TRIGGERnometry - What We Get Wrong About Race - Kenan Malik

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Kenan Malik is an Indian-born British writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science. As an academic author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism, and race. He is the author of many books, the latest of which is ‘Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics’- available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1787387763/ SPONSORED BY: AG1. Go to https://www.drinkAG1.com/triggernometry/ to get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase! Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own.

If we find anything suspicious, like new loans are changed. to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. One of the shifts that we've seen in recent years is that diversity has become a synonym for equality. Yes. They're very different things.

We tend to look at minorities as belonging to. communities and that class is something that applies largely to the white population. You can have a diverse society, but we've got a diverse society, which is deeply unequal. A diverse elite is still an elite. We live in a world where politicians, activists, corporations, are happy to talk about political equality, but don't want to do anything about economic inequality. And the point is that that affects minorities, because minorities, minorities are disproportionately working class and poor. Those deep fundamental questions about the kind of societies we live in no longer get asked.

How do we fix this? Can we fix this? Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our terrific guest today is a writer and broadcaster who's written very interesting things but particularly about the issue of race. His latest book on the same subject is called Not So Black and White, From White Supremacy to Identity Politics.

Kenan Malik, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. It's been a long time coming. We've been keen to have you on the show for ages. You kept saying, I'll come on when I've got my book out. I'll come on. Here you are.

Before we get into the conversation, which we're both really excited to have with you, tell us who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that's led you to be sitting here talking to us? If I was to tell you my journey through life, it'll take the whole programme. So let me just say I'm mainly a writer these days and I've come into writing out of social and political activism.

And much of my writing is about putting contemporary social political issues in a broader frame, a broader historical frame. So we're a tendency to look at issues as they are at the moment. and that tells us actually very little about it because you need to know not just where you are, but how you've got that. And so you need to tell the backstory, as it were. And my latest book, the one you talked about,

not so black and white, does that in relation to race. In a sense, at the heart of it, is a paradox of contemporary society, which is that on the one hand, most societies, there's a great abhorrence of racism. not that racism has disappeared. It still disfigures the lives of many. But at a moral level, most societies are poor races,

but even racist say, I'm not racist, but. At the same time, we are, we continually put people into racial and ethnic boxes. We define people by the box, their needs, their aspirations, the policies that should apply to them according to those boxes into which they've been put. And it's as if the more we are poor racism, the more we're drawn to that kind of racialisation. And the book is an attempt to address that

by looking at how we've got to where we are. So it's partly a history of race, the idea of race, and it's partly a history of the challenge to racism and to racial categorization. And mostly it's about the intersection of those two, because it's the intersection of those two histories that tell us a lot about the contemporary world and where we are, how we've got to where we are,

and why we are where we are. And I would argue there is another dimension or another paradox, perhaps, which is certainly I came to this country in 1995. I would argue the transformation in our attitudes to minorities of all kinds in that period of time has been remarkable. And starting from, by global standards, quite a high base already. I mean, by global standards, Britain was quite a tolerant society anyway, got more tolerant or welcoming, or whatever the right word is. I'm not saying it was perfect, of course.

Yet the conversation that we have about that issue has only seemed to intensify in pitch and volume and sort of screaming, particularly in the last six to seven years. Would you agree with that? It certainly, Britain has improved and become far more relaxed about issues of race and of immigration than it was when I was growing up. I wouldn't say it was particularly tolerant when I was growing up. I mean, I grew up in a very different Britain

where racism was vitral and vicious and where fire bombings and stabbings were routine, where, you know, it'd be rare for me to come back home from school without having been in a fight. It was a largely white school I went to. We live in a very different Britain today. It's not that racism has disappeared, but that kind of, in your face, vicious racism is, thankfully, very rare.

And yes, there is a paradox that, the more relaxed Britain is, the more tolerance it is in relation to race, the more we talk about it. And I think it's part, it again is part of what I try and address as to the reasons why. And it actually has very little to do with race itself. I mean, it's partly to do with race in the sense that even though that kind of in your face racism is. is largely gone. Nevertheless, those who live today, today's generation, the kinds of issues they face to them is material.

And a lot of them would feel that, for instance, we know that in the job market, there is structural racism in the sense that study after study has shown that if you send out CVs, identical CVs, but with different names on it, so one appears white in the murder commas, other appears Asian, Muslim, whatever, that you get very different responses to identical CVs. If you're seen to be white, you're more likely to get interviews, more likely to get a job.

