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23 January 2023

How identity politics props up racism

There are many ways to be black, as new books by Kenan Malik and Colin Grant show –and a fixation on racial identity is anything but progressive.

By Tomiwa Owolade

What does it mean to be black? This is a question examined by two authors who have written and spoken about race for more than two decades: Kenan Malik and Colin Grant. Malik, an Observer columnist, argues in his excellent new book Not So Black and White that we “live in an age in which our thinking is saturated with racial ideology and the embrace of difference”. But “the more we despise racial thinking, the more we cling to it. It is like an ideological version of Stockholm syndrome.”

Grant takes a slightly different approach. Unlike Malik’s book – an intellectual history of the concept of race, and a critique of contemporary left-wing identity politics – Grant’s I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be is a family memoir. It is not a conceptual account of what it means to be black. It is visceral.

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