When Monuments Fall
“We stand today at the national center to perform something like a national act—an act which is to go into history.”
So said the great nineteenth-century former slave and staunch abolitionist Frederick Douglass at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., in “That we are here in peace today,” Douglass told a crowd of almost 25,, many of them African-American, “is a compliment and a credit to American civilization, and a prophecy of still greater national enlightenment and progress in the future.”
The idea for the memorial had come originally from former slave Charlotte Scott, of Virginia, who wanted a monument in honor of Abraham Lincoln. She gave five dollars to begin a funding drive, and the monument was eventually paid for entirely by former slaves.
Almost a hundred and fifty years later, many African Americans feel differently about the memorial. In June, Black Lives Matter protesters attempted, unsuccessfully, to topple the statue. D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton vowed to introduce legislation to have the memorial removed. The Boston Art Commission unanimously
The bane of cultural appropriation
Another week, another controversy about “cultural appropriation”. The latest has been the furore over Justin Bieber’s dreadlocks. The Bieber furore followed similar controversies over Beyonce’s Bollywood outfit, Kylie Jenner’s cornrows, Canadians practising yoga, English students wearing sombreros and American students donning Native American Halloween costumes.
Many of these controversies may seem as laughable as Bieber’s locks. What they reveal, however, is how degraded have become contemporary campaigns for social justice.
Cultural appropriation is, in the words of Susan Scafidi, professor of law at Fordham University, and author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission”. This can include the “unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”
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A colonial past?
But what is it for knowledge or an object to “belong” to a culture? And who gives permission for someone from anot
How identity politics has revived racial thinking
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.
Second, Malik focuses on the politics of identity, rightly arguing that classifying people according to race was the original form of identity politics. Malik reminds us that, although identity politics is often seen as a radical force today, it actually expresses old reactionary ideas about social divisions between people.
Not So Black and White can be seen as a necessary reworking of Malik’s book, The Meaning of Race. There Malik also explor
The push and pull of extremism
It has been a year of unfolding statistics. Some , refugees have attempted to enter Europe this year, many fleeing the war in Syria. A much smaller, yet equally significant number have travelled the other way.
Some 4, Europeans have, over the past few years, left to fight with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). We know why people want to flee Syria – but what draws thousands of young Europeans to a brutal, sadistic organisation like ISIL?
The conventional answer is “radicalisation”, a process through which extremist groups, or “hate preachers”, indoctrinate vulnerable Muslims with fundamentalist ideas – the first step on a path leading inexorably to terrorism. What makes people vulnerable is that they are poorly integrated into society.
Radicalisation thesis
| UpFront – The Arena: What drives Westerners to fight for ISIL? |
Radicalisation is a concept that has caught the imagination of many politicians and shaped much domestic counterterror policy in Europe and elsewhere. The trouble is that most of the assumptions of the radicalisation thesis are untrue.
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For instance, a British MI5 study on extremism
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