We've seen the report on the Met. for instance, and the reason we report on the Met. So we should not ignore all that. Of course. But at the same time, I think the reason that race seems so to figure so much in people's lives or to shape the way we think about the world, that's actually little to do with race itself. It's to do with the broader declass.

of what I'd call the radical universalist tradition. Now, again, when I was growing up, the racism was fierce, but the left held on to a universalist position, the idea of equal rights for all, that racism was about, or anti-racism, was about challenging the failure to treat people equally. over the space of just a decade perhaps through the 80s the left lost much of its universalist perspective

it became much more drawn towards a particular, as an identitarian viewpoint. And the reason for that is as to do with the broader context of the left. There's always been identitarian strains within anti-racist, anti-colonial movements. If you go back to the 19th century,

they're back to African movements. You had Garvism in the early 20th century, pan-Africanism, negritude, and so on. But these movements were largely relatively marginal. That the main motive of the struggles for equality, against colonialism, against racism,

those struggles were driven by a universalist perspective and all the great movements that made the modern world from anti-colonial movements, anti-apartheid movements, the battles for gay rights and so on, battles for women's rights and so on, were driven by that sense of a universalist perspective. But that kind of radical universalism depends on, rests on the belief that you can transform society, that change is possible.

And that belief is ebbed over the past 40, 50 years because the radical social movements have disintegrated, the labour movements has decayed. Organisations, such as trade unions, have lost influence, the left has lost influence. And so people have been drawn more and more into their own much more narrow identities as a kind of refuge almost.

And the more you're within that box, within that cage of identity, the more the whole world can only be seen through those, through that box or that cage. And so that more and more, it feels as if that's the only way to understand the world. And it seems to me that the rise of identitarianism has actually much less to do with what people talk about in terms of identities or race or much more to do with the decline of that broader sense of possibilities of social change. There's such a profound point, Kenan, because when you looked at 2020 and the killing of George Floyd and then the rise to prominence of the BLM movement,

and you looked at what they stood for, it was hardline Marxist agenda, abolished capitalism, the nuclear family, etc., etc., etc. And people who espouse those sort of views are effectively saying, society isn't working for me, and the only way it can work for me is if we get rid of everything and then start again.

Well, we can have a discussion about Black Lives Matter and what it stood for, my critique would be different from yours. But I think there is a kind of, what happens is that that kind of anti-capitalism, that kind of against the system, tends to be more gestural, rhetorical, than there being any reality to it.

Because the kinds of movements that once existed, that gave those kinds of rhetoric reality no longer exist. And so it becomes largely rhetorical. And what effect do you think that has on society that we have gone from this universalist position, which you explained so beautifully, to where we are now, which is a far more identitarian? Is that a positive?

Are there elements of it that are positive? Is it largely negative? It's largely negative. because that sense of social pessimism I was talking about, that belief that you can't overcome the fishes of race and identity, that those divisions are too great. If you believe that, then inevitably, the meaning of anti-racism changes.

It changes from being a movement from material, change to a movement for symbolic representational change. It becomes a movement that relies on making white people feel guilty rather than actually bringing that change for minorities. Going back to this Black Lives Matter movement, my critique, at the level of the slogan it's an important slogan. Well, no one in the world would disagree with that, of course. It's not saying that only black lives matter,

but that in a world in which George Floyd was killed and which there are disproportionate killings of black people in America by the police, then the idea is black lives matter means black lives also matter that should matter equally. But the real problem, it seems to me, with Black Lives Matter, is that it confuses the fighting racism with building racial solidarity. And they're two different things.

The idea of a global black family is a confected unity. There is no such thing, because black communities as much as any other community are broken down, fractured by class, by gender, all sorts of things. By culture and geographical origin. I mean, the Afro-Caribbean to African differences are very stark. Sure, sure. Yeah.

And so one of the stories that are telling the book is about a strike, a sanitation worker strike in New Orleans. They want, the sanitation workers in New Orleans. And if you know anything about the history of American labor relations, you'll know the importance of sanitation workers strikes. They kind of play the important part in American history, and including American black history, and it was a famous sanitation worker strike in Memphis in the 1960s,

which Martin Luther King was. visiting to give support one of the most important strikes in the 60s in America. He was a visiting member when he was shot, when he was assassinated. Anyway, the New Orleans strike, sanitation workers strike began in early 2020. And virtually, all the workers were black. And they came out in strike because of poverty wages, because of a lack of equestrian. protective equipment during COVID and because of a refusal to be allowed to unionise. But if all the workers of black, it was also a black-owned company because as part of its anti-racist drive,

New Orleans had subcontracted out its sanitation work to a black company, a black-owned company. and what Black Lives Matter meant was very different on the two sides of the picket line. It was very different what Black Lives Matter meant to the black workers. It was very different from what Black Lives Matter meant to black employers. So the workers came out on strike about three weeks, I think, before George Floyd was killed. That was the summer of when Black Lives Matter and Black. the idea of racism and the need to fight against racism became a global issue. And they were on strike right throughout that summer, forced back to work that December,

having one virtually none of their demands, despite racism being at the top of people's agenda. So what does that mean? It meant that the black employers won, the black workers won, the black workers lost. In other words, black lives matter cannot be understood in terms, simply in a kind of global sense, because it depends on where you stand in your class pursuit.

Are you an employer or your worker? Are you well paid or are you badly paid? And what it suggests, or what it shows, is that if you create this kind of false unity of a black community. It helps the black middle class. It helps those within the black community who are already privileged.

But it does very little for black people at the bottom of the part, African-Americans, are disproportionately working class. But because our sense of what we need to do, is defend the black community as a whole, then actually their aspirations, their needs get lost and the needs and aspirations of middle class blacks are the ones that are catered to. So it sounds like your critique is that as we abandon a more class and economics-based analysis and move towards a more identitarian one, that leaves out the complexities of how people live.

And so actually the poorest people in the black community in this case get left behind, because no one is advocating for them because they're poor, they're being advocated for because of the color of their skin, but it's not very effective at getting them further up or improvements in their lives. Is that broadly what you're saying? To a large extent. I mean, one of the shifts that we've seen in recent years

is that diversity has become a synonym for equality. Yes. And they're very different things. Quite agree. People talk about, diversity for very good reasons. There are lots of marginalised groups that have been left out of society, left out of the gains of society,

and it is necessary to bring them into those gains of society. But you can have a diverse society, we've got a diverse society, which is deeply unequal. And so by talking about diversity, rather than equality or reducing equality of diversity, what you do is actually make the possibilities of equality that much more difficult because it becomes ignored. A diverse elite is still an elite.

And so it's important that we'll recognize that equality is not just about political equality, it's about economic equality too. And we live in a world where people are where politicians, activists, corporations are happy to talk about political equality, but don't want to do anything about economic inequality. And the point is that that affects minorities

because minorities are disproportionately working class and poor. And therefore, if you don't address that question, then you don't address the actual needs of the majority of black or Asian people in Britain or America. Why are we not talking about the economics? Because to me, it seems a completely ridiculous discussion to talk about something like race, and we go, you know, people of colour.

Well, people of colour can be anything from Rishi Sunak to someone of Pakistani origin growing up in Bradford in a desperately poor, deprived part of the UK. Why are we having such a, if I can put it bluntly, a ridiculous conversation? Because to have a conversation about economic inequality, you have to ask some fundamental questions about the way society is run,

about the nature of markets, about the nature of profit, about putting profits before people's needs. You have to ask those kinds of difficult questions. And few people want to ask those questions. And the kinds of broader movements that raise those questions have disappeared. It's what I was talking about before,

that the collapse of broader, radical social movements of working class movements of trade unions, the loss of power of trade unions, have all played a role in it. Trade unions are hugely important. Where trade unions are strong, inequality tends to be much lower than where trade unions are weak. Inequality in Britain and in America shot up in the 1980s when trade unions were smashed.

And they've stayed pretty high ever since. There is a relationship between the strength of trade unions and inequality. And so the answer is because the kind of. of those deep fundamental questions about the kind of societies we live in no longer get asked. And it's much easier then to talk about rights at a political level than to talk equality at an economic level. And Kenan, I think that may answer the question I was going to ask you. Just let me feed this back to you and tell me if I'm hearing you correctly. One of the questions I had for you was, where does the pessimism come from, given the progress,

we've made on race. And by the way, I should add, I wasn't suggesting that Britain in the 80s was this beacon of cultural universalism at all. I mean, I remember I came to school here in 95, and I remember me being called Apaki, right? And I'm from Russia. So I'm totally aware of what you're talking about. I certainly wasn't suggesting that it was, you know, perfect. But by global standards, actually, pretty good. However, are you suggesting that the pessimism about which you talk is not the product of the lack of progress, we've made on race relations, it's a product of the inequality and the lack of progress we've made on that front. And therefore, people feel like, well, there's nothing we can really do to change our material circumstances. Therefore, let's pursue this more representative, more symbolic agenda. Is that what you're saying? I'm saying that to believe, to have a radical universalist perspective, to believe in any universalism in any kind of, um, to believe in, um, any kind of, um, material sense. You have to have belief

