Alibi, a bar in Altrincham, Cheshire, recently made the news for banning solo patrons after 9pm. But it’s worth noting what else the landlord frowns upon — or rather, who else. “No sportswear/trackies,” wrote the landlord, Carl Peters. “No Stone Island. No ripped/frayed jeans. No baseball caps. No roadman vibes.”

Roadman? To the uninitiated, the term generally refers to a young, working-class black Londoner wearing a black puffer jacket, a dark tracksuit, black Nike Air Maxes. The look fuses the casual with the athletic. He might be carrying a manbag and wearing a face covering of some sort. He mostly listens to grime and drill music and he speaks a kind of Multicultural London English (MLE), often sneered at as “roadman English”. Yes, that guy.

In the 2000s, the roadman had a negligible presence in the mainstream. He was very much associated with grime culture (Run the Road, a seminal early grime compilation, was released in 2005). Since the 2010s, however, the figure has stepped into the mainstream, thanks to films and TV shows like Anuvahood and Top Boy, and the rise to prominence of drill music. Michael Dappah’s caricature of a roadman in his satirical 2017 song “Mans Not Hot” was a turning point. It turned the figure of the roadman into a meme, made him loveable even, pushing many signature phrases into everyday speech and opening the door to TikTok trends like the “roadman parliament” and “roadman translation“. Luxury fashion brands, always keen to make money from black-originated trends, have put out streetwear inspired by roadman chic. So what was once a niche, underground, street identity and sub-culture associated with inner-city black youth has morphed into a mainstreamed, commercialized aesthetic and memeified trope.

Take, for instance, Stormzy’s McDonald’s advert from earlier this year. The advert encouraged people to “order like Stormzy”: to march up to the counter and use his distinct roadman English lingo: “mandem”, “ting”, “fam” and so on. The joke, of course, was that white English people, especially those who don’t live in London, don’t talk like that, perhaps even aren’t supposed to. I wonder how it would go down if Harriet from Oxfordshire strolled into her local McDonald’s and tried speaking like this.

But the roadman — or as British-Nigerian comedian Nabil Abdulrashid’s referred to him in a skit, “the gentleman of the road” — is an authentic British figure, part of a subculture that grew within a much wider multicultural urban milieu. The term derives from Jamaican patois — to “run di road” is to be in control of a particular area — signifying its origins within black Caribbean culture. His ancestors are the “rudeboy” and the Yardie, who were for a time the bogeymen of black criminality in British society. The rudeboy, forged in the street-gang-infested shanty towns of Kingston, symbolized the rebellious culture of Jamaica’s post-independence youth, who crossed the Atlantic into Britain in the Sixties and Seventies through the post-Windrush immigration wave. Known for their sharp suits and pork-pie hats, and immortalized in the ska and rocksteady music of the era, the rudeboy archetype soon became at the center of sensationalized discourse around mugging. In the Eighties and Nineties, the Yardie, likewise a product of the Jamaican diaspora, became the evolution of the stereotype, encapsulating all the fears white British society harbored about black British youth. For the writer Jeffrey Boakye, the Yardies were seen as “ostentatious gunmen obsessed with cars and jewelry, speaking in broken English from a former colony and completely unconcerned with the safety of the majority white public.”

More specifically, and as its etymology implies, to be a roadman is to be someone who is “on road” — the British equivalent of being “hood”. This means that the roadman operates in the mean streets of the post-industrial urban metropolis. To “do road” may mean to sell drugs, to be involved in petty street crime, to play drill music loudly in public, and to keep an eye out for the “opps” — gangs of rival roadmen. The roadman’s calling is not a glamorous one. “Doing road” means struggling and hustling to survive in an unforgiving world by any means necessary, which will take its toll. The rapper Berna, who was raised in an East London council estate, put it this way: “And the gang do crimes cause crime pay / Can’t wait for the day we don’t have to / But if one don’t die it’s a nice day / So I always gotta watch how I move”. The roadman knows his life is a vulnerable one, that he always has to look over his shoulder: but he knows he cannot admit weakness.

In this sense, being a roadman is both an accusation and an achievement. Yet he is also a figure of parody, derision and pity. The roadman exists within a hierarchy within the criminal underworld — alas, for him, he is at the bottom of it. He is just entry level. A few echelons above him in his social ecology is the badman, who lives by his own code. Being called a badman is an accolade. The badman is tough, fearless and dangerous. His reputation for violence and dominance earns him respect on the road. He is discreet, but everyone knows not to mess with him. It’s like being an alpha: something you can call someone else, but never yourself.

Plenty of roadmen talk a good game and think they’re a badman; that is until they meet a real badman. In Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen, there’s a scene where one of the main protagonists, played by Charlie Hunnam, confronts a bunch of machete-wielding roadmen who have a phone containing crucial information. They refuse to give Raymond back the phone, even as he offers money for it. With some bravado, they warn him to go away or they’ll cut him up — until he pulls out a compact sub-machine gun to demonstrate who really is the apex predator. The scene has spawned a small internet subgenre of “roadmen meet real gangsters” compilations.

Still, due to social media and general cultural commodification, the roadman “look” and the roadman lifestyle have somewhat become divorced from each other. Many young people, and not just in the main cities, adopt the roadman aesthetic, speak a multicultural English dialect, and listen to grime and drill without being a part of that life.

And if London was the social laboratory where the roadman was born, the phenomenon is no longer contained to the capital.  The roadmen of Birmingham will speak “Multicultural Birmingham English” (MBE); similar to its London equivalent but adapted to a Brummie context. The chav subculture of the 2000s (racially coded as white and out of London) has largely been subsumed by roadmanism. You even have white poshos from the Home Counties who cosplay as roadmen to appear more “authentic”. Indeed, the racial imagination has always been fascinated with blackness as a source of Dionysian vitality: from minstrel performers to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G. To connect with “blackness” is supposedly to connect with one’s elemental impulses — a momentary means of escape and rebellion from a repressed white, Protestant, bourgeois mode of existence.

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It’s tempting to reassess the roadman in this light. Given that “integration” is a consistent if vexed topic in our national discourse, it has been argued that roadman-ism might be one of the few (sub-) cultures within Britain that can easily integrate, or rather assimilate, newcomers. For one, it has a low barrier of entry. It’s genuinely inclusive and open to new influences. To be a roadman doesn’t mean assimilating into blackness. It is really a pan-ethnic subculture, in many ways the default youth culture of the super-diverse cities that immigrants and their children encounter. For second- and third-generation immigrants who are alienated from both the mainstream national culture and the native culture of their parents, being a roadman offers an identity, a surrogate tribe (a mandem), something to “belong” to. Perhaps, then, roadmanism is the closest thing there is to a British melting pot.

But I’m not sure this is a model of integration that should be championed. The roadman is also a champion of ignorance, parochialism and shallow machismo. Newly minted roadmen who plunge deeper into that life will aspire to be a badman, often laboring under the delusion that doing “badness” is how you express just how masculine you are — and that you become “someone” through inflicting damage on the “opps”. That inevitably will lead to bloodshed and devastate communities. Crime and urban violence is a young man’s game and it is young men who are its biggest loser: 83% of teen victims of homicide were killed by stabbing in 2024; young men (aged 18-24) were eight times more likely to be killed by stabbing compared to young women.

The function of roadmanism, as Mark Fisher once wrote of hip-hop, is to operate as an “anti-mythical myth”. The Weltanschauung of the roadman has no room for sentimental idealism. It reveals life for what it supposedly really is: a social Darwinist struggle where only the fittest survive. Why was Henry Hill so enthralled by the gangster life in Goodfellas? It wasn’t just the money and flashy goods. It was a sense of freedom and excitement — of no longer being a non-player character in a dead-beat job.

And so the roadman “vibes” have transcended their working class black British origins to become the cosmopolitanism of the lumpenproletariat. The best remedy for it is a dynamic civil society that inspires young people to reject this nihilism. To translate their talent and graft into society’s gain. To realize that they can be free in society rather than acting against it. To discover meaning and purpose. Until such a thing exists, the roadman life will be the life that purposeless young men fall into. White middle-class people may laugh at the memes — but out on the road, baleful consequences will follow.

The Windrush generation — Caribbean migrants who arrived between 1948 and 1971 — has become emblematic of Britain’s journey to multiculturalism. Since the Nineties, Windrush has been elevated in public memory, replacing “1066 and all that” with a newer myth: Britain as a nation of immigrants. We now have monuments in Waterloo station and the new Windrush trainline to boot.

So, Keir Starmer can now assert that the Windrush generation “laid the foundations for modern Britain”. There are, of course, grains of truth in this statement. Many of the Windrush migrants worked in the newly established NHS and helped fill labor shortages in the postwar period. But this liberal origin story not only provokes derision from the Right who regard it as a rationalization of mass immigration but it also skirts around the continued racism those migrants and their descendants have been subjected to. Only seven years ago, Britain was rocked by the wrongful detainment and in some cases deportation of Windrush-era migrants, known as the Windrush scandal.

A striking irony, however, has begun to emerge. Some elements of the political Right have started to almost romanticize the Windrush generation they once disparaged, now held up as the “right” kind of immigrant in the aftermath of the radicalizing “Boriswave”.

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The postwar demographic mix that Windrush once symbolized has been overhauled in the past 30 years, and more intensely so in the last few years due to the accelerated pace of immigration under the Conservatives. A white British super-majority with a few small ethnic minority groups, largely drawn from Commonwealth countries, has given way to what the sociologist Steven Vertovec labels “super-diversity”: immigration from a much broader range of countries. As a result, what Stuart Hall once called “multicultural drift” has become more pronounced. The white British population has declined from 95% in 1991 to 75% in 2021. In the words of the historian Kieran Connell in his Multicultural Britain: “by the 2040s, there will likely be no one left with any memory of Britain before the twin processes of growing immigration and widespread ethnic diversity.”

As part of this shift, the Caribbean population has also been in decline. In 2001, it constituted half of the black population in England and Wales; today that figure is closer to a quarter. Meanwhile, over the same period, Africans have gone from representing 40% of that population to 62%. As Tony Sewell recently bemoaned, British Caribbeans “may well be extinct before 2060”. The cultural signifiers have altered too. Footballers such as Ian Wright and Paul Ince, celebrities including Lenny Henry and Ainsley Harriott, and Ska and reggae music, once defined black Britain. The Caribbeans owned the slang, the style, and the music. But now, as Sewell puts it, “rice and peas has had to give way to Jollof rice”. The faces of black Britain today have recognizably African names: Bukayo Saka, Maya Jama, Kwasi Kwarteng and Kemi Badenoch. The Windrush generation, once seen as the vanguard of black British identity, seems like part of a fading historical moment.

Being Anglo-Nigerian myself, I’m just about old enough to remember when British blackness was Caribbean in character. It wasn’t “cool” to be African. As Skepta put it: “When I was in school being African was a diss, sounds like you need help saying my surname, miss.” Over the past decade or so, there has been a quiet revolution in black Britishness. Afrobeats has gone mainstream: the Azonto dance has colonized nightclubs, and even white yuppies began to listen to Fuse ODG to show how hip they were. Many British Africans arrived more recently, often with stronger ties to their post-colonial homelands. As black Britishness becomes more heterogeneous, some Brits may find that the newer African cultures are less familiar than the Caribbean culture they grew up with.

This demographic shift has reframed questions of integration. Tommy Robinson, whose Unite The Kingdom rally last month strikingly concluded with a black gospel choir, has over the years used Caribbeans (alongside Sikhs and Hindus) as examples of integration in contrast to Muslims. Speaking on the Heretics podcast, Robinson attempted to swat away accusations of racism by referring to Ian Wright as an example of Englishness: “Are you telling me Ian Wright is not English?” More moderate figures such as Trevor Phillips have begun to argue that the Windrush generation integrated more successfully than recent arrivals, while failing to mention the length of time that Afro-Caribbeans have been in Britain. Caribbeans, he notes, were “steeped in the behaviors of the British”, by which he means they were Christian, English-speaking, and their ancestors were given a colonial British education.

There is some history behind that idea. In 1996, Diane Abbott caused controversy by lamenting the decline of Caribbean nurses in her local Hackney hospice as they “know the language and understand British culture and institutions”, contrasting them with the “blonde, blue-eyed girls from Finland”. Although her comments were derided, they reflected a real perception that Afro-Caribbeans had finally been accepted into the British body politic.

But the reality has been somewhat more complicated. The Windrush scandal, and the Home Office’s creation of a “hostile environment”, is perhaps the most glaring example of this fraught history. And while Notting Hill Carnival, which celebrates Caribbean culture, is now a staple of multicultural Britain, that wasn’t always the case. The 1976 Carnival riots set in motion stereotypes of black youth as promiscuous troublemakers, and led to the strategic use of the “Sus laws” to criminalize them. To this day, the Right-wing press panics about the levels of violence and crime at the Carnival, with calls to ban it or move it to Hyde Park.

Even so, it is worth interrogating why the Right might claim to view the Windrush-era migrants differently today. Immigrant communities in Britain have arguably followed two paths of integration. On the one hand, there is the Irish path: high intermarriage rates  and eventual absorption into the majority group. On the other, there is the Jewish route: economically intertwined but culturally and religiously distinctive. The former resembles assimilation, the latter integration.

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Afro-Caribbeans, it seems, have followed the Irish example. They have some of the highest rates of interracial relationships, particularly with white Britons. In fact, the most common interracial coupling in Britain is between Caribbeans and white English people. This happens to such an extent that some within the Caribbean community are concerned about their long-term survival. By contrast, British Asians and British Africans tend to follow the Jewish model. They marry into the white majority less frequently and maintain stronger cultural boundaries: from speaking “home languages” (Yoruba, Igbo, Punjabi and Urdu) to giving non-Anglicized names to their children and staying connected to cultural media like Nollywood for Nigerians and Bollywood for South Asians. Differences in gender roles, alcohol consumption and social habits have further complicated integration. Take the example of “dessert parlors”, which emerged in British cities and towns with high Muslim populations, and function as dry pubs.

Unlike South Asians and Africans, Caribbeans were more thoroughly — and forcefully — anglicized due to slavery and colonial proximity. This has not translated into social equality, but it helps to explain why Afro-Caribbeans are more likely to identify as “English” while South Asians and Africans often choose the broader, civic label of “British”. With fewer cultural and religious barriers — and less pressure to marry within their community — Afro-Caribbeans have blended more into the national fabric.

Even though “political blackness” emerged in the Seventies as a catch-all term for all non-white people facing racism in Britain, the forms of discrimination varied. Caribbeans were targeted primarily for the color of their skin, while British Asians faced both racial and cultural discrimination. Interviews with skinheads from the Seventies reveal these complex dynamics: many expressed less hostility towards Jamaicans than Pakistanis, mentioning shared musical and cultural tastes like reggae and ska music. The form of racism may have differed, but not the extent.

And so, as Britain’s demographic landscape changes again, so too do the narratives around immigration and blackness. Because of my own ethnic identity, I have been unconsciously part of this quiet revolution in black Britishness. Simultaneously, I am a son of England and of the decolonized British empire. But the succeeding generations of British-Africans might face a more prolonged battle — to be treated unambiguously as belonging to these isles and not as glorified “guests”. I pray it won’t be as tortuous as what the Windrush generation went through.

Mainly set in the ethnically diverse working-class area of Willesden, Smith’s multigenerational saga traces over 30 years the intertwined lives of three families: the Anglo-Jamaican Jones’, the Bengali Muslim Iqbals, and the secular Jewish Chafens. The novel mainly explores the ambiguities and anxieties of the immigrant experience, but what is particularly striking is the sanguineness throughout — a sense of possibility that seems quixotic in a post-Rochdale, post-BLM and post-Southport Britain. Even if it wasn’t wholly emblematic of contemporary Britain at the time, the book seemed to reflect what Britain could become. Reading White Teeth today feels like discovering an artifact of what the late social theorist Mark Fisher called a “lost future”.

Like any good post-modern novel, White Teeth is anarchic. The search for a pure, uncontaminated identity is flung aside and so is the past — “what is past is prologue”, writes Smith in homage to Shakespeare. As Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi had already tested, the immigrant experience in multicultural Britain with all its contradictions was the right subject for the post-modern novelist. But by White Teeth, cultural hybridity is not only normal but almost mundane. The O’Connell pub where Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones regularly meet is owned by an Arab Muslim immigrant. Children have names such as Danny Rahman and Quang O’Rourke, while the dialogue incorporates Creole and Bengali.

Around halfway through the novel, the narrator declares “this has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white”. A far cry from the high days of empire when the vexed questions of pluralism and difference were relegated “over there” in the colonies. Now those questions were coming to the metropole itself via migration, and transforming it. As Stuart Hall put it: “One day the world is going to wake up and discover that whole areas of life in Britain, in spite of Conservatism and Little Englandism, have been transformed… a kind of hybridization is happening to the English, whether they like it or not.”

White Teeth did at least acknowledge the cost of this cultural hybridization for both the native majority and the immigrant communities themselves, the latter of whom fear “dissolution, disappearance”. But the book should be read above all as the literary apotheosis of Blair-era multiculturalism. It was written in that brief age of innocence after the “End of History” and before “the age of horrorism” inaugurated by 9/11. In this narrow window, neoliberal globalization seemed triumphant and irrefragable, propped up in the academe by Homi Bhabha’s notion of “cultural hybridity” and the Blair government’s transformative immigration policies. This was an occasion to be celebrated.

