What do Sarita Malik and the late Enoch Powell have in common? They both appear to believe that non-whites aren’t capable of co-existing with liberal democratic values.
I hope Dr Malik’s letter misrepresents her beliefs; as an eminent academic in black and Asian studies, she presumably doesn’t actually hold any views that are quite so witless. Although from a brief Googling of her published work, she appears guilty of the annoying habit of using the word ‘black’ to mean ‘black, South Asian, Arab, East Asian, Romany, Irish, and anyone else we’ve forgotten about’. This doesn’t make me confident.
Update: Dr Malik responds here.
Interestingly, Roddy Doyle now repudiates the famous "the Irish are the blacks of Europe" claim from The Commitments (actually, that’s from the film – Doyle used a slightly more vernacular term for "blacks" in the novel).
Or rather, he said that while he felt that it was true at the time he wrote it, the subsequent Irish economic miracle has rendered it meaningless.
That letter is pretty ripe. But I do think that she has a point that "freedom of speech is racially coded", although not in any straightforward way. We free speech types all up for manning the barricades to protect Bekhti or Jerry Springer or Theo van Gogh. But when Prince Harry puts on his armband or Yusuf al-Qaradawi defends sharia, we’re basically nowhere to be seen, or hiding behind "while we recognise that we cannot censor, mumble mumble, everyone has the duty to condemn in the strongest possible terms".
There are of course good principled reasons for people’s reactions to the different cases. But you can sort of see how a recently arrived Martian might conclude that the key difference was that we liberals and democrats behaved a bit differently when it was our ox that was being gored.
Interesting to read the comparison drawn by John B of my views as presented in a recent letter to The Guardian with those of Enoch Powell.. Let me clarify. I do not believe that ‘non-Whites’ aren’t capable of co-existing with liberal democratic values. We have co-existed very well for many centuries in a society that claims to have liberal democratic values. I do not understand therefore where John B’s argument and association derives from.
My point is simply this. ‘The problem’ does not lie with ‘non-Whites’ (I use John B’s term here) and their ability to ‘co-exist’, but with how the idea of liberalism is used in modern society. Liberalism never seems to interfere but always shapes the underlying agenda. As stated in my letter, ‘liberalism and its core value of freedom of speech is not anti-racist’. When it suits – and I was referencing the example of the recent protests round the Birmingham Rep’s staging of the play, Behzti – ‘non-White’ communities are routinely hurled the ‘liberal’ argument that their protests are anti ‘freedom of speech’, and as such are deemed to be narrow-minded and hypercritical. Liberalism and its key tenet, ‘freedom of speech’, is used here as a tool to position ‘non-Whites’ as cultural outsiders, and as such, is racially-coded. What we need to ask, is who has the power within our society to lay claim to ‘being liberal’ and how is liberalism used?
In relation to my use of the word ‘black’: I have only ever used this term in my work to reference those of African, Caribbean and South Asian descent – and do not use it to include ‘Arab, East Asian, Romany, Irish and anyone else we’ve forgotten about’. The term ‘black’ although not without its limitations and degrees of non-identification, developed from a set of anti-racist struggles that gave rise to it within a British political context about two decades ago.
Thanks for taking the time to reply & clarify – original article amended to point people towards your response.