that it is possible to transform society. But this is my point. We have. And the movement. Well... This is my point, right? In terms of race, right, we have transformed society. So why are people pessimistic

about our ability to make progress? Because we have got societies where we've made progress when it comes to race, but which is still deeply unequal, where the impact of poverty, the impact of lack of resources, bites very deeply. And the kinds of movements, organisations, politicians that used to defend the working class,

that did to defend the poor, have disappeared. the Labour Party now says in this country, Labour Party says, we're not going to get rid of the two-child limits on benefits, even though that very week when Kirstama made that announcement. There was a report which came out which showed that the impact of the two-child limit on benefits was to hugely increase poverty among certain sections. of the population. So while it's a good thing that we've made progress, that kind of progress has been for a very small section of society.

And those who have most benefited from the kind of progress of made in race have been middle-class minorities. Working-class minorities have benefited much less from that. Just as working-class people as a whole have benefited much less over the past 30, 40 years. So it's a way that the politics and the economics have become separated. And our discussion about political equality has become separated from our discussion about economic equality or inequality. That's part of the problem. And the thing that I find frustrating about this speaking of identitarianism and this

Identitarianism movement is how reductive it is. So for instance, it will talk about white, and they will say, like, for instance, to me, you're white. My mother's Latin American, a woman of color. You know, my grandfather was an Arab. My grandmother was descended from South American native. Yeah, but look at you. Yeah, exactly, mate. And I've got the accent and I've got tattoos. So, you know, therefore equals racist. But the thing that I find really frustrating about it is that it seems to me that it was a way to demonize the white working class as well,

and if I'm going to put it bluntly, because it was like, well, you've got white privilege. And I always was like, hang on, somebody born in a council estate in Middlesbrough, who is a product of a single mother, what privilege do they have? They have no privilege. And yet they have somebody who is an ethnic minority

who grew up in a very nice part of London, lecturing this person, which to me, I mean, it's abhorrent, if I'm being honest. Yeah, again, you have to separate two things. One is, why has it become the case that racism has been reduced to the quest of white privilege? And secondly, what are the consequences of that?

And if you look at how, why racism has become reduced to the quest of white privilege. Again, you go back to what I've been talking about, which is that sense of social pessimism. Take something like critical race theory. There are lots of different discussions and critiques of critical race theory, some of which are good, some of which are bad. But one thing that is rarely talked about in the think about critical race theory. It's the broader political, social, economic context in which critical race theory becomes significant. One of the key figures of critical race theory, someone that very few people know about, but who was very important in developing. It was a guy

called Derek Bell. Bell was an American, African American, lawyer, who's played an important part in legal circles within America, who began as a lawyer working for National Association for Colored People in America, challenging segregation in the South and working to desegregate schools in particular in the South. and he became largely disenchanted by the lack of progress in that. And he came to see that, believe that racism was ineradicable, that it was there. There was equality, black people in America would never win equality.

And in a sense, that was underlay many of the arguments, of critical race theory, that sense of racism being ineradicable. Now, few people, however influential Derek Bell is, is few people are so fallen down that kind of pit of existential despair as Bell did. Nevertheless, he has been hugely influential on figures from, you know, Barack Obama to Michelle Alexander to a wine range of figures. And if you take a figure like Tanahisi Coates, who you may know about is possibly the most influential African-American essayist in America, just most influential essayist in America, he sees, for instance, that racism, he compares racism to a natural disaster, like a typhoon or an earthquake. And he says just as social movements or laws will never stop a typhoon or an earthquake,

nor will it ever eradicate racism. And once you kind of come to believe that, then there are a number of consequences of that. First, you come to see race as something fixed, and racial divisions are something fixed. you essentialise them. You kind of say that they're... And so even though your starting point is that race is a social construct, your end point is that it is unmovable.

Racial divisions are unmovable. And you come to almost the same position as those on the right who argue that race is a biological reality and racial differences are biological realities and policies should be related to that. It also means going back to what we were talking

before, that the struggle against race, if you're struggling against racism at the same time is to believe that racism cannot be overcome, then you shift from what we were talking about before, from a view of

material change to a view about symbolic change. What matters then becomes symbolism. And anti-racism becomes a kind of of performative act. And so a lot of what we're talking about, a lot of the kind of critiques of anti-racism, contemporary anti-racism, stems, I think, not from, you know, malice or or a desire to be racist or, you know, all the things that people express.