Britain was steadily redefining its identity and national narrative to take into account its changing demographics. It was recast as a “nation of immigrants”, with white Britons transformed from longer the universal subject of the nation to one ethno-racial group among a host of others. “Britishness” evolved from an imperial identity tainted with racism to a civic national badge that, like Americanism, could accommodate hyphenated identities. The HMS Windrush was reimagined as a Mayflower-like ship, founding the “new” multicultural Britain. In the same year as White Teeth came the Parekh report. Commissioned by Runnymede Trust, it called for Britain to officially declare itself as a multicultural nation composed of a “community of communities”. This notion of multiculturalism went beyond a descriptor of pluralism in British society and was turned into an ideological principle and political creed to manage this plurality. For Runnymede, multiculturalism proclaimed to provide a broad framework of a new common belonging where “all citizens are treated with rigorous and uncompromising equality and social justice”, but “cultural diversity is celebrated and cherished”.

What better figurehead for this exuberant age than Zadie Smith whose debut unleashed genuine hysteria upon release? Growing up on a council estate and ascending to Cambridge University, she was the perfect example of the “multicultural writer” fit for modern Britain. Unlike her saggy-faced, hoary predecessors, the then 24-year-old mixed-race Smith was culturally versatile, writing as splendidly on Dostoyevsky and E. M Forster as on hip-hop and Game of Thrones. It’s easy to see why The Telegraph dubbed her “the George Eliot of multiculturalism”.

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And herein lay the appeal. For all of its multicultural reputation, White Teeth comfortably fits within the tradition of the English novel — how reassuringly English it feels at every step. Like generations of refined English authors before her, Zadie Smith had read her Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her humour, too, is mordantly English — the proletarian wit of her North London background tempered by Oxbridge bookish irony. Some assumed that White Teeth was subverting the traditional English novel, through themes of race, gender and colonialism which expressed a new multicultural subjectivity, creating a sense that Smith was possibly radical and edgy. But for anyone who dares to set aside her ethnic origins, it’s clear that Smith’s cultural context is as establishment as it gets. She became a fellow at Harvard while still in her 20s.

Smith has long been a privileged transatlantic liberal. So much is clear from the positions she takes whenever she wades into politics. She publicly supported Obama, the political apogee of what she had been writing for years in fiction. She then opposed Brexit, scolding Corbyn for his Euroscepticism. But perhaps the illusion was finally shattered last year when her New Yorker essay went viral. Writing about the pro-Palestine campus protests in America, she called the protesters “cynical” and “unworthy” for not considering that Jewish students may find their actions threatening and for promiscuously labeling their enemies Zionist “as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith”. Her long-standing admirers accused her of rationalizing genocide and being a “liberal both-sider”, with novelist Michael Magee summing up the mood: “we lost Zadie.” A mixed-race author of novels that meditated on the post-colonial condition turned out to be insufficiently anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine. In other words, they discovered she was just another liberal — but she always had been.

This is why, at the turn of the millennium, White Teeth was comforting for British liberals anxious about this unprecedented epoch in British history. A novel that both hypothesized, and by its own existence seemed to prove, that not only could multiculturalism truly succeed, but that it could succeed without making Britain any less recognizably British. The collision of different peoples and cultures once separated by geography and history but drawn together by imperialism and globalization would, so the story went, bring about something new yet familiar. But 25 years later, such hopes seem misplaced. Multiculturalism is now “dead”, no longer seen as a source of freedom and unity but as a harbinger for ethnic conflict and sectarianism. Like a shrine to Jupiter in the decadent years of Imperial Rome, multiculturalism appears now as a relic of a civic religion that virtually everyone has ceased to believe in.

The Bible declares that those who do not work shall not eat, and our secular society clings onto that idea: the harder you work, the greater your reward ought to be. There is a glut of articles, for instance, expressing outrage at how many junior doctors are paid less than fast-food workers. If you’re being compared to a McDonald’s employee, you know it’s bad.

I worked in McDonald’s for a few years, and it’s true: the wages set the lowest bar. If junior doctors are earning so little, that is a scandal. But drawing attention to the paltry pay of working-class people just so you can make a point about the treatment of overwhelmingly middle-class public servants isn’t exactly progressive.

Fast-food work is derided because it’s an “unskilled” job that supposedly any fool can do. It was my first job, and the same was true for many of the people I worked with. Three quarters of McDonald’s employees are under the age of 25. The workforce at my store was young and diverse, many coming from immigrant backgrounds, very few of us university educated. The sort of people ignored by society.

Around 100 current and recent McDonald’s staff have recently testified, in a BBC report, to enduring a toxic culture of sexual harassment, bullying and racism. Female workers as young as 16 described experiences of groping and intimidation, from both customers and staff members. Managers were accused of turning a “blind eye”.

Though I can’t testify to personally witnessing any sexual harassment while I worked at McDonald’s, I did hear about it. When I first started, a male crew member who was notorious for hitting on female colleagues was suspended for making inappropriate sexual comments. He left soon afterwards. There was also a 16-year-old worker was hit on by a middle-aged, lecherous dad, while he was overseeing his own 11-year-old daughter’s birthday party.

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To some extent, such objectification is true of any workplace. In History and Class Consciousness, the Marxist György Lukács developed the concept of “reification”, which describes how, in a capitalist society, human relations are treated as relations between things. Human themselves are treated as objects, while abstract ideas like “capital” or “the market” become active subjects that determine human activity. In other words, humans are controlled by capital, rather than vice-versa.

Being a fast-food worker is perhaps the most extreme example of this condition. It is a job that allows no room for autonomy. For a good portion of my day, I was a piece of equipment that the bosses had paid for, and they wanted to get their money’s worth. Orders were issued from on high, the managers enforced them, and I was supposed to obey them without question, on pain of sanctions such as getting fired or denied decent hours. We were all overworked, because the store was understaffed — unless it was a Friday or Saturday night. Management needed to keep labour costs as low as they could get away with, to maintain profitability. There were busy shifts when I would be dumped on fries, to cook them and box them by myself, hour after hour. On summer days, it was excruciating.

Because the job is so monotonous and automatic, I felt like I was more robot than person. Working in McDonald’s made me feel what Marx meant by his theory of “alienation”, as opposed to just understanding it as an abstract intellectual concept. Alienation, for Marx, was how workers became estranged from the product of their labour, never reaping the benefits of production. It’s something that is impossible to complain about, when you feel like you’re just another cog in a machine, disposable and easily replaceable. When your work is seen as near-worthless, it’s hard to protest that you are being underpaid for what you help produce shift after shift.

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Customers often reinforce this feeling. There is a general belief that people working in the food industry are servants and, therefore, lesser beings. Places such as McDonald’s cater to the masses; in their own work stations, its customers will often experience the same anxiety, alienation and precariousness. But McDonald’s is one of the few spaces where someone, downtrodden by their own boss, can feel like they have power — where they, as the customer, are king.

Those who exploit this transaction know that the power relations are lopsided in their favour. If they become aggressive and hurl abuse at a fast-food worker, for mostly minor infractions, the worker can’t defend themselves. They must maintain their composure, respond politely and just take the abuse on the chin. Otherwise, they may be damaging the company’s reputation for providing quality customer service, and even risking their job. I know of someone who was “written up” for getting angry at a customer who was swearing at him while complaining about cold fries. Usually if you have three write-ups, your contract will be terminated.

Meanwhile, the ubiquitous presence of CCTV cameras reminded us that we were always being watched. Indeed, McDonald’s must have recorded so many incidents of sexual harassment and bullying against workers. Yet footage is seldom used to bring about justice. One of the workers who testified in the BBC story said that, even though her sexual harassment was caught on camera, she had to carry on working with the perpetrator.

The harassment and bullying that goes on within McDonald’s isn’t simply a problem of gross lechers, then; it is a symptom of structural tendency in these workplaces to objectify human beings. It is a symptom, too, of the precarity of the job market for young people. Many of those I worked with had second jobs, often similarly low-waged, just to bolster their paltry income.

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Perhaps part of why fast-food work is devalued is because the food served is seen as a vulgar indulgence, unlike junior doctors. But in this respect, how is it different from other source of pleasure? People want to eat fast food, and someone has to serve them. Those servers work long, hard hours. Beyond deserving basic respect, they should be able to earn a living, afford decent housing and a social life, raise a family.

But McDonald’s won’t give them these things, unless pressed. “Capital,” as Marx rightly stated, “is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.” Fast-food restaurants have got away with treating their workers badly simply because they can; but they have been enabled by a tacit view, among the public, that these workers are somehow unworthy. It’s tempting to see the unionisation drives and strikes that have occurred in the past few years as the beginning of a fairer era. But it’s also hard to imagine a future in which fast-food workers aren’t the benchmark for bad wages, offered in exchange for their humanity.

Yet it was only after the Second World War that Jews became white. A new book by Emily Tamkin tells the story of how the racial identity of American Jews evolved. Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities reminds us, again and again, of something too often forgotten: Jewry isn’t homogenous, and its ethnic character hasn’t always been static.

The early Jewish community in America, from the time of the revolution, was largely Sephardic — that is, Southern European and North African. Paler-skinned Ashkenazim from Germany and Central Europe, who were more bourgeois and assimilationist, didn’t arrive in significant numbers until the mid-19th century. But it was the mass migration of poor, oppressed Jews from the Russian empire, which began a few decades later, that dramatically altered the composition and culture of American Jewry, making Ashkenazim overwhelmingly dominant. That’s not to say American Ashkenazim were a cohesive, mutually supportive ethnic group. The earlier settlers feared that the newcomers, with their markedly different cultures and Yiddish language, would give Jews a bad reputation.

When they first arrived in significant numbers, the pale skin of Ashkenazim Jews was not a privilege. Those who settled in America faced considerable social and cultural prejudice — and certainly weren’t viewed as white. After the First World War, the images of Jews in pop culture were quite often of gangsters or Bolshevik subversives. During the Second, the American state was not enthusiastic about accepting Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. One of the reasons behind the opposition to America intervening in “European entanglements” was suspicion that it would be doing so at the behest of Jewish power.

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Nevertheless, despite the discrimination they faced, the philosophy of the diaspora was assimilationist and remarkably successful. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews gradually transitioned away from living in the urban slums of the Lower East Side — with their radical socialist politics, Yiddish culture, and strong association with Jewish ethnic identity — and into the leafy middle-class suburbs of white bread America. Now, Jews are among the most socially integrated groups in America. Total assimilation is commonly accessible for those that want it. A Jew, in other words, can be Jewish by choice.

The title of Norman Podhoretz’s memoir, Making It, captures the post-war ethos of American Jewry. Loyalty should be pledged to America. Jews shouldn’t stress their particularity. They should become “white”. The GI Bill, which virtually excluded black people in practice, as Tamkin notes, “enshrined their status as white Americans”, enabling them to become “publicly, outwardly all-American and privately religiously all-Jewish”. Whiteness, for many American Jews, was a result of assimilation: it meant stability, material comfort, upward social mobility, and safety.

Jews have never been an oppressed minority in America. Even early migrants faced nothing like the systematic oppression of the Pale of Settlement, which they fled from. When David Ben-Gurion toured America in 1916, he noted the existence of a “Negro Pale of Settlement” in Nashville, which does put things in perspective. And it wasn’t just Jewish immigrants who were treated as outsiders. The Irish, Italians, Poles — most ethnically “white” arrivals in the 19th and 20th centuries were treated as “alien” by an America that unofficially defined itself as White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant; most were accepted into the mainstream and ultimately seen as white, which entailed moving up the social hierarchy. All were regarded much more favourably than black Americans.

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And yet, there’s something fraught and imprecise about describing American Jews as “white” in the same way one would describe a Polish-American as white. It doesn’t completely fit. Considering how Jews have been among the most detested groups in history, it seems callous to casually claim we benefit from “white privilege”. As David Baddiel argued in Jews Don’t Count, contemporary anti-racism excludes Jews to the point of legitimising antisemitism, by regarding Jews as participating in racist structures against people of colour. It’s true that in Western countries, Jews don’t face the institutionalised oppression that other minorities may do and largely. Jews are included in national identities, while being free to preserve Jewish culture. None of this suggests antisemitism doesn’t exist.

Moreover, as Tamkin usefully points out, any association with Jews and “whiteness” has the problem of taking the Ashkenazim as the sole paradigm of Jewishness. Obviously, this isn’t the case. Judaism has had a historic presence in so many societies across the world; Jews come in different appearances and hues, imbued with different cultures. In Israel, at least half, possibly a slight majority, of the Jewish population is visibly “non-white” — the nation airlifted 14,000 Jews out of Ethiopia over two days in 1991. Far-Right parties draw much of their support from this demographic, puncturing many of the assumptions about Israel’s supposed “white supremacy”. But an overwhelming majority of American Jews are Ashkenazim, and because American culture dominates the world, Ashkenazim end up representing “authentic” Jewish identity worldwide. Ethiopian Jews are overlooked, despite being one of the most ancient Jewish communities, and much of the way we discuss Judaism is white-centric.

This mentality also affected Jews themselves. Within America, Jews have divided and demonised one another. Many Ashkenazim, as Tamkin reveals, regarded their Sephardic co-religionists as “bad Jews”, or not Jews at all, since they didn’t speak Yiddish, didn’t pray in the same way and looked different. In her history of Sephardic Jews in America, Aviva Ben-Ur recounts stories of Ashkenazic landlords in New York excluding Sephardic Jews from lodging, and petitioning Mayor William Jay Gaynor to “remove these Turks from our midst”.

Throughout American history, groups condemned to the lower rungs of the social ladder often disdain those even lower down the racial hierarchy than they are. Black people, being right at the bottom, bear the brunt of this retaliatory discrimination. There is a history, which Tamkin documents, of Jewish leaders arguing that Jews are white for immigration purposes, of Jewish leaders using the language of eugenics to abjure the connection between Jews and Africans commonly made by racial scientists, of bigoted Jewish shop owners discriminating against black customers. Tamkin also notes that, “Jewish support for civil rights was not unanimous”. Reactionaries such as Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer saw the “Negro revolution” as a threat to Jewish security. Their case, as Tamkin describes, was based on the premise that Jews “belonged to white America and one need only look at Black America to see that that was true”.

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Their attitude was not universal, however. Many progressive Jews, such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, avidly supported equal rights — and indeed were overrepresented among the white people that joined the freedom marches in the South. And prominent black leaders also supported Jewish causes: Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin and W. E. B. Du Bois were vocal about sympathising with Zionism, out a deep affinity and solidarity with the plight of European Jewry.

Indeed, some Jews were, to use Leonard Fein’s phrase, the “unintended beneficiaries” of the black-power style. Jewish leaders took inspiration from black-power activists: if blacks can advocate for blackness, then Jews can advocate for Jewishness. The zenith of black power coincided with Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of 1967, after which American Jews embraced Zionism more fully. “The perceived heroism of Israel,” Tamkin writes, “led some Jews to identify openly as Jews.” This embrace of Israel, ironically, was a function of American Jews finally “making it”: being fully integrated into the fabric of America. They could adopt a dual identity without being accused of “dual loyalty”. Israel becoming a key strategic ally of America helped in this regard. Supporting the state complimented American patriotism and fealty to liberal democratic values.

And of course, black people and Jews are not a mutually exclusive group. Tamkin estimates that there are as many as 1.2 million black American Jews, whose Jewishness is so often be ignored, including by Jews themselves, because they don’t “look” the part. They are mostly a product not of immigration but the erosion of the stigma directed at interracial marriage. Their Jewishness therefore tends to be Ashkenazic, whereas the only vague blueprint for black Jewishness rests on an indigenous African version of the religion. Ethiopian Jews, isolated from the rest of the Jewish universe, also face racism in Israel. The double consciousness of being both black and Jewish remains more vexed than that of being both American and Jewish. If becoming “white” is the only way for Jews to escape cultural prejudice, what are black Jews supposed to do?

De Kom is to Suriname what Mandela is to South Africa: a heroic patriot, an advocate of the oppressed, and a symbol of resistance against colonialism. His magnum opus, We Slaves of Suriname — originally written and published in 1934 — was the first history of slavery and Dutch colonialism in Suriname written by a Surinamese man. It was composed while he was exiled to the Netherlands and under surveillance for anti-colonial protests. After its publication, he and it were censored and neglected for years by the Dutch, let alone the West in general.

But then came the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and a renewed interest in examining the racial injustices of the past. There has since been a surge of interest in De Kom. Last February, the Dutch government pledged to honour him “with a generous gesture”. He became the first Surinamer to be included in the canon of Dutch history, alongside Vincent van Gogh and Anne Frank. And this month, the first ever English translation of We Slaves of Suriname will be published, 88 years after its completion.

The book is, in part, an ode to De Kom’s homeland: a beautiful, tropical wonderland, teeming with life. But it also tells the history of Suriname, from the beginning of European settlement — which very quickly led to the catastrophic demise of the nation’s aboriginal peoples — to when the Dutch fully colonised it in 1667, turning it into a plantation colony. From this point onwards, thousands of enslaved Africans were imported, to work producing sugar and coffee to export back to the mother country.

For De Kom, slavery was personal. He repeatedly refers to the enslaved as “our fathers and our mothers”, and deftly weaves his own autobiography into the history of Suriname. His father was born a slave, and later became a farmer. He was part of the generation of slaves emancipated into “free” citizenship under Dutch rule, yet haunted by memories still fresh in their minds, and stories passed down by their elders.

