“How do we save those children from dying? That is the question.” With what reads like a wonderful politicisation of a very famous line, Kehinde Andrews stills his audience at the Tate Britain. The children he is talking about are the children of impoverished families in Africa, one of whom dies every ten seconds. He is promoting his new book, Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century, in which he redefines the Black radicalism which came to prominence through the work of Malcom X during the civil rights movement against a whole host of ideologies with which is it constantly confused. Black radicalism is not, he tells us, simply “a tradition”: we need to understand it “as its own political ideology”, and a blueprint for major change. Afua Hirsch, author of the acclaimed Brit(ish), a friend of Andrews who is interviewing him, reads out what she wrote on the front of the first manuscript: “I have been waiting for this book all my life.”
Crucial to Back to Black’s argument is a call for a radical overhaul of what we understand by the term “radical”. That it is not the same thing as “extremist”, but quite the opposite. As Andrews explains, extremism is taking the founding principles of a methodology as far as they can go, an example of this being Islamic State militants with Islam. Radicalism, conversely, is the stripping away of preconceived ideas and pre-existing structures and “grasping things at the root”, as academic Angela Davis explained in her 1990 essay “Let Us All Rise Together” . In the context of racism, this manifests itself as a drive to treat the problem rather than its symptoms.
Content from our partners