It comes from that sense of social pessimism, the pessimism about being able to overcome racism. And as you say, I mean, part of the irony of that is that, you know, if anything the last 40, 50 years have shown, it is the possibilities of overcoming racism, of not that we've overcome racism, but certainly we've ameliorated racism to an extent that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago, 60 years or 70 years ago. So again, it comes back to my point that you have to understand this in the context of the wider shifts in society and the wider sense of social pessimism that has ripped many sections of society.

your view comes from the economic dimension of all of this, basically, right? And political. And political. It's very interesting. I'm sorry, I was going to say political, because if you have, for instance, social democratic parties in Europe, Democrats in America, essentially cutting themselves off from their working class base, from their old working class base, then that becomes a,

and refounding themselves, or think largely about middle-class support, then you can see where that sense of betrayal and abandonment comes. Well, right, whatever your skin color, there's no one you can vote for that's going to challenge authority on your behalf and represent your interest in the conversation about how resources are distributed and so on. So that makes sense. The question I wanted to ask you is, how much of this, particularly the way we think about it in the UK, is imported from America? Because I feel that many of the conversations that we have in this country, they just don't seem to map very well onto the history and culture of this country and the society that we have here.

Do you think there's a dimension where we're sort of living in this increasingly unified informational field? And so whenever a conversation starts in America, and BLM is a good example of this, it's sort of imported wholesale here and is applied in a very top-down way to a society that actually is remarkably different to America. Yes and no. I mean, yes, in the sense that you're right that the economic, social, political heft of America means that what happens in America, the debates you have in America necessarily apply to to other countries or get imported other countries.

The most remarkable expression of that I've seen is, I remember being in South Africa, where there was a Black Lives Matter March. Now, anybody who know South Africa will know that the policing of black people in America in South Africa is far more vicious, far more brutal than anything that goes on in America. I mean, it's brutal in America. There goes to the observer, Colin, Kenneth.

It goes far, far more, you know, the shooting dead of strikers by the police. And yet, the march was not about police brutality in South Africa. It was a police brutality in America. And that kind of shows that there's a tendency. When we think about it in American terms, to ignore what is actually happening in front of our eyes are on the ground where we are. So yes, in that sense, I agree with you. But in the broader sense that we've been talking about, that what this, and this applies to Britain, of course, the character of race and racism in Britain and the relations between different

racial categories, racial groups are very, it's very different in Britain than it. and the nature of immigration, all sorts of things, are very different in Britain than it is in America. At the same time, going back to what we were talking about before, the importance of what I call social pessimism in shaping the way we look at race and identity is as significant in Britain as it is in America. So which is why, yes, I agree with you,

but also that we need to take the wider frame into account too. Yeah, it's a really interesting point that you made. I guess one of the frustrations that I have is, you know, for instance, we say sex is a spectrum, and we're obviously not going to get into that, but race is a spectrum. You know, nobody is completely white. You know, nobody, you know, we talk with,

there's this conversation right now happening in America, are Latinos white. you know, Asian people, should they be discriminated against when they come, when they apply for universities, because, you know, they're overrepresented, particularly in STEM courses. And so it just seems to me that we just tend to think of these people as homogenous blobs almost, whilst not actually drilling down. And I just wonder, do you think we're ever going to go to that point where we're ready to have a more honest and a more authentic conversation about race?

Or do you think it's just going to be dominated by what we see at the moment? Well, I think the view of racial communities as being homogenous groups has been disastrous. Because the people, again, go back to our Black Lives Matter discussion, the people it abandoned. are those at their bottom because you tend to see

minorities as being single, homogenous communities. First, the most conservative voices often get, I've seen as representative of those communities. So, I mean, this is most visible in Britain in Muslim communities, that somehow conservative

Muslim Council of Britain The Muslim Council Yeah Conservative Muslims are seen as represented and liberal Muslims are seen as somehow not authentic

not of that community So I think that view of communities as minorities as forming homogenous communities has been disastrous and we live in a world

in which we tend to look at minorities as belonging to communities and that class is something that applies largely to the white population and so we have to, you know, the white, but what that does is racialize the concept of class. And so you have, you know,

notions like the white working class, where the whiteness seem to matter more than their class location. And again, that is really disastrous for the white working class, as it were, to view that their problems in terms of race or ethnicity or culture, rather in terms of class, is deeply problematic. And for example, in education, which is where I used to work, the lowest achieving subgroup in education is white working class boys. Yeah, I think education is quite interesting

because if you take another issue in school, that of school exclusions, yeah. And this is seen as something that affects particularly black pupils. But actually, it affects pupils of Caribbean descent those of or of black