Early in the book, De Kom invites “the white reader”, who he believes will be sceptical of what he writes, to contemplate a sailing ship. For De Kom, the image is not one of freedom; it represents instead the torture of his ancestors:

“But we do wish to warn you. From your lofty seat, do not venture down the futtouck shroud … Up here you can smell the invigorating smell of tar and the salt sea wind … Down there it already reeks a mile leeward of the sweat and excrement of a thousand slaves packed into a hold.

Up here you can hear the cries of the albatross, the song of the sailors, and the crash of the wave … Down there you can hear the cries of the slaves, the wails of the women in labour, and the crack of the whip coming down on the backs of blacks.”

When the history of European colonialism is interrogated, the focus tends to be on the British and French (and, to a lesser extent, Spanish) empires. The role of the Netherlands is rarely noted, though it had one of Europe’s oldest empires, including colonies in Suriname, Java and Southern Africa. And, as Pepijn Brandon has argued, the Netherlands was also a key player in the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch planters had a reputation for being especially cruel and sadistic in their treatment of slaves.

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The typical colonial narrative argues for the “civilising” influence of the imperial power. De Kom counters this with brutal expositions of what Dutch rule really meant for the Surinamese, documenting gruesome accounts of the torture frequently dished out to those seen as slacking or insubordinate. A common technique was the notorious “Spanish billy goat”, where the slave would be mercilessly flogged while his two hands were tied together, his knees pulled up through the arms with a stick inserted between them and planted onto the ground. The frequent sexual abuse of black women by their masters, long a taboo subject, is also given in-depth treatment by De Kom.

Despite all this, De Kom is uneasily ambivalent towards the end of slavery in Suriname. In 1863, 100,000 or so slaves became free citizens — in name, but not in essence. “The physical instruments of torture,” De Kom lamented, “have largely been replaced by mental torments, poverty and want.” While former slave-owners were compensated for the loss of their “property”, former slaves received no reparations. They weren’t given any land, training, education or credit — unlike European settlers, who had received all these things upon arrival, to help them make a living.

Instead, former slaves had little choice but to enter coolie contracts under “state supervision” for ten years before they could even be officially “free”. It was basically another form of slavery; in other words, the abolition of slavery was managed in the interests of plantation owners, rather than the individuals they’d exploited. It was a sham.

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Likewise, Suriname’s “autonomy” was also a sham. The nation was still seen as inseparable from the Dutch kingdom. De Kom’s raison d’etre for writing We Slaves of Suriname was to unshackle his compatriots from their “inherited sense of inferiority and to rouse the self-respect of the Surinamese people” so that they could extricate themselves from the Dutch yoke.

Nevertheless, despite his fervent indictments of the evils of slavery and Dutch colonialism, De Kom was unlike some of his contemporaries, in that he did not subscribe to the “back to Africa” agenda. The decolonisation struggle he envisioned was not meant to be a violent one, or a regression into narrow tribalism: “What I was after was organisation, not a bloodbath.” He firmly believed that the mosaic society of Suriname — composed of blacks, Indians and Javanese — could unite in the spirit of solidarity to liberate their nation, and achieve a dignified human existence for all citizens.

On the last page of his book, De Kom dreamt of the day he would return to a free Suriname:

“Sranang my fatherland.
I hope to see you again once.
On the day when all misery shall be erased from you.”

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The lines are particularly poignant if you know that, when he wrote them, he would never see his treasured homeland again. Shortly after the German invasion of Holland in 1940, De Kom joined the Dutch resistance and wrote for the censored De Vonk, a paper affiliated with the Dutch Communist party, which mainly documented the abusive activities of fascist gangs in the streets of The Hague (in particular those against Jews). On the 7th August 1944, he was arrested by Nazi forces and sentenced to forced labour at Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis and was buried in a mass grave. Ever since, his legacy has risked fading into history.

His work is poignant, too, because Suriname has suffered since then. National independence, like the abolition of slavery, has not been a glowing success. Since 1975, when Dutch rule finally came to an end, Suriname has endured civil war, dictatorships, tribalism and corruption — similar to that which plagues a lot of post-colonial nations. The nation is still haunted by the abuses of empire.

Anton De Kom’s work doesn’t tell an uplifting story, then; but it is a common story, of how our modern world came to be. Black labour, in the form of chattel slavery, played a significant role in creating the wealth of the West. “This is the price we pay for the sugar you eat,” cries out the limbless and nameless Negro slave (owned by a cruel and unscrupulous Dutch merchant) in Voltaire’s Candide. Human beings turned into commodities: this is our history whether we are comfortable with it or not. And De Kom, despite all the efforts to silence him, will not let us forget it.

The experience hardened his belief that European colonialism was out of date. In August 1941, in discussions on the Atlantic Charter  —  which laid out the Allied goals for a post-WWII order  —  FDR stressed the inclusion of an article on self-determination, much to Winston Churchill’s anxiety. Roosevelt insisted that a precondition for a peaceful world was the development of “backward countries”, but that one-sided colonial trade agreements — like those of the British Empire — were why those countries “are still as backward as they are”.

American leaders have long liked to position themselves as opponents of European colonialism. John F. Kennedy, during the 1960 Presidential election, declared that the US should side with third world nationalist movements. After all, America itself is the product of thirteen colonies emancipating themselves from the British Empire and building a democratic republic. That revolution, which took place 245 years ago, has since been a model for movements worldwide. Vietnam’s nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, for instance, explicitly invoked the American Declaration of Independence as inspiration.

America, then, claims to stand for a liberal international order composed of independent nations, dedicated to promoting peace, prosperity and freedom. In theory, anyway. In practice, America did not become a benign superpower after the Second World War; it became an empire in its own right. It did not liberate European colonies; it inherited them and made them American.

In Indochina, the US supported the French colonial regime, before replacing it as the occupying force — leading to the original forever war. In the Middle East, the US replaced Britain as well as France as the imperial power ne plus ultra — a project that, as recent front pages graphically demonstrate, hasn’t ended well. But American interventionism in Africa is less widely understood. A revelatory, meticulous new book by Susan Williams — based on declassified documents and new testimony — has done a lot to correct this.

Africa, Williams suggests in White Malice, has long been of “central importance” in the vision of American foreign policy planners. During the second world war, in response to Hitler’s armies conquering most of North Africa, the US built a number of air bases on the continent  — in Liberia, for instance  —  to prevent its enemies using West Africa as a platform to attack the Americas. The OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) established an Africa service with three field bases in Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia. And the Manhattan Project — the secret program to develop the first nuclear weapons — made the Congo, with all its natural resources, central to American foreign policy.

The Uranium used to create the first atomic bombs originated from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province in Southern Congo. In 1942, a band of OSS agents were assigned to secure the mine, holding the richest Uranium in the world, to stop it falling into Nazi hands. They were also tasked with covertly transporting the Uranium  —  disguised as “diamonds” —  to the US, via airports in Elizabethville and Leopoldville designed by the Americans to ensure reliable transport. Shinkolobwe’s role in the Manhattan Project, as Williams notes, “was shrouded in secrecy”. Journalists were not allowed any information about the mine — let alone to visit it. It’s name and location was wiped off the map in 1942 and security was akin to a “fortress”, with armed guards patrolling 24/7.

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The Congolese miners were hyper-exploited. They were paid terribly, were frequently whipped by overseers and had little protection as they handled high-grade Uranium — which caused many to suffer long term health conditions. In other words, they were no better off than they had been under the Belgian colonisers.

After the war, the withdrawal of European empires left a void. And so most of America’s military bases in Africa remained. Pan-Africanism, on the ascendancy, was influencing civil rights and black radical movements among black Americans. The Soviet enemy was threatening to gain influence over the newly independent African nations. America, Williams writes, had to “recapture Africa”, putting it back into Western hands “by any means necessary”.

The CIA was anxious to get a foothold in these newly independent nations early to contain any possible spread of Communism. In the 1950s, the CIA’s African division developed an elaborate network of front organisations to acquire information and intelligence from across Africa. It funded journals and concerts, and established contacts with journalists, writers and businessmen who would become informants. For instance, Maurice Tempelsman (known for his relationship with Jackie Kennedy), who had big financial interests in Africa, sat on the board of the African-American Institute, a CIA front group. His business associate, George Wittman — whose company operated in a dozen African countries — was recruited into the agency in 1951, and helped produce a massive study of Ghana. The CIA also developed a close relationship with the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was they who informed the South African police as the whereabouts of Nelson Mandela.

Meanwhile American policymakers, like the European colonisers before them, believed that Africans weren’t quite ready for “orderly development” and “progress towards self-determination”. Williams quotes the vice-President Richard Nixon advocating that the US side with the “strong men of Africa”  —  the tyrants, in other words  —  to maintain stability and cultivate military regimes. This would counter the Communist threat. President Eisenhower agreed. Despite grandiloquent rhetoric in support of democracy, then, US foreign policy actively supported anti-democratic movements in Africa.

Because of this, the US was perpetually irritated by the two main heroes of Williams’ book: Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first leader of independent Ghana in 1957, and Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DRC. Both were huge icons of anti-colonialism. And both were Pan Africanists, who believed in the dream of a united, strong and sovereign African continent  —  one that would be an influential power bloc on the world stage independent of both the West and the Soviet Union.

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Nkrumah was initially well-disposed to the US; immediately after Ghana’s independence, relations were relatively “friendly and fruitful”. But by 1960, Accra was promoting an “African centric” foreign policy and Ghana was becoming the HQ for anti-colonial insurgents from all across Africa. With his quest for an atomic reactor, and his close relationship with Lumumba, Nkrumah was now seen as a “subversive”. His “tendency to support extremist elements in neighbouring African countries”, as a State Department document put it, troubled America.

The motivation behind Nkrumah’s nuclear program was the aim to modernise Ghana within a generation. According to Williams, Nkrumah got support from Canada to build a reactor, but US pressure ceased this collaboration, so he decided to appeal to the Soviet Union instead — raising US suspicions. It is worth noting here that the US gave a nuclear reactor to Congo in 1958, when it was still a Belgian colony, and also supplied enriched Uranium to apartheid South Africa for its nuclear program. It seems that, for the US, “a necessary qualification in Africa for access to a reactor”, as Williams notes, “was colonial occupation or white minority rule”. In other words, atomic energy was only appropriate in white hands, not sovereign black hands.

Throughout the 1960s, relations between Accra and Washington would deteriorate. Nkrumah publicly called the US a “neo-colonial” power in a book titled Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. He became paranoid and more dictatorial in his rule. The state monopolised the media; critics who “disrespected” the President were jailed. Economic mismanagement was rife; many state-run companies made losses. The cost of living rose dramatically, which led to protests on the streets, and repression in return. Discontent with Nkrumah’s rule within the armed forces produced easy allies for the CIA, who had been flirting with the idea of regime change in Ghana since 1961. In 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup indirectly supported by Britain and America, while on an official visit to China. Shortly afterwards, the pro-Western military junta swiftly shut down the Kwembaya atomic reactor.

America’s main gripe against Patrice Lumumba, meanwhile, was his desire to keep Katanga  —  Congo’s richest province, where separatism was building  —  as part of the Congo. The province was the home of lucrative American and Belgian mining companies; Lumumba wanted to nationalise the industry. And so the CIA suspected Lumumba was a secret Communist and in “Soviet pay” — even though ideologically he was a nationalist. His reputation tarnished by these suspicions, Lumumba’s appeal for UN intervention during the Congo crisis of 1960 fell on deaf ears. With Belgian support, Katanga seceded. Around 100,000 people were killed. Lumumba was captured and executed by Katangan separatists in January 1961.

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In 1960, as Williams reveals through recently declassified documents, the CIA had officially approved a plan to fund and help organise opposition to Lumumba — with the expressed purpose of overthrowing him and replacing him with a “moderate”, pro-Western strong man. The prime candidate mentioned for this role by CIA Director Allen Dulles was Colonel Mobutu, who organised a coup against Lumumba on later that year, but wouldn’t fully come to power until 1965  —  via another American-backed coup. Williams presents unequivocal evidence that Mobutu had been an informant for Belgian intelligence and the CIA for years previously.

The ousting of Nkrumah in Ghana and Lumumba in the Congo followed a similar pattern of US interventions: such “deliberate violations of democracy” had taken place in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA would support in various ways  — indirectly, and sometimes directly  —  the overthrow of governments that had been democratically elected. These governments were deemed unacceptable by America because they had the misfortune of believing that their nations deserved to exercise self-determination, not simply have it in name. The US would then help install brutal dictatorships — like Mobutu’s — that used torture to repress critics and treated the national treasury as their own personal piggy bank. For American policymakers, this was an acceptable outcome, even though it contradicted the values of their own constitution. Communism was kept in check. Black lives did not matter.

We are in the midst of a frenzied post-colonial “reckoning” but, with notable exceptions (like Vincent Bevin’s absorbing Jakarta Method, published last year), this reckoning has focused on events that took and take place on American soil. For all the interest in black people, there has been little interest, even on the Left, in the African continent — except as a historic victim of Europe. The enemy is 19th century colonialism, which gave rise to the slave trade; 20th century American imperialism has been largely ignored.

But as refugees pour out of Kabul, dragging the failures of American intervention into the spotlight, the revelations in White Malice are perfectly timed. Perhaps now we’ll collectively object to the fact that American companies  —  Apple, Google, Dell  —  are using child miners in Cobalt mines in the Congo. Perhaps we will realise that little has changed in America’s relationship to Africa since the Cold War.

In Britain, however, where “black power” also began to take hold, there was a twist: it wasn’t just being embraced by black people, but Asians too. Indeed, Stokely Carmichael once recalled his surprise when, during a trip to London in 1967, he witnessed Black Power “resonating” among “the raised fists in the Asian communities, especially among Pakistani youth.” This would extend into the 1970s and 80s, when South Asians and black people were united under the banner of “political blackness”.

In the US, “blackness” was  —  and remains  —  both a political and ethnic identity; in Britain, things have always been more complicated. Here, political blackness was fashioned to encourage solidarity and mobilisation between Black Caribbeans and South Asians: an identity for people who shared a history of colonial subjugation, migration and diaspora  —  and who were now being treated as second-class citizens.

Ambalavaner Sivanandan, for instance, left behind the ethnic pogroms of his native Sri Lanka to migrate to London in 1958, only to witness attacks by white mobs on West Indians during the Notting Hill riots. “I knew then I was black,” he wrote; he would be treated as black whether he accepted it or not. Decades later, not much had changed. After a long career as the editor of the journal Race & Class, Sivanandan wrote in 2008: “Black is the colour of our politics, not the colour of our skins”.

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But political blackness was born in a different era, one where “coloureds” — anyone who was not white — were treated as part of a de facto underclass in the UK. Institutional racism meant they occupied menial jobs, were denied decent housing and education and were excluded from many social spaces due to the “colour bar”.

At the time, the mainstream Left did little to change this state of affairs. Trade unions, for instance, were generally hostile to the cause of anti-racism. Political blackness, therefore, wasn’t simply a critique of Tory governments; it also attacked the Labour Party for being co-conspirators in institutional racism. “What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after,” was Sivanandan’s sardonic assessment. After Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, as fears abounded of Kenyan Asians “swarming” into Britain, it was Harold Wilson’s Labour government that rushed through the racist 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. Where previously Commonwealth citizens had had unlimited entry to Britain, as British subjects, they were now barred.

In this context, it made sense for the descendants of Britain’s colonies to band together. In 1968, Jagmohan Joshi co-founded the Black Peoples’ Alliance (BPA). Their founding congress was attended by various Caribbean and Asian militant groups — including the Pakistani Workers’s Association, the West Indian Standing Conference (WISC) and the Afro-Asian Liberation Front. The BPA took to the streets a year later, 8,000-strong, in a “march for dignity” to Downing Street, calling for the repeal of the Immigration Act. And over the next decade, it would, along with other groups, continue to play an important role in protesting police brutality and defending ethnic minority communities from far-Right attacks.

But political blackness is now a fossil. Today it’s widely accepted that it flattens out the differences between blacks and South Asians into an abstract non-white identity. For Kehinde Andrews, a modern-day black nationalist, blackness is the sacred unifying glue of the “African diaspora”. Turning into a political umbrella, he claims, “erases the history of political organising based around shared African ancestry” in Britain.

Moreover, discussions surrounding race in Britain have been further fudged by the super-diversity that has resulted from recent decades of mass migration from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Eastern European migrants, for example, have been the frequent object of xenophobia in the past couple of decades, despite being “white”. At the same time, the emergence of identity politics in recent years has had the effect of breaking up what was once a unified “black struggle” into ethnic and religious fragments.

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Within this political desiccation, it is hardly surprising that the Tories are the political group best equipped to appeal to an increasingly diverse electorate. It is, after all, something that they have been trying to do for a long time; in 1983, they ran an election poster featuring a besuited black man alongside the words: “Labour say he’s black. Tories say he’s British”. The message is clear: we emphasise nationhood and want to include you in it, while the Left wants to keep you imprisoned by your race.

Of course, when the Tories first tried to paint themselves as the party of the aspirational ethnic minority, the message was hollow: the party was extremely white. Now, the party is responsible for the most ethnically diverse cabinet in the history of British government. Beyond Rishi Sunak — who is, of course, its embodiment — there’s also Priti Patel, the daughter of Indian migrants by way of Uganda, at the helm of the Home office. Kwasi Kwarteng and Kemi Badenoch, both of West African stock, are Business Secretary and Equalities Minister respectively. Then there’s Claire Coutinho, Bim Afolami and Suella Braverman among others.

