Malik’s book is full of delicious nuggets of the kind, and though his claims about the modern invention of race and racism aren’t news, he must be commended for the sheer accumulation of evidence in their favour. Through it all, he maintains a consistent and compelling argument: that race and racism served as alibis for class-based regimes of domination and exploitation that took hold — again, paradoxically — in the wake of the Enlightenment.
Slavery in the American South, for example, was racialised after the fact, as a way to break alliances between European indentured servants and African slaves, and to legitimate the greater use of slaves (whose bondage had no limits). In Europe, meanwhile, as capitalist development necessitated imperial expansion, good Enlightenment liberals increasingly adopted racialised claims about the need for the higher races to discipline the lower.
In the imperial cores, meanwhile, they came to treat their own outwardly “white” working classes as a different race. Indeed, race “scientists” ranked various European peoples according to the different quotients of Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean mojo that supposedly coursed in their veins; it just so happened that the Irish were found to have an outsize portion of Mediterranean “genes” — a fact that naturally explained their subjugation.
Even within individual European countries, the working classes came to be coded as black in their supposed laziness and antisocial nature. An item in The Daily Telegraph, for example, lamented that “there are a good many negroes in Southampton, who have the taste of their tribe for any disturbance that appears safe”; the paper, to be clear, was referring to the overwhelmingly white English working class.
Perhaps his most discomfiting argument — discomfiting in its unassailability — is that Nazi Germany didn’t rupture the ordinary development of Euro-American ideas on race and equality, but fulfilled them. Long before the National Socialists set out on their racial project, Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the moral rightness of subjugating Native Americans, for they were “but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than… wild beasts”. In the Congo, Namibia, Australia, and, yes, British India, good liberals carried out their “compulsion to civilize”, as Malik puts it, with unspeakable tortures and mass atrocities.
America, especially, provided a racial template for the Nazis. The 1934 National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation noted that “the dominant political ideology in the USA must be characterised as entirely liberal and democratic” made it “all the more astonishing how extensive race legislation is”. The premier Nazi scholar of American law admired its “artificial line-drawing”, which dealt with the problem of “mongrels” by dividing the entire population into two groups, “whites and coloreds”, without fretting too much about details. In places, Nazi jurists felt American laws went too far, such as the rule that people with even a drop of “negro blood” are to be treated as black.
Did this affinity — between the world’s leading liberal regimes and their National Socialist foil in World War II — represent a betrayal of Enlightenment values? Yes and no, per Malik. The Enlightenment, he argues, may have inaugurated the modern ideology of race, but it also set forth the premises necessary to emancipate people from all arbitrary hierarchies.
The problem was that the radical, anti-racist Enlightenment of, say, a Diderot was eclipsed by the more moderate posture of a Burke or an Adam Smith, which was prepared to accept domination in the name of pragmatism and even “progress”. And as the liberatory promises of the Enlightenment crashed on the rocky shores of capitalist political economy, with its need for colonial expansion, darker racial sentiments took hold, as did the impulse for national purification and separation.
It fell to others — to Europe’s victims — to bring Enlightenment ideas to their logical conclusion. The heroes of Malik’s book are the “black Jacobins” of the Haitian revolution as well as C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and even Malcom X in his later years. These were figures who saw — or in time came to see — that class and economic exploitation form the more fundamental power relationship in modern society. Race, in many ways, works to legitimate class-based domination and, especially in the United States, to forestall the emergence of a cross-racial labour movement.
Progressive identity politics, he suggests, obsessed with “cultural appropriation” and language-policing, harkens back to old ideas of racial separateness. It, too, helps forestall class solidarity across skin colour. At one point, Malik notes archly that one of the earliest “Black Power” conferences, in the Nixon era, was sponsored by… makeup brand Clairol.
Malik’s class-based analysis is largely correct: once you notice how 21st-century identity politics helps uphold today’s neoliberal political economy — offering diversity in the boardroom, but not living wages, good health care, and safe retirement — you can also see how the 19th-century variety served to uphold that era’s class-based hierarchies.
In the face of this, what is desperately needed is a more robust universalism, capable of generating and sustaining solidarity across cultural divides. Malik puts his hope in the ideals of the radical Enlightenment. Yet as he concedes early on, the Enlightenment notion of equality is socially constructed — that is, it rests on a social, rather than metaphysical, claim made about the radically free and equal status of all members of the human race. That’s good, so far as it goes, but as his masterful history shows, it often didn’t go very far. Indeed, these very same claims about progress and liberation came to form the basis of new dominations.
I wonder if the way forward lies (partly) in going back, in recovering what the moderns too rashly swept aside. In his early chapter on the premodern, pre-race world, Malik notes in passing that the Enlightenment made explicit a universalism that was always “implicit” in Christianity. In fact, Christian universalism is very much explicit. In the secularised West, it’s easier said than done, but having endured the modern horrors of racism, it might be worth taking inspiration from the universalism that proclaims that there really is “neither Jew nor Greek”. As I shudder at sentiments like those of my dinner companion, which seem to be rising, I take great comfort in the presence, however residual, of a religious doctrine that human beings share fraternity, not according to social construct, but owing to a common, divine paternity.
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