"The Only Way Forward for the Left Is to Return to the Universalism It Had Historically Championed"

"Malik joins here with a small but growing number of leftwing thinkers, including Nancy Fraser and Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr., who view leftwing identitarianism as having been in an unholy, but perhaps unwitting, alliance with neoliberal capitalism over the past decades. As Malik puts it, by 'delinking race and class and obscuring the social and political roots of both working-class inequalities and racial injustices,' left identitarianism has made it harder to deal with both. 'Just as in the nineteenth century racial identity was used to break-up class alliances, and to persuade white workers that their interests lay in their whiteness, not in their class location, so today the language of identity leads to the same place, though without necessarily the conscious intention of doing so.'"

Sheri Berman at The Liberal Patriot reviews Kenan Malik's Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics.