Kenan Malik's "The Meaning of Race:Race, History and Culture in Western Society" (Book Note)

 

"The Meaning of Race" offers a comprehensive examination of the origins and development of the concept of race. Kenan Malik, the book's author, demonstrates impressive scholarship, drawing on a wide array of disciplines such as history, philosophy, biology, anthropology, sociology, and literature. Despite being a non-academic independent writer and journalist, Malik presents a well-organized array of sources, and his multidisciplinary approach, coupled with a direct writing style, ensures intellectual coherence. The absence of academic affiliation does not compromise the book's intellectual rigor, as it consistently avoids caricature and polemic. Instead, Malik's work stands out for its sustained quality, bold arguments, and the likelihood of becoming a central reference in the sociology of race and racism.

 

The book initiates by asserting a widely accepted sociological notion: that race lacks significant biological foundations. Malik argues against the idea of genetic variation as an objective basis for social inequality, contending that perceived racial distinctions are social constructs devised to rationalize such inequality. The exploration of three contentious themes follows this premise. First, Malik challenges recent claims suggesting that the Enlightenment was the intellectual root of white European superiority and modern racism. Instead, he posits that the idea of race emerged from the objective inequalities of capitalism juxtaposed with the Enlightenment's emphasis on human equality. Malik supports this argument by highlighting exceptions and using Rousseau as an example, asserting that the Enlightenment predominantly asserted differences in moral and social characteristics rather than innate traits. He contends that even advocates of slavery in late-eighteenth-century Britain rarely justified the practice through biological inferiority but rather in terms of property rights. The acceptance of definite biological differences within humanity, according to Malik, gained traction only with the emergence of systematic divisions in the capitalist economies of Northern Europe in the early nineteenth century. Thus, Malik argues that race and racism initially arose to rationalize division within European society, primarily between classes, rather than to justify the exploitation and subordination of non-white populations outside it.

The book's second theme delves into how the tenets of 'scientific racism' permeated political and social thought from the mid-nineteenth century to 1945. During this period, racism shifted its focus from the white European working classes to blacks. Imperialism and nationalism served as primary means of disseminating these assumptions, drawing heavily on Eric Hobsbawm's analysis of the racialization of nationalism in the late nineteenth century. The book further explores anthropology, particularly the work of Franz Boas and Levi-Strauss, where the conceptualization of culture became akin to race, adopting a reified and ahistorical determinacy.

 

The third theme addresses the impact of the postwar order's disintegration and the end of the Cold War on racial ideology. It includes a lively chapter on how racism, disguised as cultural defense, underlies efforts to protect 'the nation' from immigrants, Islam, and the underclass. A more extensive chapter, influenced by postmodernist thought, discusses anti-racist discourse. This section critiques recent approaches to ethnic identity and difference, highlighting the overuse of the concept of the 'Other' and critiquing the naive voluntarism of those who view identity as a matter of changing preference within discourse. The chapter builds toward a passionate conclusion, arguing that a relativist and fragmented epistemology, coupled with the relentless pursuit of ethnic diversity, compromises with the racist assertion of immutable difference. Malik advocates for resurrecting the tattered yet still valid Enlightenment standard of universal equality.