightenment ideas of equality, was hostile to colonialism, and rejected notions of inherent European superiority. But just as in reality the doctrine of “separate but equal” resulted in “separate and unequal,” so too did Herder’s ideas create a perilous and slippery slope too many were happy to slide down. As Malik notes, “once it was accepted that different peoples were motivated by different sentiments unique to themselves, that these sentiments inexpressibly imbued a people’s history, tradition and consciousness, and defined every individual’s being, it was not a great leap to view those sentiments as racial” and use them to validate segregation, apartheid, and even genocide.
Despite the obvious dangers of Herderian thinking, it re-emerged after the Second World War. That parts of the right continued to be attracted to such thinking is perhaps not surprising. What is surprising is that it was embraced on the left as well.
During the postwar decades advocates of universalism and Herderian-identitarianism battled it out on the left. Malik discusses, for example, the confrontation in the U.S. between integrationists working in the universalist tradition who fought to gain equal access to all aspects of American society for African-Americans, and black nationalists, who in classic Herderian fashion viewed “black people as a self-contained group with its own culture, values and ways of living.” Similarly, Malik argues that the initial “differences between [Martin Luther King, Jr.] and Malcolm X expressed the tension between universalist and [Herderian]-identitarian perspectives, between the idea that black Americans are an integral part of American society and the belief that equality could come only through separation.”
By the early twenty-first century, however, the identitarian approach triumphed on the left in the form of anti-racist thinking and as the “often-unacknowledged foundation of identity politics.” In the United States, Malik emphasizes the influence of contemporary activists and intellectuals like Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo, all of whom insist on the primacy of race in defining who we are and believe black identity is “a thing to be guarded, policed,” and protected from white people whose racism is “permanent and ineradicable.”
Identitarian thinking is not, of course limited to the left; it is pervasive on the right as well. And while Malik is careful to point out important differences between left- and right-wing identitarianism, most notably that the former “emerged from the decay of genuine movements for social change and betterment,” and the latter “from the attempt to restore the fortunes of the far right after the disintegration of fascist organizations in the post-Holocaust world,” he stresses their fundamentally similar rejection of Enlightenment universalism and insistence that “humanity is divided into discrete groups and shaped by differences, not commonalities.” Also worth noting is that both contemporary right- and left-identitarians view group identities through a cultural lens; in the past, the right tended towards a biological view of race. These similarities can sometimes make it difficult to determine whether identitarian arguments are coming from the left or right.
In 2020, for example, the National Museum of African American History and Culture attempted to delineate the purported distinctions between white and black culture, putting things like “hard work,” “objective, rational thinking” and an appreciation for “planning for the future” and keeping “time schedules” in the former category—a description that could just as easily have come from the rantings of a right-wing racist.
Or take, for example, the following passage:
The true wealth of the world is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples…Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness…Will the earth be reduced to something homogeneous because of deculturalizing and depersonalizing trends for which American imperialism is now the most cynical and arrogant vector? Or will people find the means for the necessary resistance in their beliefs, traditions, and ways of seeing the world? This is really the decisive question that has been raised at the beginning of the next millennium.
This may sound like the screed of an anti-racist, post-colonialist thinker, but they are in fact the words of Alain de Benoist—a figure revered by the American, European, and Russian extreme right. De Benoist claims to reject traditional biological racism, insisting that his goal is simply protecting European (or Christian) civilization from external threats. In order to do so, he defended apartheid in the past; today he views “Americanization” and “Islamization” as the main threats to cultural purity and vociferously opposes both. In order to make his Herderian ethnopluralist bona fides clear, de Benoist says he is happy for Muslims to uphold their own traditions, just as long as they do so in their “own” countries.
Not So Black and White is a plea to the left to recognize the dangers of identitarianism. While this worldview may stem from a creditable desire to fight racism, it fundamentally misunderstands its origins and function and is unable to effectively combat it. Throughout modern history racism has served to justify inequality and exploitation while dividing its victims. That a political right which aims to protect an unjust and unequal status quo has an interest in promoting racial or cultural group distinctions makes sense; for a left that ostensibly wants to promote justice and equality, it does not.
Malik joins here with a small but growing number of leftwing thinkers, including Nancy Fraser and Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr., who view leftwing identitarianism as having been in an unholy, but perhaps unwitting, alliance with neoliberal capitalism over the past decades. As Malik puts it, by “delinking race and class and obscuring the social and political roots of both working-class inequalities and racial injustices,” left identitarianism has made it harder to deal with both. “Just as in the nineteenth century racial identity was used to break-up class alliances, and to persuade white workers that their interests lay in their whiteness, not in their class location, so today the language of identity leads to the same place, though without necessarily the conscious intention of doing so”
Ultimately, the only way forward for the left is to return to the universalism it had historically championed. “Radical universalists from Toussaint Louverture to CLR James...recognized,” Malik stresses, “the importance of Enlightenment ideals in challenging racism and colonialism” and understood “that racial barbarism sprung from the denial of such ideals to all of humanity.” As many in the West question whether our increasingly unequal, divided and diverse democracies can survive, more people on the left should take pleas like Malik’s seriously.
Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is currently working on a book about the decline of the left, the rise of the populist right, and the fate of democracy.