What this shows is that there is no such thing as “black politics” in any unitary sense. Black people, with various backgrounds, are acting politically across the spectrum. Yet today’s understanding of “political blackness” still implies that you need to have a particular kind of radical politics be “authentically black” politically — and any deviation equates to “selling out”.

This expectation that all ethnic minority politicians must be naturally Leftist reveals a basic ignorance of the fact that many of them come from communities and cultures that are conservative, probably more so than your typical Tory whose conservatism has been diluted by the winds of liberalism. Norman Tebbitt once expressed his admiration for the “natural conservatism” of British Asians (and you could chuck in British African communities too) for upholding traditional virtues: respect for tradition and faith, strong family and communal bonds, deference to authority and conservative sexual morality. A recent BBC survey of British Asians also concluded that they were more socially conservative than the rest of the British population.

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Of course, within ethnic minority communities these values are hotly contested, as in any community. Ethnic minorities are as divided by class and politics as white people. Many British Indians and some segments of Britons from West African communities are affluent, socially mobile and well credentialed enough to vote Tory; most other ethnic minorities are disproportionately poorer, so tend to vote Labour, though there are exceptions. Gone are the days when “political blackness” could be used to represent ethnic minorities as an underclass; significant slices have climbed the social ladder.

So don’t underestimate the power of a Tory government that can synthesise patriotism and multi-ethnicity, practise “colour blindness” and rebut the Left’s accusations of tokenism by pointing out that they operate on talent and aspiration and beliefs, not skin colour. The Tories’ message of equality of opportunity and meritocracy strikes a chord with many, whatever their hue.

On the identitarian Left, meanwhile, instead of “political blackness”, ethnic minorities are currently stuck with “people of colour’ or the soulless bureaucratic acronym BAME as umbrella terms to express their collective grievances to officialdom. Political blackness may have been flawed, but at least it was a radical attempt to encourage solidarity between different communities for a politics dedicated towards social transformation. Any attempt to revive it now would only degrade into kitsch.

For today, blackness in Britain has morphed from a radical political identity into an almost wholly racial identity associated with African ancestry. If anything, blackness has become an aesthetic, a chic identity swallowed up into the consumerist economy. Despite the Left’s best efforts, political blackness cannot be the basis for any politics of solidarity any longer.

Andrews’s book The New Age of Empire is an extension of that argument. In it, he cautions sympathetic readers not to get too giddy over the embrace of “anti-racism” by officialdom. As he sees it, it will only lead to “meaningless change” and “token gestures”. A self-proclaimed “black radical”, Andrews wants to attack the root of the problem: the West itself and the “logic of empire” that organises it.

Unsurprisingly, ground zero for Andrews’ critique is the Enlightenment — the “sacred foundation of Western knowledge”, as he sardonically puts it. All our modern ideas of freedom and equality are traditionally traced back to this Age of Reason. Andrews argues against that narrative. Kant’s racist anthropology and Hume’s polygenism, he writes, “provided the universal and scientific framework of knowledge that maintained colonial logic”, which is the central organising principle of the current “political and economic system and therefore infects all interactions, institutions and ideas”.

Kant et al placed white people firmly at the top of the racial hierarchy. And that codification of black inferiority was used to justify Western imperialism, which has gone through several mutations — from the relentless expeditions into the New World and Atlantic slavery, to 19th century European colonialism, to the present, in which the United States inherits imperial responsibilities. In our allegedly “post-racial” age, institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank continue to exploit Africa through unfair “structural adjustment” programs that force austerity and privatisation upon poor African nations, further crippling their economies. No matter how “the logic of empire” mutates, the premise is still the same: “The West is rich because the rest is poor”.

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As an epigone of Malcolm X, Andrews is not interested in interracial allyship as a solution. “The white left”, as he calls them, are too in thrall to the “psychosis of whiteness” to recognise that racism and imperialism are baked into their own politics. Echoing Maoism-Third Worldism, he chastises the white Left for failing to see that the “true revolutionary class has always resided outside the West”. As far as he’s concerned: “If you have come this far and believe that White people offering a meaningful hand of friendship is the solution, then you have missed the point.”

His solution is revolutionary Pan-Africanism — and has been for some time. In a 2018 video he made for the BBC, Andrews outlined his African utopia, his own Wakanda, materially rich and technologically advanced, where the diaspora will eventually return to their “African promised land”. In his book, he states his purpose is to develop “the politics of black radicalism, which centres on uniting Africa and the African diaspora to create a true revolution … the only true solution to the problem of racism”.

Andrews’s tract is uncompromising. His re-telling of the history of Western violence and the chronically poor state of Africa is potent. Interestingly, he is also critical of China and other upstart powers for using Africa as a “stepping stone” for their own development, while continuing the systematic “looting” of the continent. But Andrews ignores a number of contradictions that might puncture this worldview.

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Ironically Pan-Africanism, the ideology Andrews pledges fidelity to, is a bastard child of the West. It was westernised blacks that imagined a global black community with a common destiny transcending all nations, as a response to racial oppression (an idea rather similar to Zionism, a comparison Andrews wouldn’t be pleased with). Many of the icons of Pan-Africanism — Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X — hailed from the Americas, not Africa. Even native-born African adherents like Kwame Nkrumah were Western educated and very much influenced by the modernist impulses of Marxism.

But Andrews exhibits a common vice of contemporary radicalism: the idea that to be radical is to be disenchanted with all that is Western. It is rather fashionable, as the shrill calls to “decolonise” suggest, to believe that authentic radicalism regards the Enlightenment not as a resource in challenging imperialism but an imperial project itself. That narrative omits the fact that, while mainstream Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were rabid racists, the Enlightenment also provided the best tools to date for universal human liberation.

As Jonathan Israel has documented in his voluminous scholarship, there were two sides to the Enlightenment: a moderate and a radical wing. Funnily enough, all the individuals Andrews names in his galère of “dead white men” — Kant, Hume, Locke, Voltaire and Jefferson — were part of the Moderate Enlightenment, which was more elitist and conciliatory towards the old order. A different set of dead white men, inspired by Baruch Spinoza, made up the Radical Enlightenment — Diderot, Condorcet, D’Holbach . They  applied reason consistently against old hierarchies and institutions, including slavery and colonialism, precisely because they were fetters on human freedom and equality.

For instance Condorcet, in 1795, observed that during the “Age of Discovery” a “stupid and brutal fanaticism governed the kings and robbers”, which meant the “unfortunate beings who inhabited these new countries were not treated as men, because they were not Christian”. He went on to argue that the advantages of the Age of Discovery meant nothing unless Europeans “acknowledge men of other climates, equals and brothers by the will of nature, have never been formed to nourish the pride and avarice of a few privileged nations”.

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Indeed, anti-imperialist radicals of the 20th century such as CLR James recognised that Western thought was the wellspring of all progressive, emancipatory politics — especially the historical gains that emerged out of the Enlightenment. Secularism, individual rights, the scientific method, democratic politics, universal values, philosophical humanism and materialism have superseded earlier concepts — not because of white supremacy, but because they are, patently, improvements on what came before. Out of the seismic upheavals that formed the modern world — the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific revolution and the Enlightenment — flowed superior ideas: ideas that still form the basis of human liberation.

These so-called “western values” are not western in any essential sense. They aren’t the property of white people; they are the birth right of all humanity. Which is why previous anti-imperialist radicals made a distinction between the good that stemmed from the most revolutionary elements of Western culture and the scourge of Western imperialism, which was a major obstacle to the realisation of these ideals around the world.

“The science resulting from all human knowledge has no nationality,” observed Sekou Touré, who lead Guinea to independence: “The ridiculous disputes about the origin of such and such a discovery do not interest us since they add nothing to the value of the discovery.”

Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese nationalist and Pan-Africanist himself, was known to have been inspired by the French revolution in his anti-imperialism, and studied French Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. Moreover, CLR James, while detesting European colonialism, felt no shame in acknowledging the “learning and profound discoveries of Western civilisation” and made it his mission to “master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation”.

Radical Enlightenment values are still the best tools humanity has crafted to create a better world. The challenge then is not to negate them but to build upon them, expand them, and ultimately raise them to a higher level never before seen. This still remains Africa’s path to liberation from tyranny and want — as opposed to Andrews’ nihilistic vision, which sees no place for interracial solidarity and finds a “glimmer of hope for true transformation” only in total collapse of the system. Dare I suggest it: “western values” are the real path towards black freedom.

Lockdown has disorientated everyone’s social life, with the indefinite suspension of the night-time economy — pubs, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, theatres and music venues. Of course, some pleasure-seeking inevitably has to be sacrificed temporarily for the sake of arresting the spread of the virus and protecting those most vulnerable. But the sacrifice has hit singletons and voluptuaries particularly hard.

The last year has been a puritan’s wet dream: social distancing has devastated all the industries that facilitate casual sex; some countries have imposed alcohol restrictions; the film industry even consulting the old priggish Hays Code for filming intimate scenes; universities restricting parties and hooking up on campus in the interest of public health. And now a third lockdown has once again cancelled all opportunities for us to go out and enjoy ourselves.

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Worse, it’s felt as if the risk of spreading the virus has been exploited to bolster an old prejudice: that spending time in these places is inherently immoral. The stench of puritanism, which H.L Mencken summarised as “the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy”, has risen to the surface to pollute the nostrils of society. Official Western morality — whether represented by Plato, Christianity or Kant — has always regarded hedonism as fundamentally bad. The new Puritans, like the old ones, like to police the way other people get their pleasure.

You don’t need to have broken any rule to earn their ire: to even complain about what it feels like not being able to date or party, or even socialise with friends over a drink, is regarded as inappropriate, dismissed as inconsequential, in comparison to the noble goal of saving lives.

And so no one protests that the lifestyles of the lustful, the promiscuous, the sluts and fuckbois (“libertine men and scarlet women” as The Music Man refers to them) have been turned upside down. Some hopeful young romantics gave e-dating a go; others tried out “Zoom nightclubs”. The use of online porn has increased and OnlyFans has risen meteorically. But the pleasures of the flesh have been out of bounds.

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Even though I knew this state was temporary, in the early days of lockdown an irrational, paranoid voice inside me did entertain fears that the so called “new normal” would irrevocably abolish these pleasures. In stark contrast, the neo-puritans celebrated the current chaste state of affairs — even calling for it to continue. They imagine Covid-19 to be the nail in the coffin for the “soul-eroding” hook-up culture; they reminded us that there are dangerous “consequences” to casual sex again.

Thank science for the vaccine then. Not only is it a testament to human endeavour,  it is also a precious golden ticket to the return of a varied and exciting social life. Some predict, or rather salivate over, an explosion of decadence and debauchery — a “roaring twenties” of the 21st century. Epidemiologist Dr Nicholas Christakis certainly thinks such an era is on its way, arguing in his recent book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, that the rest of the 2020s will be defined by “sexual licentiousness” as people will be “relentlessly seeking social interaction”.

During the peaks of pandemics, he argues, people tend to be more risk-averse, frugal, abstemious and socially reserved. Afterwards, all of these trends reverse, and people spend and socialise more liberally than ever before. The most obvious comparison, of course, is the Jazz Age following the Spanish Flu and the First World War that witnessed “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. The era was made legendary by the Flappers and Greenwich Village; it developed new social and cultural freedoms, especially for women, who turned against stifling domesticity (as so many of us now long to.)

During the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th century, the belief that the end of the world was near was so popular that survivors became wildly hedonistic, organising lavish parties and feasts in ale houses, simply to celebrate the fact that they were alive amidst the spectre of death and misery all around them. “They spent day and night moving from one tavern to the next, drinking without mode or measure…engaging only in those activities that gave them pleasure”, observed the contemporary writer Boccaccio on the excesses of the era.

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There are even accounts of survivors going to their local graveyard for a quick shag before repenting in church to laugh in the face of death, which later led to the Papal office threatening fines and excommunication. Moreover, the plague saw the de facto institutionalisation of prostitution, with brothels providing a new source of income for the authorities and arguably ensuring social stability by serving as an outlet for riotous lower class men, especially in areas where they outnumbered young women.

In the 1980s the HIV/AIDS epidemic was supposed to have been the end of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. It was viewed by religious fundamentalists as cosmic karma for the promiscuity of gay men. The epidemic contributed to the demise of the gay-centred bathhouse culture and shifted campaigners’ focus from sexual liberation to gay marriage. The porn theatres that were once a hallmark in Time Square, New York were gentrified in favour of “family values and safety”.

Still, the HIV/AIDs epidemic was succeeded by the sex positivity of the 1990s, during which the West was drunk on the rather shallow liberal optimism of the ‘end of history’ following the end of the Cold War. That era saw the Spice Girls, the golden age of lads mags and the rise of queer culture, kink/BDSM and Tantric sex in mainstream pop culture — and their steady integration into the consumer economy.

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A pattern is apparent: human beings are pleasure seeking-creatures. After a period of retrenchment, sacrifice and austerity, an orgy of decadence and debauchery isn’t too far away. All that pent-up energy and desire just waits to express itself. Why? Because it feels good. Don’t underestimate the sheer endurance of the human libido, and the lengths we will go to, even in unbearable situations, to satisfy it.

For the neo-puritans who are surreptitiously giddy that Covid-19 will somehow put an end to casual sex and hook-up culture in favour of marriage or at least long term “emotionally committed” relationships: if even HIV/AIDS couldn’t do it, then Covid-19 sure as hell can’t. Humans have always hooked up despite what traditional morality said — and will continue to do so. Once this third — and we can only hope final — lockdown comes to an end, lust will be in the air.

One key motif of modern politics in the past decade has been the recurrence of the antinomy between individualism and communitarianism. This has especially been the case in the Covid-19 pandemic, during which activities like partying have been condemned as individualist selfishness in contrast to our communal obligations to “protect our NHS”. It is important to stress, nevertheless, that hedonistic proclivities aren’t simply about satiating individual desires, but about forming bonds, connection, even intimacy with others.

The “anarchy of the flesh” is an essential part of social life: we drink, eat, party, dance and screw with other people. There is a particular intimacy that one can experience on a dancefloor or in a concert that can evolve into a transcendent experience. This is something to be valued and cherished as part of the human experience — and something to invest and indulge in, when the pandemic is in the past.

This poetic episode from Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture, Sudhir Hazareesingh’s voluminous yet gripping biography, is a small demonstration of the historical magnificence of that revolution. The slaves not only appropriated the Historie philosophique, but as Hazareesingh writes: “brought the text to life in a glorious display of erudition, swagger and wit”. The life of the Haitian slave leader, published in September this year, could not been more timely, as the historical legacy of slavery and racism came to dominate debate in the United States and beyond.

Most Westerners will be familiar with the importance of the years 1776 and 1789. The American and French revolutions were the two defining moments of modern history, events that overthrew monarchy and feudal absolutism with new Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality and republicanism, thus sparking “The Age of Revolution”.

The Haitian Revolution of 1791 might be included into this same bracket. A revolution as monumental as events in the United States and France, it erupted just two years after the fall of the Bastille on a small Caribbean island, organised and executed by African slaves fighting for their liberation against French slave masters.

It should be regarded as one of the great events of world history, being the first rebellion in which slaves overthrew their masters, abolished slavery, beat off multiple imperial powers and managed to set up their own nation and constitution. It was, in Aime Cesaire’s words, when “black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world.”

It is mainly because of CLR James’ indispensable masterpiece, Black Jacobins, which artfully retells its triumphs and tragedies, that the Haitian revolution has attracted any awareness, let alone esteem in our culture at all. Otherwise it has been a revolution largely relegated to obscurity.

Thankfully, Black Spartacus is a valuable gem for readers eager to enlighten themselves about the revolution and especially for the man who lead it. Toussaint Louverture’s life can rightfully be described as “epic”; born a slave in the 1740s on the Breda plantation in Saint Domingue, France’s most valuable colony, his existence was defined by oppression and cruelty.

After helping to organise the most successful slave rebellion in history, and later becoming its leader and general, he turned his fellow emancipated slaves into a formidable fighting force, outsmarting his enemies, and authoring a constitution in 1801. This abolished slavery once and for all, included a non-racial definition of citizenship — and brought Haiti on the brink of independence. In response Napoleon sent an expedition to crush the revolution and re-install slavery. It failed as Haiti became independent in 1804 — though by then Louverture had been captured and had died in the grim, snowy Fort de Joux in France the previous year.

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While Louverture’s life is extraordinary, much of it has been the subject of mystery and legend. We don’t know precisely what year he was born, what year he was legally emancipated, or when he learned how to read. No official portraits of him exist, so we don’t even have an accurate depiction of what he looked like. Moreover, there are certain aspects of Louverture’s life we simple will never know. For example, the letters he wrote to his various mistresses (many of them white) were torched by Napoleon’s army in 1802. Moreover, Toussaint had as much interest as anyone else in creating the mysterious aura around his name.

However, Black Spartacus is rooted in an impressive depth of research. Hazareesingh dived straight into the various, and often untouched archives in France, Spain, Britain and America (unfortunately not Haiti itself as not much material has survived) to “find our way back to Toussaint: to return as far as possible to the primary sources, to try to see the world through his eyes, and to recapture the boldness of his thinking and the individuality of his voice.”

According to his own claim, Hazareesingh has succeeded in arguably painting the richest portrait of Louverture’s life to date in biographical form, one that captures the “boldness of his thinking” and “his voice”, as well as the complexities and nuances of his political life.