African descent are actually far less affected. And that's because it's a class difference again. Until relatively recently, most people of black African descent in this country

were more middle class than those who are on Caribbean descent. And so it's not an issue of simply of black pupils being excluded. It's a particular set of black pupils who tend to be more working class who are excluded. And as it so happens, white working class boys are also excluded,

not to the same extent, but certainly more than pupils of African descent, black African descent. So what is a complex situation? What is a complex picture? Then becomes seen in the kind of narrow, rigid, racial terms, which doesn't actually tell you much about what is happening, what is going on. Absolutely.

And one of the highest achieving subgroups in education is West African girls, girls of West African heritage. They're absolutely crushing it in exams. You can see they're the ones who are going on to be doctors, scientists, lawyers. they're doing fantastically well, yet nobody talks about this. And it just seems to me, again, that the problem is, is when you have a conversation that is not honest, Kenon, you're not discussing all facets of the problem.

And when you're not discussing all facets of the problem, you're never going to solve that problem, which is my concern. Yeah, it's not a question of honesty. I think it's a question of the way we've come to view the world. You know, I think it's wrong to see this as somehow people being dishonest about it. But we've come to view the world and view the categories that matter in certain ways. And those tell us actually very little about the world as it is. So again, you know, we talk about Asians.

But Asians in the American context, we talk about Asians in a British context. And Asian means slightly different. For our American view as an Asian person in this country, someone from the Indian subcontinent or whose ancestry is from that region. Yeah. Yeah. But if you look at social outcomes or educational outcomes, you find it's very different from those of Indian background

to those of Bangladeshi and Pakistani background. And that, again, has to do a lot to do with class because those from Indian background usually come from a majority that come from middle-class families, those from Pakistani or Bangladesh backgrounds come from working class or rural families. And so just to the categories we use to think about these issues themselves obscure many of the problems we face. And again, Asian in the American context,

I mean, we're talking about a huge, wide range of different communities, some of whom are very poor, and do very badly in things like educational attainment, some of whom are much wealthier and do very well in educational attainment and to kind of put all of them into a single category, Asian, and look at how Asians are doing in different social. It's to misunderstand the roots of many of the problems

that we face. I mean, taught my American affirmative action. There's a, I don't know if you saw, there was a paper came out last week, which looked at how at top colleges, I believe, top colleges in America.

Pupils were the same sat score, but different income levels, did. And what they found, not surprising, but it's quite stark in the way it showed it, is that with the same score, those who are in the top 1% are, I think, twice as likely to be offered a place at a top university than those who are at the bottom income these are. In other words, this is affirmative action for the very rich. And so those kinds of issues get missed out when the categories we use to understand the world and how it works. Actually, it don't serve as well at all.

I think that's a very good point, actually. And I think what Francis meant was that because we are quite often misled by a different worldview and misinformed about the right way to look at it, we end up having fake conversations, even if no one is being actively dishonest. No one may, people might not be going into it going, well, I know the truth, but I'm going to say this. But we are having the wrong conversation, which I think is what you're saying as well. And actually, I mean, if you look at what you're saying, it's the most obvious thing in the world because there is a reason why people in society compete for resources.

They want to make more money. They want to raise their status. And that is because deep down, we all know that the more money you have, the better you and your children are going to do in life. That's kind of how it works. That's why we want more money. That's why we want more resources. So you're saying something very, very accurate and obvious. And the late mortise through this entire conversation, Kenan, has been the need to address the inequality that we see in our societies now.

And we've got about 15 minutes left. I'd love to spend it talking about that with you because you are on the left. And I sense that you are quite in favor of strong intervention in that. in the market, if you like, or in the world, in order to address the disparities between people at the bottom and people at the top. How do we fix this? How do we fix this?

Can we fix this? Well, I think the first... It's... To have a debate about the market and the capitalism in... We don't need to have a debate. Tell us what the thing. I think the first thing is that we live in the world where... profit comes before need.

