“Identity Politics”

… Bernstein writes about “identity entrepreneurs,” people who claim and leverage a minority identity for economic or other gains, even though that identity never resulted in their facing discrimination. He writes about race fakers such as the Malone twins and Rachel Dolezal, and the suspect Cherokee ancestry claims of Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). He also raises the complexities posed by people like Tiger Woods, who calls himself ‘Cablinasian’ and refuses to identify as African-American as that would ignore his own mother’s part in his ancestry; and Kamala Harris, who identifies as Black but can legally claim Asian and White identities as well.

Kenan Malik’s new book, Not So Black and White: A History of Race From White Supremacy to Identity Politics, lives up to its title. It dispenses with simplistic views of racism as a matter of privileged whites lording it over people of colour and gets to grips with its complex history.

Malik, a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, focuses on two key themes. First, the history of the concept of race, where he argues convincingly that race only emerged as an idea in the 18th century. Malik also counters the widespread assumption that race has always been understood in terms of skin colour. As he points out, there were times when the working class was also viewed as a race apart.

Our tortured efforts to eliminate racism render us as absurd as ever

No question, 1989’s Back to the Future: Part II had incredible foresight, with a plot in which the bully Biff becomes a political tyrant — allegedly modelled on one Donald Trump. But when it came to predicting the future, a different Eighties film did better. If you’ve never heard of Soul Man, that’s not a surprise: this 1986 comedy about a white teenager who blacks up in order to blag a Harvard scholarship for African-Americans was deemed so offensive, even back then, that it damaged the careers of pretty much everyone involved. And yet it has proven astonishingly prescient.

The nomadic Sami people of Scandinavia are the only European Union’s only “indigenous” people, the bloc’s rotating presidency has claimed.

A social media account for the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU has described the nomadic Sami people of Scandinavia and north-west Russia, once more commonly described as Lapps or Laplanders, as being the EU’s only “indigenous” people.