One way he does this is torpedoing a common misconception about Louverture, that he had little affinity or attachment to his Caribbean and African heritage. Loverture wasn’t ashamed of his African origins, or sought to distance himself from it — he embraced it. He was raised in the Allada culture by his parents, where he learned their native Fon language, which he was known to frequently use when conversing with his soldiers (often to their delight). He was knowledgeable in African herbal medicine. While he didn’t personally adhere to Vodou, he was intimate with it and used it as a repository to inspire his people. And his military prowess was in some sense influenced by the martial cultures of the various African peoples on Saint Domingue, as much as studying the writings of Julius Caesar.

Louverture’s genius also comes from how he was able to appropriate the ideals of the Enlightenment and use them against the European powers enslaving his people. Hazareesingh points out, as other have before him, that Louverture eventually became familiar with the writings of Raynal, Diderot and Rousseau, and saw that the French revolution had betrayed its own stated ideals when it “manifestly sided with the slave-owners” in Saint Domingue. If Liberté, égalité and fraternité are universal and have any concrete meaning, then surely they apply to enslaved blacks as much as to white bourgeois men? Louverture’s vision, in contrast, was more faithful to republican ideals, especially in his non-racial idea of fraternité, in which liberated black slaves, white colonists and mixed-race peoples would live together as “a single family of friends and brothers”.

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In Louverture one finds a distinction between the evil of European colonialism and the good that flowed out of many of the ideas of the European Enlightenment. As Hazareesingh writes: “The Haitian revolution generated its own set of emancipatory principles, making it the most masterful political improvisation of the Radical Enlightenment.”

What the author does marvellously is show the multiple streams that formed Louverture’s political views; not just African mysticism and Enlightenment philosophy, but also his visceral Catholic humanism, which taught that all of God’s children are equal no matter their colour. This last idea Louverture probably got from radical Jesuit priests he knew on the Breda Plantation, and who likely taught him how to read. This syncretic ideology formed what Hazareesingh describes as “creole republicanism”, inspiring a ferocious opposition to slavery and inspired social solidarity among the former enslaved.

But Louverture was no simple-minded idealist. He describes Louverture as a foxy, “revolutionary political operator” who knew the importance of Machiavellian strategy. The Haitian leader could be very cynical and cunning if it meant protecting the revolution, which is why he made alliances and counter-alliances at different times with the Spanish, French and British Empires against each other, all of whom ultimately had predatory ambitions for Haiti and had nothing but racial hostility towards the Haitian revolution. At one point, while officially still allied with France, he betrayed a French agent he had helped send to Jamaica to start another slave revolt, by revealing the plans of the expedition to a British agent.

On principle Louverture was “sincerely committed to the liberation of black people in Jamaica from British rule”, but suspected the French were using him and his army as cannon fodder for a risky foreign intervention, which he and his advisors feared would “imperil all the achievements of the revolution in Saint Domingue” and whose ultimate purpose was to get rid of him. Louverture’s raison d’etre was to defend and consolidate the Haitian revolution by any means necessary, which is why Hazareesingh clearly writes with admiration, although without descending into hagiography. Because Louverture, like almost every revolutionary leader since Oliver Cromwell, had an authoritarian streak too.

Hazareesingh recognises that he “became increasingly trapped in an authoritarian spiral” in his desperate attempts to restore the pre-revolutionary plantation economy, in order to kickstart the economic development of Haiti and protect it from external attack. He withheld civic roles from women, and in the infamous 1801 constitution named himself leader for life.

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Nevertheless, perhaps the most enjoyable chapters come towards the end when Louverture’s cultural and political legacy are discussed, in death transformed into a symbol of liberation across the world.

Both William Wordsworth and Bob Marley paid tribute to him in song and verse. Jamaican slaves and Irish republicans were inspired by his opposition to racism, in the case of the former singing in 1799 that “black, white and brown, we’re all de same”. Louverture proved inspirational to 19th-century abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and John Brown, and 20th century anti-imperialists like CLR James and Aime Cesaire. Louverture and the Haitian revolution were a “precursor for modern emancipatory politics” — and few people can claim to have a legacy as enduring as this.

The concept of the “Great Man of History” may no longer be fashionable, but if it has any validity then Toussaint Louverture is surely one of them. To rise from slavery to become the great emancipator of the 18th century, and in CLR James’ words the “finest product” of the Enlightenment, is a mark of greatness.

Louverture’s life shows how individuals can have a decisive role in changing, even in the midst of larger social and economic forces. His will and determination, his fierce struggle for man’s “natural liberty” is a testament to what Wordsworth called “man’s unconquerable mind”. So we should be thankful that Sudhir Hazareesingh has written the outstanding biography of “the first black superhero of the modern age”.

If it weren’t for the fact that the director of the film was Sofia Coppola, a woman, this shot would unquestionably be taken as a vintage example of the dreaded ‘male gaze’, the bête noire of feminists, who might see it ravenously honing in on a female body in a ‘pervy’ manner, objectifying Johansson at will for male voyeurism and domination. Still, the ideologically blinkered would find a way of arguing that Coppola’s ‘internalised sexism’ caused her to pander to the hegemonic male gaze.

Laura Mulvey coined the phrase, in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.She argued that cinema has been a medium for the dissemination of misogyny and patriarchal ideology, presenting women as passive erotic objects for the titillation of the actively-looking male heterosexual subject. Megan Fox bending over a motorcycle in very short denim shorts in Transformers 2, for example. For Mulvey, the male gaze is necessarily unethical because “all too often … female bodies are shown to be objects designed to please men and conform to mainstream ideals of femininity”.

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Increasingly in film, any supposedly sexualised representations of the female body receive a backlash; every once in a while a male critic will be pilloried on social media for writing a horny review that objectifies a starlet in a ‘creepy’ fashion. We are in danger of erasing the erotic from film altogether.

These objections have a subtle but alarmingly puritanical edge to them, reminiscent of a religious hatred of the body and sexuality, their appropriation for pleasure and fun being seen as an offence to decency, as well as fundamentally immoral. This view has been especially repressive for women — it paternalistically claims to protect their modesty and dignity, from the diabolic world of sex, deemed antagonistic to their maidenly nature. But, as we know, lust doesn’t only belong to men.

With sexual liberalisation, women gaining more autonomy and social power, and the rise of sex-positive feminism, the “the female gaze” has arrived. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, for instance, has been credited with helping to assert female sexual agency in her comedy Fleabag,in which her character frequently and openly fantasises about men she fancies, sexually objectifying the male body, bracingly representing women as actively desiring sexual beings, instead of simplythe objects of male desire. Films such as Gone Girl and Portrait of a Lady on Firehave also been championed as an antidote to the exploitative male gaze by privileging female desire, the latter pushing men out of the frame altogether.

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While this is a generally positive development, a simplistic dichotomy is often constructed between the female gaze and the (straight) male gaze, which according to critic Christina Newland, “has no radical mileage”. The female gaze is portrayed as edenic and spiritually dignified, in contrast to the demonic and depraved nature of the male gaze. “If male thirst simplifies women to bits of flesh, then female thirst tends to be all about fleshing out the person inside,” as one critic put it.

Feminist theorists assert that the male gaze is an instrument of women’s oppression. Of course, it canbe this. As we know, some men can be incredibly cruel when talking about women and their bodies, exploiting shame, anxiety over their appearance and the sexual double standard to humiliate them. Furthermore, the male gaze in specific contexts, where power relations are at play, can be a precursor for violence and abuse. Think of the sexist, piggish boss in 9 to 5, who takes pleasure in groping and sexually bullying his secretaries (who then proceed to get their revenge).

But the implication that the male gaze could only ever be brutish and oppressive is to have a truncated view of male desire. Women can’t be reduced to their bodies, but the vast majority of men don’t merely see women’s bodies as ‘pussy’ to be pounded or punching bags to be sparred with. It is something to be awed and respected as a source of erotic contemplation (just as the male body can be for women).

“The eternal feminine draws us on high”, wrote Goethe. The male gaze isn’t simply an expression of male sexual power over women. It is just as likely to be an expression of alienation, of vulnerability; a yearning for tenderness and a nervous assertion that beauty is good and to be preserved in the midst of an increasingly ugly and colourless world. It seems like the only people not permitted to soliloquise about the male gaze are men themselves.

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Invocations of the male gaze have become like truncheons deployed to condemn sexual desire and expression. Is every portrayal of the sexualised human form really inherentlydegrading? It’s almost a secular way of condemning the sin of lust, where any image of the female form that could conceivably be attractive to men (which, let’s be real, is most of them) is pandering to the male gaze, therefore the production of that image is ‘objectification’, therefore it is immoral.

The lengthy and graphic sex scenes in Blue is The Warmest Colour between the two lesbian protagonists were excoriated for supposedly being “male gaze porn” disguised as art house cinema, because the camera focuses in on the bodies of these attractive actresses for minutes on end in a way that was apparently designed to please straight men.

What? Are we really going to define beauty according to a narrow ideological agenda, because it a priori might appeal to those whom it apparently isn’t supposed to appeal to. This reveals the major problem with the progressive-feminist critique of the male gaze: it hinges on something so fundamental to the nature of film itself: sex appeal.

The stars, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux are obviously rather fetching. Their bodies, their faces were vital ingredients for the ravishing chemistry they were able to create on screen. So of course male viewers would be tantalised. Is that inherently a bad thing? While the “male gaze” jibe sounds enlightened and à la mode, it implicitly denies that the women (especially the lesbian ones) in the audience have a gaze of their own, or asserts that it has been colonised by the omnipotent male gaze.

Would the lesbian sex have been more ‘authentic’ if the women were less attractive (according to so-called male standards)? Or would it have just been less erotic and sexy? Maybe the male and female gaze aren’t as different as we think they are  — and that’s what really bothers critics.

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When watching anything, desire, sensuality, eroticism and aesthetics are all an intrinsic part of our viewing experience. I felt this acutely when I watched The Time In Between (El Tiempo Entre Costuras), a Spanish Civil War espionage series, starring Adriana Ugarte (best known for being the blonde haired femme fatale protagonist in Pedro Almodovar’s Julieta) and Hannah New (fans of Maleficentwill recognise her as Queen Leila). The show is terrific and the actresses talented. But I would be lying if I said that my viewing experience wasn’t enhanced by the simple fact that both women are clearly gorgeous.

There is no explicit sex scene, and none of the actresses appear nude, but nonetheless, I “fell in lust” with them, in particular Adriana Ugarte with her dancing eyes and “awfully kissable mouth” to borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with her ability to grace the screen with a beauty and finesse reminiscent of Old Hollywood glamour. Maybe it was the haute couture 1930s costumes, or maybe it was my own ‘male gaze’, but I loved looking at her. Which brought to mind a truth about the viewing experience we’re sometimes too coy to acknowledge.

Actors are, among other things, their bodies and faces. Their good looks are a crucial part of their craft, as well as how they manipulate their bodies. It is no good deluding ourselves that this isn’t the case (and indeed that it shouldn’t be).

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We go to the cinema to be moved and inspired. We trust that our physical and emotional responses  —  tears, anger, fright —  are telling us something about what we are seeing on screen. Why not lust? Why not our hormones? Our libidos are as intrinsic to our humanity as our reason. The value of the Erotic thriller genre — from Body Double to The Handmaiden, films that use the erotic as a spectacle, partially designed to ravish your senses — would be diminished if this weren’t the case.

Our squeamishness in acknowledging that “eye candy” has a legitimate part to play in an art form as visual as cinema, originates from that residue of puritanism in our culture that views personal display and glamour as vain and immodest. It is part of the anti-body bias in Christianity which regards the flesh and all of its pleasures as intrinsically sinful and degrading, and which must therefore be repressed. Hence the notion that portrayals of sexuality in a public venue such as a cinema are just a little bit suspect.

But visual gratification is one of the reasons why we enjoy watching films. The bliss of watching wonderfully composed humans on screen acting out a story for our collective enjoyment is one of the foundational pleasures of film. We denigrate it at our own loss.

One such example was in 2018, when one of the housemates, India Willoughby, a TV journalist who was once a man but had transitioned into a transwoman, asked her fellow housemates whether they would go out with a transwoman.

“I believe it’s your choice… I would choose not to,” replied the RnB singer Ginuwine. Willoughby then asked: “You would go out with a woman?” “Yes,” Ginuwine replied. “But you wouldn’t go out with a transsexual woman?” Willoughby hit back. “No,” replied Ginuwine. As the awkward conversation rumbled on, Willoughby suggested that Ginuwine give her a kiss, but he leaned back and said “no”.

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By Louise Perry

This encounter provoked a social media storm at the time. Some believed Ginuwine was transphobic for rejecting Willoughby. Others insisted he had a right to his preferences. Some even suggested that Willoughby was sexually harassing Ginuwine, by stepping over boundaries he made clear.

Unfortunately, two years on, the ethics of refusing transsexual people as dating partners remains a fraught subject: questions such as “Is it transphobic for lesbians not to date trans women?” are being discussed online. Again, they tend to arouse strong reactions. Some lesbians, for instance, have expressed concerns that raising the question of whether they ‘should’ be attracted to trans women is a surreptitious attempt to pressure, manipulate and guilt trip them into shifting their sexual boundaries into unwanted sex in the name of being more ‘open’.

Of course, there are lesbians who are reluctant to date trans women because they believe they are not actually women (or at least not women in the same way biologically born women are) . But it’s worth remembering that lesbians have endured a long history of attempts to control their sexuality, whether through hideous practices such as religious indoctrination, conversion therapy or ‘corrective’ rape to “make them straight”. And why focus the attack on lesbians, when many straight men would also reject trans women as a potential mate?

This obviously provokes a wider question: when does a preference become a convenient cover for bigotry and prejudice? On some level, as this tweet declares, “dating is discrimination”. But the question provoked by that Big Brother episode was: when is discrimination acceptable, and when is it unacceptable?

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By Jesse Singal

No one should dictate to others who they can or can’t date, love or sleep with. Historic attempts to do so  —  whether through slavery, arcane patriarchal customs or socially and religiously enforced ‘lifelong’ monogamous marriage  —  have led to oppression, trauma, unhappiness and neurosis. Think of the countless unhappy marriages many closeted gay people have had to endure — because they could not be honest about who they really wanted to love, because of the intense social stigma and shame attached to their sexuality. Without the freedom to choose who you date, the modern achievements of personal autonomy and individual liberty are negated.

That said, the question must be asked: are our dating and sexual preferences innocent? Where do they come from? Attraction is a biological impulse, but what lies behind it? Darwinists would say they grow out of our evolutionary origins. Since women are supposedly the ‘choosier’ of the sexes, they choose men who can ‘provide’ for them and protect them. Freudians would say our preferences originate from our childhood. According to the Oedipus complex, men unconsciously choose partners who reflect the most attractive qualities of their mothers (the Electra complex makes the same case about women and fathers.)

Frantz Fanon, meanwhile, would say that forces such as racism and colonialism play a big part in influencing people’s desires and attraction. A racist society constructs certain standards of beauty based on ‘whiteness’, which racial subordinates must conform to if they want to be respected as having any erotic worth. Whiteness equals desirability, so blacks must assimilate to gain recognition and respect. Historically, black women have bleached their skin and relaxed their hair to fit a Eurocentric image — which black men, in turn, have coveted it. As Fanon wrote in Black Skin White Masks:

I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. … who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man…Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilization and worthiness become mine.

Few people would need to read these theories to know that many of us have a ‘type’. You might prefer partners of a certain height, status, hair colour, body shape, and so on (there is even data to suggest that some people are attracted to those who look similar to them.) Such preferences may be oddly specific, and rather superficial, but they are mostly innocuous.

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Racial categories are reactionary

By Ralph Leonard

Some people seek a partner from a similar religious or cultural background — in the hope that this will make it easier for them to relate to one another, or out of a desire to pass on their heritage, traditions and values to future children. This is technically exclusionary for potential partners who lay outside this category — and may even be narrow minded — but such preference is not especially egregious. Still, can predilections mutate into something more sinister?

Because of globalisation, migration, social liberalisation and the rise of online dating, interracial dating has never been more prevalent; the stigma attached to it has mostly dissipated. In 2011 —  the last time such statistics were recorded — it was found that nearly 9% of people in England and Wales were living as part of an interracial relationship (up from 7% in 2001). Moreover, there is data to suggest a correlation between the rise of online dating apps and an increase in interracial relationships.

Yet, there is a paradox. Christian Rudder, co-founder of the dating site OkCupid and author of the 2014 book Dataclysm, which uses data trends to analyse human behaviour, has argued people’s use of online apps doesn’t match up with their professed attitudes. Most people will say, when surveyed, that they are open to dating someone from a different ‘race’; in reality, they tend not to be. According to Rudder’s data, collected between 2009 and 2014 from DateHookup ‘Let’s Meet scores’, women in particular generally preferred men of their own ‘race’.

More brazen are those who, on dating apps such as Grindr, Tinder and Bumble, nonchalantly state their racial preferences on their profile. It’s not uncommon to see caveats like, “Not attracted to Asian men”, “ I don’t date black women”, “I only date white girls” — and it’s difficult to argue that this has nothing to do with racism, which has historically played a role in influencing ideas of who is desirable and who is not.

White women  —  or a particular image of white women  —  have been placed at the top of this aesthetic hierarchy as the paragon of human beauty, with black women languishing at the bottom, portrayed as ugly, unattractive and overweight, and Asian men stereotyped as ‘sexless’, meek and less endowed compared to other ‘races’. American research seems to confirm this, indicating that Asian men and black women are more likely to be excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts as potential dating partners on dating apps.

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The ruthlessness of the sexual marketplace

By James Bloodworth

Herein lies the uncomfortable truth about our so called ‘dating economy’: discrimination is the name of the game. If you are considered attractive or ‘high value’ according to dating market logic, then you have myriad opportunities to meet new people, pursue novel erotic experiences and find romantic fulfilment. You don’t have to be restricted to people within your ‘community’. You can make your own choices and exercise your sexual autonomy to the fullest extent you desire.

But if you are considered unattractive and ‘low value’ then you will be excluded from what Henry Miller called ‘The World of Sex”, a place of freedom and adventure, erotic fufillment and pleasure, and love and companionship. To be deemed undesireable and ‘unfuckable’, of having no erotic worth at all is painful and soul crushing. This shouldn’t merely be sneered at as the delusional whining of losers drunk on entitlement. Human beings need to be loved by others, to pleasure and be pleasured by others, to develop intimate connections with others, to have fun with others. Being the social species we are it demands it. People are not wrong to want it and feel alienated when it proves extremely hard to achieve, because they are not desired by others for being who they are.

In modern society, our erotic selves and sexuality and our innate need for companionship are so intertwined with our personality that to not have the opportunity to fulfil them because you are a sexual minority rejected by the dominant culture, a racially stereotyped, or a socially awkward person is immensely alienating. These conditions will only be heightened even more with the economic decline and further atomisation resulting from Covid-19 and the restrictions meant to contain it.

Yet, discrimination is simply a fact of dating. It doesn’t matter if you are solidly monogamous, polyamorous or a promiscuous nymphomaniac: distinctions are made between those they are attracted to and those they are not attracted to. Dating is not a democracy and nor should it be. This is because choosing potential romantic and sexual partners is rather different from making friends or acquaintances, since these are people who become part of our intimate space, who we may share our bodies and the most personal aspect of our lives with. But, while we have a right to our preferences, we should also be able to critically reflect on why we desire what we desire and what influences it.

The country is in an economic black hole. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown that put all economic life on standby, Britain will soon experience its worst recession since records began. Companies have laid off staff. Unemployment has skyrocketed, and is set to rise further after the furlough scheme ends in October and firms plan for more redundancies.

Britain’s GDP fell in the second quarter by 20.4%  —  the biggest quarterly decline in recorded history. Particular industries reliant on social interaction, such as hospitality and leisure, are facing economic Armageddon. The gravity of this crisis, which will define the 2020s, still has not been fully grasped yet — but it will be soon.

Above all the current economic orthodoxy — what some call “neoliberalism” — already facing a crisis since the 2008 financial crash, has nakedly been revealed to be obsolete. The Government has tried to reboot the economy through incentivising consumer spending with the Eat To Help Out Scheme, but that is chicken feed compared to the radical transformation that is required. There are huge changes needed, and every shade of the political spectrum will have their own interpretation.

Ever since the beginning of this crisis uber-environmentalists, in true Malthusian style, have claimed that Covid-19 showed humans were the “real virus” all along. Inger Andersen, the UN environmental chief, said in March that nature was “sending a message”. They argue that this crisis has revealed the rotten nature of an economic system based on “Promethean” delusions of grandeur such as dominating nature and “infinite growth” in such a way that humanity is playing with “dark forces” it has no idea of, such as novel diseases transmitting from animals to humans.

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By Niall Gooch

Some see the Covid-19 crisis as the perfect opportunity to reformulate global capitalism around an economic regime based on “degrowth” and a steady state economy where economies are relocalised, cities are decentralised and activities like international travel are reined in.

Against this, members of the cabinet should read Austerity Ecology and Collapse Porn Addicts, published in 2015. The author, socialist writer Leigh Phillips, argues for the value of economic growth, industry, technological progress and production, precisely what will be needed to drag Britain out of this depression.

His book was originally a critique of the Left for betraying its founding values rooted in the Enlightenment and surrendering to Malthusianism, moralistic anti-consumerism and anti-industrial “small is beautiful” ideology, but it could apply as a critique of Right as much as Left.

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Phillips’s core argument does not deny the reality of climate change or the various environmental challenges that exist. Indeed, he believes that society should grasp onto the forces of industry and technology to lessen the impact on the environment while ensuring innovation and development. For instance, investment in cultured meat could mean Britain satisfying its demand for meat without a single animal needing to be slaughtered — a far more effective way of ensuring animal welfare than moralising vegan puritanism.

Phillips also mentions nuclear power as a way to provide clean energy that is also abundant, while mainstream environmentalists are radically against nuclear energy, not merely because the supposed dangers of exceptional accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima, but because nuclear can help solve the energy problem without the need for eco-austerity.

Unlike the Government, Phillips is a socialist, so his argument partially holds the free market responsible for the mess we are in, largely because of its irrational tendencies that produce inequalities and externalities against the environment, problems which it can’t solve. He declared: “It is the market that drives planned obsolescence, not growth or consumerism.” Instead Phillips proposes democratic planning as a more rational way to organise an economy. Even if you are against planning, it is clear the state has to take a more intelligent and prominent role to spur innovation in place of cautious private firms who are more concerned about their profit margins.

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Will the Conservatives start conserving?

By Tom Holland

Overall, the impulse towards austerity should be resisted. The only way Britain can get itself out of its economic rot is to grow itself out of it through an economic renaissance. Which means the government researching and investing in new forms of energy, transport and communication, and in new forms of production and industry that can produce new forms of wealth that will enrich society and raise living standards through plentitude and abundance, as well as tackling egregious hyper-exploitation of the natural world.

Phillips’s important cris de coeur can contribute to an alternative, ecologically intelligent vision of neoliberalism that need not be regressive hair-shirted moralism.

During the second OAAU rally held in Cairo, Malcolm declared: “we need allies who are going to help us achieve a victory, not allies who are going to tell us to be nonviolent,” before elaborating on why he would embrace John Brown as a “white ally” in the struggle for black freedom:

“He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. He wasn’t nonviolent. White people call John Brown a nut … any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom — in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts. As long as he wants to come up with some nonviolent action, they go for that, if he’s liberal, a nonviolent liberal, a love-everybody liberal. But when it comes time for making the same kind of contribution for your and my freedom that was necessary for them to make for their own freedom, they back out of the situation.”

Brown played an important role in one of the greatest progressive struggles of modern history: the struggle to abolish institutionalised chattel slavery in the USA. This struggle arose from the contradictions left unresolved by the American revolution of 1776. The Declaration of Independence declared in stirring language the fundamental equality of man and his inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — and yet maintained an institution that was the foulest offence against these ideals.

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A rugged-faced Puritan from Connecticut, Brown earned the unqualified respect and admiration of black radicals because he viewed blacks as moral equals. Most mainstream abolitionists viewed blacks as the moral equivalent of children, who were to be seen but not heard; he refused to infantilise them. Instead of acting ‘for’ slaves, he insisted on including them in the armed struggle for their liberation — and was willing to risk his life and reputation in service of black freedom. For W. E. B. Du Bois, Brown was “the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk”.

Originally a New Englander (and quite possibly a Mayflower descendant), Brown was raised in an intensely Calvinist household headed by a stern yet tender father, who set up anti-slavery societies and frequently debated the issue when the Browns moved to Hudson, Ohio. Brown was influenced by his father’s beliefs, as well as the fiery sermons of Jonathan Edwards, with their strict insistence on predestination and colourful tales of eternal punishment for sinners. His Puritanism was not simply pious; it was political. He strongly held to antinomianism: the idea that the ‘higher law’ of God was superior to the law made by men. If human institutions contradicted that ‘higher law’, then it was one’s duty to disobey, resist, and overturn it. In this spirit, Brown was a legatee of the revolutionary Anglo-Protestantism associated with Oliver Cromwell, whom Brown modelled himself on.

In his biography of Brown, David Reynolds argues that the abolitionist’s other great inspiration was Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution that ended slavery there. A revolution formed and led by the slaves themselves. Brown admired L’Ouverture as he admired Cromwell: as revolutionary leader, a generalissimo, a master strategist and tactician, and as a man of high principle, faith and honour. He assiduously studied L’Ouverture’s battles, as well as those of other maroon communities in the Caribbean.

The “horrors of Saint Domingue”, as the Haitian revolution was often referred to, cast a long shadow over early nineteenth century America. Images of African slaves, no longer meek and passive but fierce and autonomous, overthrowing their white masters provoked a climate of fear among white society. The debate on slavery became rawer and more visceral. ‘If it could happen in Haiti then it could happen here,’ was the prevailing worry. John Brown, no doubt, would have heard the name and tales of L’Ouverture as he was growing up.

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By Oliver Wiseman

As a young man, Brown used the tannery on his farm as a hideout on the Underground Railroad, helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada. He even published his own re-written version of the American constitution, to redress its implicit acceptance of slavery. Nevertheless, he initially aspired to live a modest existence as a farmer, businessman and entrepreneur — enterprises he consistently failed at  —  while devoting his life to obeying his strict moral code. I imagine in a world without slavery and with a bit more luck, he would’ve been a stellar example of the ‘Protestant work ethic’.

His radicalisation really began in November of 1837, when Presbyterian Minister and outspoken abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy was shot and killed by a pro-slavery mob. It is said from then on Brown made a promise to himself: “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!”

In the 1850s, Brown was drawn to ‘Bleeding Kansas’, a state in crisis. In order to maintain its position, the ‘Slave Power’ used electoral fraud, intimidation and violence with total impunity. A Free State militia captain, Reese P. Brown (no relation), was hacked to death outside his home by a pro-slavery mob. When the Senator Charles Sumner spoke out against slavery in his ‘Crimes Against Kansas’ speech, he was viciously caned on the senate floor. Violence was the order of the day, until the intervention of Brown and his banditti.

It was the conflicts in Pottawatomie and Osawatomie that brought Brown notoriety; a mist of controversy has surrounded his name ever since. Angered by the pacifism of anti-slavery partisans in the face of pro-slavery violence, Brown decided to make a reprisal raid. He killed several leading pro-slavery Kansans in the dead of night, disrupting the swagger of slave-owning Southerners who boasted about the habitual meekness of their foes, who supposedly lacked martial virtues. Now, they knew they were in for a real struggle. For Brown, the devout Calvinist, an eye for an eye was a more persuasive doctrine than turn the other cheek.

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Brown’s final act was the infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. He and his partisans planned to seize the federal armoury’s arsenal, in order to arm rebellious slaves and put the fear of Jehovah into slaveholders. It was a disaster. Ten of his men were killed, among them two of his sons. And, of course, it did not ignite the imagined cataclysmic slave revolution. It earned him the noose for treason. But the courage and defiant nobility he displayed after such a humiliating and somewhat anti-climactic defeat impressed even his captors, who reported that, far from being a deranged ‘madman’, he was sober in mind, lucid and eloquent in speech. As he testified in court at his trial:

“I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”

His matyrdom was not in vain. As his close friend Frederick Douglass remarked, in a speech delivered on the 14th anniversary of Harper’s Ferry: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.”

Indeed, on the day of his execution, Brown handed his guard a slip of paper, prophetically stating: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” His conviction that the “peculiar institution”’ of slavery could not be extirpated from America without a war of emancipation was proved right. America could no longer remain, to use Lincoln’s words, “half-free and half-slave”: a conflict was inevitable. Lincoln was forced to execute what he initially tried to avoid: what he called, “a John Brown raid on a gigantic scale”.

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In death, Brown was transformed into an icon: a symbol of the abolitionist cause, a prophet of a new American freedom. On the battlefields of the civil war, Union soldiers belted out “John Brown’s Body” alongside the standard patriotic hymns.

Heroes do indeed exist. And John Brown was unquestionably an American hero. He fought and died for the dream of a democratic multi-coloured America where liberty and equality are a reality for all. Unfortunately, his dream is yet to come true. Despite the progress that has been made, racial inequality and violence are still a plague on American society. As the murder of George Floyd demonstrated, black people are still mistreated by authority.

For all of its flaws and contradictions, an anti-racist movement has emerged to redress this injustice. What was unprecedented about the protests across America was how white people made up a significant number of the protesters. John Brown should be an inspiration to young white anti-racists: he was passionate without being overbearing and sensitive, and without being self-loathing. Above all, his ethos was based on collaboration with blacks as equal partners, not paternalistic narcissism.

Moreover, Brown’s legacy provokes the sensitive question: can an institution be so evil and oppressive that political violence against it is justified? Can the ends really justify the means? His goal of abolishing slavery was undeniably good, but his violent methods are hard to swallow in a political culture that valorises non-violence and trusts in the gradualism of the democratic process to achieve change.

Nevertheless, Brown’s actions were a product of his context: his carefully considered violent tactics resulted from America’s continuous compromise with an evil institution that negated its founding ideals, with the objective of realising those very ideals for all Americans. And so his story demonstrates that there is no objective ethical concrete we can take refuge under.

Each of us has a place in history, and we have to use our own agency to grapple with difficult moral and political questions for ourselves. It’s something people living under oppressive conditions all around the world have to deal with every day. It is the only way humanity has been able to progress.

However, some outlets such as The Washington Post, CNN and Fox News have also decided, in an act of racial grammatical reciprocity, to capitalise ‘White’. The justification is that both ‘Black’ and ‘White’ denote distinct cultural identities. As the Post said of white European immigrants to the America, “these diverse ethnicities were eventually assimilated into the collective group that has had its own cultural and historical impact on the nation,” going to conclude that “as such, White should be represented with a capital W.”

Those who joyously celebrated the New York Times uppercasing ‘Black’ as an act of “liberation” (for instance, Nikole Hannah Jones, the founder of the 1619 project) were not as happy about the Washington Post’s decision. Some have referred to it as the “grammar equivalent of all lives matter”. Others argue it is outright legitimising white supremacy.

For me, it feels like the grammar equivalent of All Lives Matter.

— Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) July 29, 2020

But is capitalising (or not capitalising) a single letter really such a big deal? Well it may be a small symbolic action, but the fact that so much of the mainstream media is making it at the same time is not. It is taking place as part of what some have rather derisively called the “woke cultural revolution”. This also includes Robin DiAngelo’s terrible book, White Fragility, and similar tracts becoming bestsellers; white voiceover actors recusing themselves from voicing black characters; major corporations aligning themselves with radical political causes; city authorities voting to defund or even abolish police departments; and other significant developments.

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By Remi Adekoya

We are in new territory now — and not everyone is finding the right way forward. For instance, the decision by the Washington Post and others to capitalise ‘White’ is obviously foolish, because it reifies a phantasmic unitary ‘white’ racial identity and culture, as fetishised by creepy white nationalists. In what sense do an Armenian-American from Los Angeles, an Irish-American from Boston, a New York Jew, an Appalachian, a descendant of Southern slave owners and a Palestinian immigrant share a distinct cultural identity?

There is (or was) the idea of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture, which for so long held a hegemonic position — and was held up as what European immigrants had to assimilate into (if they were allowed) to be considered upstanding Americans. Of course, this ‘respectable’ idea of ‘whiteness’ was a basis for institutionalised racial oppression and violence, so no truck should be had with it.

But isn’t there an inconsistency from those who think capitalising black is an act of social justice, while capitalising white is wrong and inappropriate? By capitalising ‘Black’ aren’t you inevitably opening the door for legitimising ‘White’ identity and other forms of racialisation? After all, ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ can’t really exist without each other.

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The usual retort is that ‘Black’ recognises a shared culture and identity that has played an important role in the American context. Moreover, we capitalise terms like Jewish and Asian so why not Black? And then there’s this compelling argument: most black Americans can’t trace their heritage to a specific tribe or ethnic group in Africa because of the deracination of the Middle Passage and racial slavery; so they have had to create their own identity and culture, often times in opposition to the dominant Puritan inflected ‘official’ WASP culture (and its southern counterpart).

Finally, there’s the practical requirement for commonly understood words. Though black culture can speak for itself without needing special recognition from The New York Times, to enable conversations about these matters we still need the least imperfect terminology we can find.

That said, black identity must not be over simplified. The rise of ‘mixed race’ relationships and decades of immigration from the Caribbean and Africa in recent decades has further complicated what it means to be ‘black’ in America. In what sense can it be said that a black American from Chicago who could probably trace his ancestry in America all the way back to the seventeenth century (longer than many white Americans), a Haitian-American, or an immigrant from Ethiopia share a common identity let alone culture?

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Furthermore, while cultural differences do certainly exist, they are not as distinct and solid as we might imagine. The truth is that ‘black’ and ‘white’ Americans are much more similar to one another than different. The entire shelf of modern American music would not exist without black Americans. What we call ‘black culture’ wouldn’t exist without the European influences it had to draw upon. The point is made by Albert Murray in his masterpiece The Omni-Americans, which he wrote as a “counter-statement” to the “race oriented propagandists” of his day:

“The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multi-coloured people. There are white Americans so to speak and black Americans. But any fool can see that the white people are not really white and that black Americans are not black. They are all interrelated in one way or another.”

“Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences”, Murray goes on, “the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.” Murray made his declaration of America as a “multicoloured nation”, not a multiracial one, in 1970. With decades of further immigration from all around the world, which has added new elements to America’s national culture, his argument is even more true now than it was in his time. Yet I suspect Murray’s words (notice how doesn’t capitalise either black or white) would now be received with suspicion in some circles. Indeed, his arguments would be criticised as denying the ‘reality of race’ and therefore ‘denying’ racism.

