Zine Magubane at Jacobin:
Kenan Malik’s Not So Black and White: A History of Race From White Supremacy to Identity Politics is a detailed yet broad examination of how race was invented as a logic to organize people’s experience of themselves as well as to channel political activity. The book is organized around four themes: 1) a retelling of the story of race, demonstrating how it emerged as an elite discourse to justify restricting equality and liberty to the few; 2) an exploration of how mass resistance, particularly against slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow, expanded the ideas of liberty and equality in order to make them truly universal; 3) an examination of the relationship between racial inequality and class inequality, with special attention to how a narrow focus on racial inequality obscures how class exploitation works to produce and reproduce racial inequality; and 4) how identity politics is a form of class politics that operates with equal perniciousness on the Right and the Left. Not So Black and White is not only a searing indictment of how “our preoccupation with race frequently hides the realities of injustice,” it is also a call for a different kind of politics — one that is class-based and worker-focused — to free us from the prison of identity. Although the book is not explicitly framed as a critique of epistemology, it is a provocation to think even more critically about analytical categories and the politics of historiography. Not So Black and White invites us to evaluate how race has become not only the primary way to organize political life but also the preferred epistemological category for explaining the march of history. As such, it demonstrates that debates over historiography and epistemology are not simply of academic interest. They are informed by class politics and are weapons in political struggle.
More here.