So wherever you look at issues, whether you look at energy or whether you look at education, profit comes before need. And we need to reverse that, to think about people's needs. So if you're talking about income, for instance, instance, one of the big shifts over the past 40 years has been the removal of or the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

of the rights of trade unions. It's been made more and more difficult for trade unions to come out on strike, for trade unions to show solidarity with other trade unions, to have secondary action, all those things have gone. And if we're serious about wanting to defend... those at the bottom. If we're serious about wanting to defend the poor, if we're serious about

wanting to undermine inequalities, then you have to be serious about opposing those kinds of restrictions on trade unions. Because if you look throughout the 20th century, those times when trading unions were strong, inequality was low. When trade unions are weakened, inequality shoots up. It's not true just of Britain. You can see the same picture in America. So one of the things that always strikes me is that the quest of class is now something

that the people on the right take up, conservatives take up. It's an issue. but to me it's as performative as much of left-wing anti-racism, right-wing defensive class, because they'll talk about class, but they won't do any of the things necessary to defend working-class people. The moment work-class people go out on strike, their argument is that, we must do something to restrict

the rights of trade unions even more, because they're still going on strike. So it seems to me that if we want to take seriously questions of class, if we want to take serious of questions of inequality, if we want to take seriously questions of poverty, then one starting point, there are a lot of starting points, but one starting point has to be the removal,

of nearly 40 years of restrictions on trade unions to defend their rights. Let me just push back on that at this point, Kenneth, because there'll be people sitting down watching this going, hang on a minute, 1970s. The unions were very strong. We had a three-day week. The UK economy was, quite frankly, decimated. We were known as a sick man of Europe.

Thatcher came in, reduced the power of the unions, the power of the unions, Britain became a far wealthy and far more successful country. And what happened to inequality? Isn't that really the conversation, Kenon? Because I think both sides of this discussion always want to pretend that they have a solution, whereas if you're a neutral and honest observer,

what you see is there are a trade-off. So, for example, when you talk about we need to put need above profit, I lived in a society that put need above profit. It didn't work out very well, right? But that's not to say we should put profit above need in all circumstances. There is a balance between the two. And we must look for the right place where that balance is, whereby we still have profit and we still generate enough revenue

or stuff or goods for people to enjoy in society, while, as I think you're right to say, making sure that in the pursuit of that, we do not leave people behind. Because I'm very persuaded by the evidence on this, which is the well-being of a society, and there's a lot of statistical evidence for this, depends not so much on its absolute income,

but on the distribution of that income across society. And I think concern about inequality is something that I really share, actually. But the question I was going to put you a slightly different, which is in the 70s, yes, the unions were largely dismantled by a political force. But isn't the reason that we don't have powerful unions now more about the fact that the industries, which lent them,

to unionization and that sort of power don't really exist. There isn't a million minors in this country now. There aren't that many bus drivers. There aren't that many. Yeah, there are some. But you're not going to get the working class united around this stuff. Because the working class doesn't really exist in the same way that it did 40, 50 years ago. There is a large element of truth in that.

But then partly it's also because one of the, one of, one, One way of looking at what you're saying is that work has to become fragmented. And that many of those who work, the kinds of jobs they have are jobs in which the employees make it very, very difficult to unionize the gig economy. So if you look at what's happening with Amazon now. Or Uber drivers or whatever. Yeah. But there is a drive now to unionize Amazon workers. and to improve their wages and conditions,

which anybody who defends the need to improve the conditions, the conditions, the wages of those in the bottom of society, who wants less inequality, has to support. Just as an aside, Kenan, we had James Bloodworth on the show to talk about his book about conditions at Amazon warehouses, so I know what you're talking about. But it's not just Amazon, I mean, that's where the focus is now. Yes.

But there is, we've got to a point where it's very difficult to unionize, where it's very difficult to go out and strike. And that kind of collective action that used to be part and parcel of working class life has gone, has disappeared. And again, if we're talking about defending working class interests, if we're talking about defending the interests of the poor, then we have to also defend their ability to act collectively as a group,

because as individuals, workers are very little power. The only way they can express their power is through collective action. And yet it's collective action that we live in a world where we fear collective action in that sense. So to defend collective action, to defend the idea that something like the water companies shouldn't rip off the public, to defend the idea of a well-resourced, well-funded national health service, it's not us to live in Russia, it's to look at the problems we have now and say that if we're serious about addressing these problems, and then there are certain things we have to do.