The real problem with uppercasing racial categories is that — like many of the symbolic actions that have followed this ‘racial awakening’, from toppling statues to woke rebranding by corporations — it creates the illusion that wide-ranging change is ‘finally’ happening. But real progress will only occur when the material conditions of black Americans has improved, and when laws and institutional practices that empower police to brutalise citizens have been overturned. In other words, the prize is not symbolic concession, but radical social transformation. The former is easy and superficial; the latter is hard and substantive.

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The growing influence of identity politics and racial essentialism in the media, academia and other mainstream institutions is all in the name of equality and diversity. Nevertheless, it is a way of thinking that permanently categorises human beings, putting them into rigid racial, ethnic and cultural boxes. Race isn’t regarded as a social construct that can be explained and analysed historically, but as an omnipresent state of being which we must ‘come to terms with’. Ironically this undermines the lived experience of belonging to a diverse society with all of its messy, complicated and very human dynamics.

Under the identitarian worldview, America is portrayed as a mosaic of different volks (or ‘races’) each existing in their own unique universe with particular histories, values and volkgeist, which must be ‘respected’ and not transgressed against. It leaves little room for overarching common identities like nationality that can go beyond racial and ethnic affiliations. Is it any surprise that numerous controversies over so-called ‘cultural appropriation’ have become mainstream political issues in the past few years? Once you enter into the cycle of essentialising human beings through race and identity, it, crackpot racialist ideas inevitably become legitimised.

One of the most banal and vulgar ways to think about humanity is to classify and categorise by ‘race’, and especially by skin pigmentation. Racial thinking, no matter how ‘progressively’ arrived at, can only be reactionary. It is irrational, anti-scientific and anti-humanist. It is a fetter on the social development of human beings and their flourishing. Racialism and racism are twin brothers. Solidifying racial categories in mainstream discourse is a grave mistake. Real progress should mean challenging racial thinking at its root and ultimately transcending it.

Pugh recalled how she hadn’t heard of “cultural appropriation” until a friend informed her of its supposed meaning and “the history and heartbreak over how when black girls do it they’re mocked and judged, but when white girls for it, it’s only then perceived as cool”.

After acknowledging her “white fragility” and “white privilege”, Pugh expressed how “truly sorry” she was for the “offence” she caused and “profusely” apologised that it “took this long” for her to realise her transgression.

If you are au courant with the latest trends in pop culture, then you would know that Florence Pugh has not been the only celebrity embroiled in charges of appropriating and defiling the culture of ‘marginalised’ groups. Over the past decade, figures such as Justin Bieber, Madonna, Katy Perry, Scarlett Johansson and Jamie Oliver have all been accused of being “culture vultures”. Recently, The Simpsons have announced they will no longer use white actors to voice non-white characters. Other white voice actors have recused themselves from voicing black characters on cartoon shows, saying they should be voiced by black actors instead.

White people aren’t the only ones who have been condemned for such cultural transgressions. Beyoncé was accused of “appropriating” from Indian culture because she wore a rather glitzy sari for Coldplay’s “Hymn For the Weekend”. The social media editor of Marie Claire lambasted Rihanna for allegedly “appropriating” the Chola aesthetic from Mexican culture for donning thin eyebrows — even though thin eyebrows have been used across the world, from southern Africa to 1920s New York.

One would be wrong to assume this nonsense is simply consigned to the absurd summits of celebrity culture, however — it’s trickling down to the whole of our cultural discourse. For instance, in 2018, American student Kenziah Daum was subjected to a vicious social media backlash, simply because she wore a traditional Qipao to a Prom night. In 2019, Indigenous musicians in Canada were at each other’s throats over the Cree artist Cikwes’s use of a traditional Inuit singing technique, because according to Inuit “spokespeople” she did not have “permission to… take something that isn’t hers and make an album, and put it on iTunes, and have it for sale”.

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Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

“Cultural appropriation” is an academic concept that originates from the esoteric realm of post-colonial and decolonial studies, but has now become a pop cultural phenomenon and a mainstream political issue.

The argument is that exploitation of the cultures of colonised peoples by colonial structures is analogous to theft and plunder, like the lawless seizure of land, artefacts and treasures. As currently interpreted, it is also a form of erasure, emotional violence against the colonised subject, rendering them invisible, to cement total subjugation and control over all spheres of their subordinated existence.

Too often the argument has nothing to do with anti-racism or a critique of colonialism, but identitarian gatekeeping — the enforcement of customs of etiquette over who can use a particular cultural form in any particular context. This “cultural insiderism”, to borrow a phrase from Paul Gilroy, empowers self-appointed guardians to establish a cordon sanitaire around cultures and appropriate the right of license, hence entrench their own social power.

An irony of this argument is that most opponents of cultural appropriation proclaim, often radically, to be for diversity, immigration and multiculturalism, yet they are same people who bitterly resent the actual results of such a symbiosis. Tribally marking off permission rights over who can use what cultural form, or whose “voice”, and in what way is puerile.  It attacks the main benefits of living in a modern, culturally diverse, cosmopolitan society: freedom of expression, cultural innovation and experimentation and expansion of one’s horizons and liberation of the imagination.

No culture is pure, uncontaminated, hermetically sealed, existing purely within its own universe. “The history of all cultures is a history of cultural borrowing,” Edward Said observed, and that Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism, has often been invoked by the culture warriors to bolster their arguments is something he would be aghast at.

This point is effortlessly made about European or Western culture, but it is also true of non-white cultures. Jazz is commonly thought of as invented by black Americans and appropriated by white America — yet, jazz itself appropriated from European classical music. That was cultural appropriation par excellence and we’re all the better for it.

Cultural forms can certainly be utilised in a racist and exploitative manner, the sordid history of blackface minstrel performances being an example. Black music historically has been derided as “race music” and demonised for being violent, salacious and primitive, while white artists were showered with praise when they play similar music. So it is true that intercourse of cultures doesn’t always take place on equal or equitable terms, but can be shaped by racism, inequality and oppression.

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What the Left gets wrong about knife crime

By Ralph Leonard

However, as Amiri Baraka once observed, the issue here is not that of cultural appropriation at all, but of material exploitation: “The problem is that if The Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie [Johnson], I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s that kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of culture because that’s normal.”

The ubiquity of campaigns against cultural appropriation reveal how social struggles, anti-racism for instance, are increasingly framed in cultural terms, rather than political ones; how cultural radicalism has mutated from promoting cultural liberty and freedom of expression to cultural restrictionism; how politics itself has been culturalised, hence why the recent statue wars and the removal of “unwoke” TV episodes have dominated mainstream political discussion over the past few weeks.

A recurring motif one detects in the campaigns against cultural appropriation is a primitive and moralistic hostility to capitalism and consumerism. Often the outrage is over the commercialisation and commodification of cultural forms, that in turn are mass produced and sold for a profit. According to these cultural “radicals” this process is abuse. Cultures becomes diluted, reduced to musical tropes and clothing styles that have been evacuated of authenticity and soul by market forces.

But it is precisely this commodification that lays the basis for a new radical cultural freedom, allowing people to choose elements from a mixture of traditions and create a new culture for themselves. The same process also makes it easier for people to stray from their “original” identities and to integrate into modern society. Uncommodified cultures stagnate, closed to outsiders, and raise the costs for straying outside their walls. Humans make culture, not vice versa. Because of this, cultures are dynamic, evolving and always intermixing, so to erect borders between cultures and police them is not just inherently authoritarian but inane.

It is not a coincidence that many agitators against cultural appropriation are socially-conscious people of colour, second and third generations immigrants whose ties to their heritage is precarious. You may feel like a foreigner in your home country, yet might as well be a tourist in the country of your parents. The best you can do is take the bits of your heritage that you value and assimilate it in yourself to have any connection with it all. Even then it feels distant and instrumental.

I am empathetic to this myself as a British-Nigerian, the sense of alienation and deracination many of my cohorts will feel. But I see this deracination, this proletarian “rootlessness”, however paradoxical it may seem, as the basis for a new higher form of liberation. One of the hard truths of modern existence is that there is no such thing as a rooted, stable and authentic identity one can reconnect with after seismic processes such as colonialism, migration and globalisation.

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Which is why I find the most irksome aspect of this argument the noticeable but seldom mentioned assumption that only white people have the liberty to break out of their “roots” and become universal, worldly, cosmopolitan, mobile and protean. But “people of colour” are particular, provincial, rooted in their ancient cultural and spiritual traditions.

The culture warriors aren’t even trying to expand cultural freedom and possibility for non-white artists. No, they want everyone to be provincialised, white people included. This to me can only produce inane solipsism and break down the possibility of having a shared universal conversation that transcends colour lines and cultures.

Crusades against cultural appropriation are not progressive, they are reactionary. Not only does it constrain exchange, inhibit the imagination, and threaten to deaden cultural expression and innovation, they undermine precisely what is valuable about a diverse and open cosmopolitan society. For the sake of art, culture and the human experience itself, let’s take a stand for true cultural freedom and unfettered imagination.

Across the globe, demonstrations of solidarity and protest under the banner of ‘Black Lives Matter’ have taken place. Syrians in Idlib painted a mural dedicated to George Floyd. In Britain, there have been demonstrations in Manchester and London. Outside the gates of Downing Street, protesters chanted “I can’t breathe” and “fuck the police”.

As is often the case in these scenarios, activists seek to make a connection between what is going on in America and how it connects to their situation here. “The prejudice that black people in America face is the same prejudice we face here,” a BLM activist, Shayne, told the BBC. “I think it really made me take a look at the police system all around the world. I have always been focusing on institutional racism in America but it really made me look in the UK. I have realised that there’s so much institutional racism in the UK police.”

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On Newsnight on Monday the spoken-word artist George The Poet said: “There are disturbing parallels between the black British experience and the African-American experience.” Emily Maitlis challenged him — “but you are not putting America and Britain on the same footing … our police aren’t armed, they don’t have guns, the legacy of slavery is not the same” — and received a lot of criticism on social media from those who felt she was being tone deaf or ‘whitesplaining’ racism to a black man.

I understand and empathise with why people make this comparison: there is a trans-Atlantic Anglo-American intercourse at play. America is an intellectual and cultural powerhouse. Anti-racist and black liberation movements in Britain have long taken inspiration from black American music and black political movements in the United States, such as the Black Panthers, Black Power and certain trends in American academia, to help them form their critique of racism in Britain.

There is not so much a parallel per se, but an echo in the British and American ‘black experience’, in terms of incarceration rates, for example. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the infamous ‘sus laws’ were revived and deployed by police to harass and arrest black people for ‘loitering’ or just walking down the street, echoing the American story of police targeting black communities.

There is also a gallery of mainly black men who have died in ‘suspicious circumstances’ when coming into contact with the police. For instance, Julian Cole, mentioned by George The Poet in his Newsnight segment, was paralysed in 2013 during a scuffle with nightclub doormen and police officers. The officers lied in their statements about what happened during Julian’s arrest and his condition, which could have prevented him from going into a vegetative state. They were subsequently sacked after an inquiry, but not prosecuted. Sean Rigg, who in 2008 died outside Brixton police station during a mental health episode after being ‘restrained’ by police.

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The Democrats can't take the black vote for granted

By Christopher Rhodes

According to the charity Inquest, there have been 1,741 deaths in police custody or otherwise following contact with the police in England and Wales since 1990. If you dig deeper into the statistics, you discover that use of force is a feature in twice as many deaths among the BAME population as it is in other deaths in custody. Shockingly, not one police officer has been successfully prosecuted — let alone convicted  —  for deaths of this type since 1969, when the two Leeds police officers responsible for the death of David Oluwale  —  the first black man to die in police custody in the UK  —  were found guilty of assault but found not guilty of manslaughter on the direction of the judge, despite unlawful killing verdicts in coroner’s inquests. This echoes the United States in creating a culture of impunity among the police who feel they can do anything and get away with it, knowing that the legal system will give them refuge.

Part of the problem with the discussion is that to suggest that racism in Britain is not the same as racism in America can be perceived as downplaying, or even denying, the racism that exists in Britain. “It’s an insult to tell black British people that this is an American experience and they shouldn’t draw comparisons,” said the historian David Olusoga. But while there may be parallels between the black experience in Britain and America, there are also huge differences. Race and racism manifests themselves in different ways in Britain and in America because they are different societies with different histories. That’s not to minimise British racism or ‘pat Britain on the back’, to use a common cliché in this argument.

Unlike America, Britain does not have a history of slavery and de jure segregation within its borders, although the British empire was throughout the 18th century a leading power in the slave trade, which thanks to the asiento system meant it also supplied slaves to the French and Spanish colonial territories in the Caribbean and the Americas. Britain long had a hypocritical conceit in regards to the ‘peculiar institution’; technically it wasn’t permissible on its ‘green and pleasant land’, because no formal statute codifying modern slavery within Britain was ever passed, since apparently “England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in”.

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Can America escape its dark past?

By Oliver Wiseman

So slavery, and all the abuse, racism and exploitation that comes with it, was permissible ‘over there’ in the colonies, but not allowed in the sceptred isle itself.

There have been attempts to enforce unofficial segregation against black migrants through institutionalised forms of racism in housing, employment, most graphically manifested in the ubiquitous ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ signs outside of pubs and clubs, until the 1968 Race Relations Act that forbid it. However, Britain doesn’t have the legacy of segregation and redlining America has.

There aren’t neighbourhoods in Britain that are wholly black, where people grow up and may not encounter a white person or anyone of a different ‘race’ at all. In America there is a distinct ‘black bourgeoisie’, with its own networks to provide opportunities. You encounter neighbourhoods that have the trappings of stereotypical middle-class life, but are entirely black such as in Harlem, New Orleans, Atlanta and parts of Los Angeles. There is no equivalent in Britain. While there are individual blacks who are among the general middle class, there is no distinct ‘black bourgeoisie’.

Moreover, all police officers in America have a gun. While a gun is not necessary for police brutality to take place, guns do make it much easier and the results more often fatal.

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There is a certain type of black activist who often makes the equation between the British and American experiences. They are prone to soliloquys about the ‘fact of their blackness’; how their ‘blackness’ is a burden. They speak in the language of ‘trauma’ (so much so that trauma is evacuated of any meaning and trivialised), and draw on the idioms of identitarianism from the rump of American academia. Imposing the racial language and grammar of the United States on to Britain, a society that is different historically, socially and ethnically, is a form of intellectual imperialism, and obscures how we should analyse racism in Britain, and how it can be combated.

I don’t wish to downplay the situation and claim there isn’t a problem with racism and violence. There is; but I want to be mindful of the black American situation. Black people in Britain haven’t been victims of pornographic forms of racist violence such as public lynching. The police in Britain don’t shoot 12-year-old children at point-blank range, was the case with Tamir Rice.

To make a like-for-like equation between Britain and America is untrue, potentially inflammatory and crassly propagandistic. Racism and police brutality absolutely exist and are serious problems. But they must be addressed on their own terms.

Over 100 people in this dreaded year alone have been killed by knife-wielding assailants, the highest number since Home Office records began in 1946. What is particularly disturbing is just how young many of the victims and perpetrators are. Hospitals report that the number of children aged 16 and under admitted for assault by a knife or sharp object rose by 93%, from 180 admissions in 2012/13 to 347 in 2017/18. Meanwhile fatal ‘blade offences’ committed by those aged 18 or under are reported to have risen by 77% between 2016 and 2018 –from 26 to 46 deaths.

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Do police numbers really affect knife crime?

By Tom Chivers

The recent surge in knife crime is undoubtedly disturbing. It has sparked a fierce public debate and demands for action. Boris Johnson has announced that his government will recruit 20,000 new police officers, create 10,000 new prison places and expand stop and search powers as part of an effort to ‘clamp down’ on knife crime. The aim being to emphasise deterrence and punishment, reassure the public and send a message to criminals.

Meanwhile, the blame is put at various doors, including drill music, austerity, cuts to police numbers, pupil exclusions and fatherlessness among other pet theories. Each is an attempt to fit a complex issue into a simple explanation.

Take, for example, the question of fatherlessness, especially as it concerns black communities. In a column for the Sunday Times, published shortly after the murder of Jaden Moodie, Rod Liddle claimed that absentee fathers are to blame for knife violence among black youth. Inevitably, it stirred up a storm on social media with David Lammy labelling Liddle a “national disgrace” and “a living, breathing personification and definition of white middle class privilege.” The irony is that Lammy made virtually the same argument in 2012 when he suggested that the absence of fathers was a “key cause” of knife crime. Earlier in 2010 he also urged black fathers to be more involved with their children.

Clearly, family dysfunction is a significant issue and ought to be discussed seriously. But too often it is discussed in a narrow and at times an overly racialised manner, as if it were disconnected from wider social and economic trends that affect white people too. We should neither essentialise the issue as an exclusively black cultural problem, nor avoid the issue for fear of offence.

Other policy suggestions, such as the clampdown on drill music that some people call for (because the genre supposedly incites violence), would be counter-productive infringements on free speech. Likewise, stop and search is not a viable solution because of its record of indiscriminate use against ethnic minorities. These are authoritarian solutions that, at best, deal with the symptoms, not the causes, of violence while causing resentment and curtailing liberties.

By way of contrast, the Left tends to view the knife crime debate as a “moral panic” perpetuated by elites to justify draconian policies of social control. There is indeed a history of such panics, some of them trafficking in racial stereotypes, such as the supposed epidemic of ‘black muggers’ in the 1970s (as documented by Stuart Hall in Policing the Crisis). A lot of the recent reporting on knife crime, particularly around drill music, does seem designed not to inform, but frighten, people.

