“As the rise of the politics of difference has turned the assertion of group identity into a progressive demand, so racialisation is no longer viewed as a purely negative phenomenon. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities…The concept of race is irrational. The practice of antiracism has become so. We need to challenge both, in the name of humanism and of reason.”

The idea of race has what I find a surprisingly short history. For much of humanity’s past, it was group membership of things like socioeconomic status, citizenship, or faith which mattered. As late as 1881, the King of Hawaii was given precedence over the Crown Prince of Germany; social rank mattered more than race.

Race then had its heyday, but post WW2 it for good reasons became unacceptable. Malik worries in “Strange Fruits” that it is returning in popularity in the guise of culture and under the auspices of antiracism. The right, he argues, uses human diversity as an argument to exclude the different; the modern left uses human diversity as a reason that people must be treated differently. Both, he suggests, rely on race and emphasize differences between people. Often it is culture that the left argues must be preserved: but that he suggests is too often used as a proxy for race, and one’s membership in a culture is defined by who one’s ancestors were. When museums restrict access to certain exhibits for cultural reasons, as they do in Australia and elsewhere, genetics and descent is the gatekeeper to knowledge.

In the end, race explains an insignificant 3-5% of human variation. Its categories are almost entirely arbitrary, and impossible to define over a constantly changing humanity. If science wishes to use it as a pragmatic way of grouping people, Malik argues, as when the FDA approved a drug targeting African-Americans, then fine; but it is the use of a social construct for convenience without the specificity to be anything more, and should be treated as such, not as a fixed dividing line between groups. Antiracists on the left who argue that cultures/races must be treated differently because they are different, he suggests, should remember the same: celebrating racial differences requires the same assumptions about race as those held by racists, an unscientific and unfounded philosophy.

To find out more, you can pick up a copy here (or just read the reviews) – or in the UK or Canada.