And, Kenan, we are, it's looking more and more likely, as the Conservatives are imploding in front of our eyes, that we're going to get a Labour government, Keir Stama. Are you hopeful? No. Why not? No, because I think it's made it clear that even minor changes

to improve the lives of those who are poorest. It's off the agenda. I mean, we'll wait to see, you know, if there's a Labour government, if there's a Labour government, and we'll wait to see, you know, what happens then. But no, I'm not particularly hopeful that things will change. I mean, everything from benefits to,

immigration, the policies that Labor follow are not that different for the policies that the tourists pursue at the moment. It's so interesting because you're not the first person on the left that we've had on the show who Francis has asked that question about the Labour Party coming in and the answer usually it's very much the same. There's almost certainly going to be an incoming Labour government under Kirstama by the looks of the politics today as it is. Are you excited from your perspective where you sit on the left about that prospect? No. What's interesting as well is when we have people from the right on the show

and we ask them about the conservative party, they feel exactly the same way about the conservative party. So it's almost like the Labor Party doesn't represent the left and the conservative party doesn't represent what people want on the right, which comes back to your point about social pessimism because if you can't vote for a party that actually represents what you want, why would you be optimistic about the future? Sure. I completely agree.

Yeah. It's a weird place for us to be in a society. Do you think something like proportional representation would help, as in we'll get lots of more fragmentation, and there'll be lots of smaller parties, which would then the argument is represent people better. If you want the progressive left, you can get, for example, the momentum party. If you want the old school left,

you get something like the SDPs, for example. I don't think that the answer, I mean, we can have a debate about proportional representation, good about it, and there are arguments, I think either way on this. But I don't think the problem is the mechanisms of politics. I think it's at a more profound level of ideas and of organisations that can bring, and belief in change. It's at that level that the problem lies. But how do you get people to believe and change

if they can't vote for it? Because change isn't simply about voting. I mean, being able to organize collectively to bring about change, whether it's in a, in a, to change one's housing conditions, to change one's, conditions of work to improve one's wages. All those things are part and parcel of bringing about change.

Democracy isn't simply about putting across on a ballot paper every five years. It is about all that happens in between. It is about civil societies, about the organisations of civil society. It's the ability to be able to protest. It is the ability to take action collectively. All those things are central to a democratic society. And too often we kind of think that democracy is only about elections and forget about all the rest.

And, you know, at a time when there are increasing curbs on protests, I think we should remember that, you know, authoritarian countries, often don't stop people voting, but they stop people protesting. They stop people being able to express their views. They lock people up for doing that. So it's important to recognize that the issue is simply about voting. It is about all the tumult of civil society and our capacity to get together

and to organize, whether it's a union or a housing committee or whatever, if it's in that, the democracy lies. Kenan, I think it's a beautiful point to end this section of the interview on. It's been really a refreshing to hear your take on it. The book is not so black and white. We're going to go to your questions on locals in a second, but before we do, we always finish the main interview with the same question, Kenan, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be?

Well, we talk about immigration obsessively, incessantly, probably too much. But despite our obsessive talk discussions about immigration, we actually have very little understanding of how the policies that are being enacted to stem immigration into Europe, into Britain, into America, into Australia and so on. How they're changing the geography of the world. And what I mean is this, you take something like the EU. Over the past 20 years, the EU has created a set of deals with just about every coercive force in...

North Africa, in the Sahel, in East Africa, in the Horn of Africa, from malicious to dictators. It began with a deal with Gaddafi when he was in power in Libya. It's made a deal with O'R. al-Bashir, the former Sudanese leader who's wanted for war crimes by the international criminal court. And it's effectively created, and it's made these deals with all these coer,

forces to stop migrants from coming to the Mediterranean to cross over to Europe. And what it's really done is created a huge kidnap and detention industry right across the region. And in so doing, it has trampled over the rights and the sovereignty of many of those countries. because for EU cash, they have to put the interests of EU migration before they put the interests of their own peoples or their own economies. It's destroyed economies.

It has turned lives of people in place like Niger upside down. A country, most people haven't probably even thought about. And it's not just the EU. We can see it's similar processes. in America, in Australia and Britain, of using, and the irony is that the argument for these policies is that we need to protect our borders from immigration.

But in so doing, what rich countries are doing is trampling over the sovereignty and borders of poorer countries. And that's something that we've rare, talk about that the way that the immigration policies of the rich countries are making poorer countries subservient to their needs, their immigration needs, and undermining, overturning local economies and the needs of people. And I think that it's a scandal. And I think we should, and the fact that we're not talking about it is also a scandal.

Well, we've got more questions for you from our audience. Head on over to locals, guys, where we will follow up with more of your questions for Kenan. Why do the far left and the far right hold very similar opinions on Israel and Jews in general?