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In place of policies based on punishment and deterrence, there are those on the Left who argue we should frame knife crime as a public health issue, pointing to how Scotland tackled its knife crime epidemic over a decade ago. “You can please the Right wing press or you can be effective,” said Ash Sarkar of Novara media, “what we know is effective is a public health driven model where you increase the role of social services and early intervention…if you want to please disgusted in Tunbridge Wells then increase stop and search.”

It is clear that the social indicators that factor into crime occur pretty much universally: poverty, domestic abuse, dilapidated communities, school exclusion, lack of opportunities, structural inequality, overburdened services and so on. A high level of crime and violence usually correlates with the poorest and most run down areas. So any strategy that is serious about tackling crime and violence at its root must address the material and social conditions that allow it to thrive.

However, to simply treat knife crime as a ‘public health’ issue that requires ‘early intervention’ and ‘containment strategies’, as if we were dealing with a medical crisis like AIDS or Ebola, is somewhat evasive because it doesn’t address the full picture and ignores the question of moral poverty.

Many of those who get involved in knife crime at a particular stage in their life are usually socially disengaged and detached from the wider community. They have no sense of respect for their fellow humans or the community in which they live. Slaves to nihilism and despair they are not just the products of economic poverty, but of moral poverty too. Many of them join gangs, who are almost a surrogate family to them, feeding a need for solidarity and purpose in a society that cannot provide it to them.

Because the Right is adept at appropriating the language of morality, there is a tendency on the Left to reject it, regarding it as reactionary. On some level this is understandable because the Right often uses moral arguments to individualise social problems and obscure the structural roots of crime and violence. However, the moral dimension is as important to the Left as it is to the Right, though for quite different reasons. One cannot have an alternative political and economic vision for organising society without a moral one too.

Throughout many communities institutions such as the church, the patriarchal family and trade unions that once socialised young people and gave them a moral framework have declined and no longer have the influence and trust they once did.

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The relentless promotion of market ideology (what is often referred to as neoliberalism) over past few decades, and the more recent experience of austerity, have helped to atomise society, weaken social bonds and fragment communities. With the increasing marketisation of society in areas such as health and education, value for money and economic self interest have been elevated above deeper social and moral needs.

Responding to the devastating consequences of these policies, politicians have expanded the scope of the state and officialdom. Where once families and community institutions helped define morality, increasingly that role has been outsourced to the public sector – filling the void with everything from citizenship and consent classes for children to parenting courses for adults.

Morality has become a set of ‘skills’ that can simply be taught, or a set of rules and guidelines handed down by the state from on high, instead of a set of difficult choices individuals have to wrestle with, or a set of norms deliberated over collectively. The effect of all of these developments has been to undermine moral autonomy and retard the genuine moral development of individuals. In other words, morality no longer belongs to us.

The question of moral decay should then at least form a critical part of any discussion on knife crime. The Left is very good at talking about the social and economic impact of neoliberal policies, but not so good about its moral impact, beyond cliched rants against individualism and ‘greed’. The irony is that in forgetting how to talk about morality, the Left can only retreat into shallow moralism.

Left-wing politics is not viable without moral autonomy, because it is through exercising this capacity that people are able to transform society for the better. Moral autonomy is the prerequisite for social solidarity in any meaningful sense. People are not simply automatons who are eternally victims of circumstance, blown about helplessly by impersonal economic and social forces. They are moral agents who have a will and a mind of their own.

You cannot challenge austerity and structural inequality without restoring the bonds of social solidarity within the communities devastated by them. This doesn’t mean playing up to tabloid style ‘moral majority’ politics or responding to Right-wing racist authoritarianism by proposing a Left-wing racist authoritarianism. What it does mean is that the Left has to reclaim the language of morality and renew institutions that help individuals to realise their own moral autonomy.

It only in this way that we can wake up from the nightmare of violence.

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Hired: Six months undercover in low-wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Low paid, insecure and precarious work has come to characterise the modern labour market, and UnHerd columnist James Bloodworth’s book Hired exposes just how exploitative much of it is. In a similar vein to Polly Toynbee and George Orwell before him, Bloodworth goes undercover in various low paid jobs across the country to experience first hand the conditions millions of workers face. Hired is an illuminating piece of journalistic work and sheds light on a topic that rarely gets serious coverage. For this reason it is a must read.

Betraying Big Brother by Leta Hong Fincher

Leta Hong Fincher’s excellently researched book draws on extensive interviews with women across China to paint a portrait of a burgeoning feminist movement that is flourishing despite repression by the powerful Chinese state. Hong Fincher focuses on the feminists’ activism against domestic and sexual violence, unequal pay, sexual harassment in education and the workplace, arbitrary detention and political surveillance, and the more general fact that the Chinese Communist Party relies on patriarchal authoritarianism to enforce “harmony” and social stability. The stories of these Chinese women are inspirational and remind us of the need for continued feminist activism across the globe.

Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider

I have my differences with Asad Haider politically, but Mistaken Identity is a nuanced critique of identity politics from a socialist and anti-racist perspective. He briefly, yet energetically charts the history of identity politics from the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s to the present-day reemergence of social movements like Black Lives Matter. Haider argues that “identity politics” has lost any emancipatory potential it may once have had, and has degenerated into essentialism – viewing ‘identity’ in itself as an organisational category and a condition of being political. I did feel Haider could have further developed his advocacy of strategic “insurgent universality”, but Mistaken Identity is nonetheless an important contribution to the debate about identity politics on the Left.

HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen

The role of free speech is at the centre of the culture wars that are polarising Western society, and the concept of hate speech, and whether it should be criminalised, is a frequent topic of debate. Supporters argue that hate speech laws are a tool in the fight against racism and other forms of bigotry, and can remedy the injuries hate speech can cause.

Using strong legalistic arguments and evidence from other countries Nadine Strossen takes the view that hate speech laws are at best ineffective, and worst counterproductive, to their stated aims. In particular, she shows how vague the concept tends to be, leading to very loose interpretations and the propensity for abuse. It should not be a surprise that reactionary politicians and commentators in the US refer to Black Lives Matter as a “hate group”.

Strossen’s core argument is that the best way to fight against hate, and for equality and social justice, is not through censorship, but with the vigorous use of free speech. Her argument may not be popular in some circles, but the need to defend free speech from all threats is more important than ever.

Indefensible by Rohini Hensman

This is one of my favourite books of this year. Rohini Hensman has written a much needed critique of certain tendencies on the Left to subscribe to a hypocritical form of “anti-imperialism” – opposing imperialism from Western powers while expressing indifference, or worse support, for Russian imperialism, Iranian clerical imperialism or various Bonapartist regimes that are authoritarian and nationalist in nature and who give lip service to anti-Western populism. Indefensible should serve as a clarion call for the Left to practice a more consistent internationalism, where the values of freedom, democracy, self-determination and human rights apply to all parts of world.

In it she argues that left-wingers who advocate for ‘open borders’ are “useful idiots” for big business and neoliberalism. She says they are blinded by their bleeding-heart liberalism and do not understand how elites use mass immigration to hold down wages, and as a battering ram against the power of organised labour. She claims that in “acting on the correct moral impulse to defend the human dignity of migrants” the Left has ended up, intentionally or not, “effectively defending the exploitative system of migration itself.”

Unsurprisingly, the piece has provoked a fierce backlash, mainly, but not exclusively, from anarchists and libertarian socialists. Some have labelled Nagle a “crypto Strasserite” (named after the Strasser brothers who tried to give a pseudo ‘Left wing’ bent to Nazism in its infancy), others think she is a barely concealed white nationalist.

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Nagle’s allies say that this reaction vindicates her point that the Left is incapable of having a reasoned and nuanced discussion on difficult questions like migration. Anyone who deviates, even slightly, from the utopian and absolutist orthodoxy of open borders is drowned out by a chorus of ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘xenophobe’. Such a response is based on empty moralistic sloganeering, not rational argument. Let me offer some of the latter.

In my view, Nagle’s argument is indeed flawed, because she conflates the historical process of globalisation with the set of economic policies and orthodoxies that we call ‘neoliberalism’.  She is not alone in making this mistake, many on the Left (including some of Nagle’s critics) also see globalisation and neoliberalism as synonymous. But they are not.

Nagle is also wrong in claiming that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, “barriers to labor and capital came down all over the world.” Borders may have become more open for capital to expand globally, but the same can’t be said for labour. The number of border walls around the world has increased from 15 in 1990 to 77 now.  “We may live in an era of globalisation”, Reece Jones notes in his book, Violent Borders, “but much of the world is focused on limiting the free movement of labour”.

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Labour’s conspiracy of silence on immigration

By Paul Embery

I do concede, however, that many Leftists who argue for freedom of movement do a dreadful job of it. There is a tendency to reduce the issue to a simplistic humanitarianism, in which emotion substitutes for serious consideration of the political and economic dimensions. I also dislike the way of thinking that denies migrants agency and treats them as objects of pity for self-righteous, privileged Westerners.

In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde explained why sympathy is not enough:

“[People] find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this… Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

“They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

“But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”

Likewise the ‘migration crisis’: our aim should not be to simply keep migrants alive and amuse them, but to reconstruct the global order so that desperate migrants are not trying to smuggle themselves into Europe, North America, Australia and elsewhere.

So long as migrants are seen as poor victims, we will be addressing the symptoms, not the economic and geopolitical causes of their predicament. What is required is not a politics of pity and charity for the wretched of the earth, but a politics of solidarity and justice.

Further reading

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

By Ben Cobley

A serious discussion about freedom of movement must acknowledge that some people in this world, relatively speaking, already have free movement, while others don’t. I understood for the first time what ‘passport privilege’ meant when I found that I could travel more freely across Africa with my British passport than with my Nigerian one. Think about that, a European has more freedom of movement in Africa than a native-born African does.

Angela Nagle is by no means the only Leftist to entertain the idea of immigration restrictions. The established social democratic parties across Europe and America, panicked by the rise of national populism, have lurched to the Right on immigration to win back support from working class voters.

The key flaw in this approach is that it conflates the problems facing the working class with immigration, which only bolsters the national populists. Austerity, stagnating and declining wages, unemployment and political voicelessness have nothing to do with immigration – acting as if they do will only deepen the sense of grievance and pour fuel on the populist fire. The Left will lose if it chooses to play the national populists at their own game. What is needed is a new strategy.

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I am very well aware, under the current circumstances, that freedom of movement is a minority position, and is not going to be instituted unless it has a democratic mandate. Unilaterally declaring ‘open borders’ is not viable option. But it is possible to push for a reformist immigration policy where immigration is liberalised, amnesties are rolled out and the ‘hostile environment’ rolled back. The argument for this can be won, and it is a policy but that can make a real difference.

The Left has to rethink its whole strategy if it is serious about reasserting itself politically. Mimicking anti-immigration populist sentiments and putting a pseudo-Left spin on them is not the answer. Rather, the way forward is to combine a liberal immigration policy with progressive social and economic reforms and a radical vision for a just global order. The false choice between the disintegrating liberal consensus and national populism has to be broken. A ‘third way’ is possible. The question is whether the Left is ready to rise to this challenge. I hope, for the sake of the working class – both native born and migrant, that it is.

He was one of the few Leftist intellectuals – as Christopher Hitchens once said about George Orwell – who was simultaneously on the right side of the three major questions of the 20th century: Fascism, Stalinism and Imperialism. But today his praise for ‘Western culture’ would probably be dismissed as a slightly embarrassing residue of a barely concealed ‘Eurocentrism”’

Sophie Zhang in a recent column for Varsity entitled “Not all literature is ‘universal’ – nor does it have to be”, writes that:

“The study of English Literature… has often centred around texts that claim to explore ‘universal’ themes and experiences. Yet what such curricula fail to recognise is that in glorifying the universal, we neglect the particular, because to focus on the ‘Western’ canon would be to ‘to centre whiteness and continually place non-white voices on the margins'”.

Implicit in this view is that only “whiteness” could have access to the universal, and those outside of “whiteness” are intrinsically on the margins, and their views are necessarily “particular”.

Similarly, James’s admiration for Western culture and the Western canon is something many black radicals, who otherwise admire James for his opposition to colonialism, struggle to understand about him. It is rather fashionable, and almost expected, that to be a ‘proper’ black radical today is to be hostile to all that is designated as Western; it is to indiscriminately dismiss the Enlightenment as “white” and “racist”, and disparage the Western canon as not being “relevant” to black people.

James, though, was, to his core, a radical humanist who believed in the collective power of human beings to transform society and be masters of their own future. He held this fundamental principle throughout his life, above any narrow characteristic such as race, ethnicity, or nationality. While James opposed dogmatic, class-reductionist forms of Marxism that didn’t take into account the importance of racist oppression, or were indifferent to the specific struggles of black people for their freedom, he had no time whatsoever for half-baked romantic notions of ‘negritude’, or essentialist black nationalism.

Further reading

Identity politics is a monster. Connection is how we kill it.

By Graeme Archer

James was strongly anti-imperialist, yet he wasn’t anti-Western (a distinction that often gets lost these days), and was one of the few radical Leftists who talked of Western civilisation unironically, without “scare quotes”. James himself, in a 1969 essay called Discovering Literature in Trinidad, was explicit about the influence of ‘Western civilisation’ on his outlook:

“I didn’t learn literature from the mango tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation. That is where I have come from and I would not pretend to be anything else.”

He was, as Farrukh Dhondy observed in his biography, “the only intellectual of the black diaspora to unequivocally espouse and embrace the intellectual, artistic and socio-political culture of Europe”. For James, the emancipation of the black mind would come from embracing the works of “dead white men” such as Socrates, Sophocles, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Thackeray and Dickens, as much as the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Aime Cesairé, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison.

He believed the European canon provided black people with a means of empowering themselves both culturally and intellectually, to broaden their imagination, to liberate them from the tyranny of geography and race, and help them transcend their particularity and enter into a universal conversation across colour lines, based on a shared humanity.

James was once asked, “Should Shakespeare and Rembrandt and Beethoven matter to Caribbean people?”, and replied:

“The Caribbean people are people, and Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Beethoven should matter to all people living in the world today, and who are able by means of their language, or by means of information and communication to understand or get some insight into what Shakespeare and Beethoven mean. I don’t like that question at all… if it means that Caribbean writers should be aware that there are emphases in their writing that we owe to non-European, non-Shakespearean roots, and the past in music which is not Beethoven, that I agree. But… fundamentally we are a people whose literary and aesthetic past is rooted in Western European civilisation.”

This legacy is important for us today, because James understood that the Enlightenment, though conceived and initiated (for historical reasons, not genetic ones) mainly by privileged white European men, is the common property of all of humanity.

Indeed, it was the struggle of those who were initially excluded, like black people, against a background of colonial domination and racial subordination that brought the seemingly abstract Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality closer to concrete reality; the Haitian revolution, which he documented so majestically in The Black Jacobins, is an embodiment of this struggle. What the French started in 1789, the Haitians completed in 1804. For James, then, the Enlightenment, and the struggle to complete it, was and still is a global, and hence a universal, project.

Further reading

The noise of victimhood culture has drowned out the plight of the poor

By Jenny McCartney

Furthermore, James recognised – as a faithful believer in the materialist conception of history – that “the race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics” and that to “think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous”. At a time when there is intense debate on the Left around identity politics and “race v class”, this statement may be uncomfortable for some who may misinterpret and mischaracterise it as “class reductionist”.

Not so, as James goes on to say: “But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.” In fact, James even argued that in the United States that black Americans were a kind of vanguard for any progressive revolution in that country, not because black people are special or their melanin levels give them magic powers, but because of their objective position within the structures of American society. He argued that if blacks mobilised en masse for their freedom then the dynamics of the entire society will shift too.

James was creative and intellectually flexible in his Marxism, as opposed to the rigid and economistic forms many of his contemporaries adhered to, which allowed him to have an integrated view of race and class and how they influenced each other within the wider context of capitalist society and international political economy.

In his view, it is not simply class, and not simply race, that matter; because if you don’t understand how the wider political, social and economic structures divide and rule societies in their totality, you will get nowhere.

Further reading

It's not just the economy, stupid. Cultural factors and disdain for politicians also drive "populism"

By Matthew Elliott

This stance goes against both class reductionism and some of the superficial nonsense that masquerades as ‘anti-racism’ and ‘intersectionality’. James rejects it as always tending to personalise power and hence the enemy, and for basing itself on politically correct gesture politics that frets about ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘cultural appropriation’. That reduces the struggle against institutions and practices to a trivial fight against individuals and attitudes. This facile and essentialist identity politics is counterproductive to any based on solidarity and liberation.

James expressed the core point very simply when he was asked to become a teacher at the department of the newly created Black Studies in Washington DC’s Federal City College (a post he accepted, but with some reservations):

“I do not know, as a Marxist, ‘Black Studies’ as such. I only know the struggle of people against tyranny and oppression in a certain political and social setting, and particularly in the last two hundred years. It is impossible for me to separate black studies from white studies in any theoretical point of view.”

James understood that any successful politics should not reinforce one’s narrow and parochial identity, but help to transcend it. We live in a big world, and it is in this context that our politics must be situated: to restrict people politically in little ethnic and racial silos is not productive to any genuinely progressive project.

It is this radical humanism and intellectual cosmopolitanism that is the greatest lesson we can learn from James. Because in this age, where solidarity has been eroded, where identity politics may seem pervasive, where racist oppression may seem immovable, where the hope that we can change society and create a better world is possible may seem fanciful, the core democratic and revolutionary principles of James can guide us to create new ideas and new movements that can help us emancipate ourselves.

Further reading

New evidence on race and inequality in America

By Peter Franklin