“Identity Politics”

“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about black queens”

Cleopatra was Greek. Basic historic fact. But we live in an exciting era where actual history has been turned over to be rewritten by the wokes who think that Black Panther’s Wakanda and the 1619 Project are actual history.

So when Netflix decided to cast Gal Gadot, who’s Israeli and thus Mediterranean and at least has some relationship to the role, the BLM crowd protested and she was recast as black. Because everyone who has watched 70s blaxploitation movies knows that Cleopatra was black.

This awful shooting is being used to peddle divisive racial myths.

It’s a miracle he’s still alive. Sixteen-year-old Ralph Yarl, a schoolboy from Kansas City, Missouri, was shot in the head and arm last Thursday night. He had gone to the wrong address, pulling up outside a house on Northeast 115th Street, instead of Northeast 115th Terrace, which is just a block away. Yarl knocked on the door, expecting his two younger siblings to come running out (he’d been asked by his mother to collect them early from a sleepover). Instead, he was shot at twice by 84-year-old Andrew Lester from the other side of the threshold. Lester claims he feared for his life – and that Yarl was pulling at the door handle (a claim Yarl denies). Incredibly, mercifully, Yarl is not only still with us, but is also expected to make a close-to-full recovery. Lester, meanwhile, has been charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. If convicted, he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

Sixty years on, the ethnic model described in Beyond the Melting Pot merits revisiting

In October 2022, Los Angeles’s ethnic politics cost city council president Nury Martinez her job. In leaked audio, Martinez can be heard discussing the city’s redistricting with two other Hispanic councilmembers and a Hispanic labor leader. In what she would later claim was a moment of frustration, Martinez called fellow council member Mike Bonin’s adopted son a “monkey”—Bonin is white, the son is black—and condemned Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón: “Fuck that guy, he’s with the blacks.”

… 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.