Douglas Todd: Race, identity and religion: Five thinkers offer fresh takes
Credit to Author: Douglas Todd| Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2020 20:02:44 +0000
In a western world progressively polarized by ideology rooted in identity, race and religion, five up-and-coming thinkers are offering perspectives that go beyond the monotonous truisms of the political left and right.
These British, American and Canadian intellectuals, from a range of backgrounds, volunteer refreshingly unpredictable ideas. Whether linguists or novelists, they’re authors gaining wide traction through outlets from The Guardian and The New Yorker to Real Time with Bill Maher and Comedy Central.
The politics of these intellectuals is hard to pin down, since they navigate complex theories on their own, refusing to conform for the sake of getting ahead. They inject new life into the term “heterodox,” which is the opposite of “orthodox.” They’re willing to be iconoclastic. Some are being called “radical centrists.”
Here are the takes of five leading intellects on some of today’s hot-button issues:
Reihan Salam, head of the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think-tank.
One of Reihan Salam’s most admired thinkers is the late Canadian Marxist Gerald Cohen. Salam, 40, is pro-gay marriage, in favour or legalizing prostitution, worries about “white flight” from core city neighbourhoods and thinks the Iraq War was a “disaster of world-historical proportions.”
Yet this son of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh in 2019 was named head of the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think-tank. Salam believes non-parents should be taxed more than mothers and fathers, to support those who take the risks of parenting. He’s also against “birthright” citizenship, by which a few countries, such as the U.S. and Canada, issue passports to babies born on their soil to non-citizens.
Salam’s latest book is titled Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. He authored a much-discussed piece in The Atlantic titled “The Utility of White Bashing,” in which he argued that liberal Caucasians and people of colour subconsciously jockey for status and advancement by casually criticizing whites.
Zadie Smith, 44, is a British-Jamaican writer whose novels delve into multicultural families. Married to an Irishman, she often teases whites as a group, but she also thinks identity politics — the tendency to form political alliances based on race, religion, gender or sexuality — has been harmful.
Smith has talked about how strange it is for her husband, novelist Nick Laird, to find himself increasingly categorized by his ethnicity. “He turned to me and said: ‘I used to be myself and I’m now white guy, white guy.’ I said: ‘Finally, you understand.’ But the lesson of that is that identity is a huge pain in the arse … The only thing that identifies people in their entirety is their name: I’m a Zadie.”
A darling of the literary scene, Smith also doesn’t worry much about cultural appropriation, since she often creates characters from backgrounds other than her own. There is a “kind of fake piety” linked to the issue of appropriation, she says. Smith ventured into fiction writing “because I wanted to know what’s it like to be a Jewish Chinese guy or an old black woman or a white professor or whatever.”
John McWhorter, linguist and literature professor at Columbia University.
An eminent linguist and literature professor at New York’s Columbia University, John McWhorter is a sought-after commentator who has described himself as a “cranky liberal Democrat.”
Brought up in a comfortable American neighbourhood, he is well-versed in combatting racism and in describing how language necessarily evolves, including in regards to terms such as “coloured people” and “people of colour.”
However, McWhorter, 54, has written that anti-racism has become a kind of fundamentalist religion that divides people and aims to destroy those who raise questions. He has said what is holding back blacks is not race, but “black attitudes.” McWhorter was recently portrayed in a video (see below) titled “America has never been less racist.” He has riled some by arguing that affirmative action programs should be based not on race, but on economic class.
Wesley Yang, author of The Souls of Yellow Folks: Essays.
A Korean-American, Wesley Yang is the award-winning author of The Souls of Yellow Folks: Essays.
Frank about ethnicity and sex, he dives into the “resentments” he and other Asian-Americans experience, whether they are feelings of “invisibility,” having a “lukewarm identity” or bumping up against a “bamboo ceiling.” Yet Yang is skeptical of the concept of “micro-aggressions.”
The millennial-age author is devoted to free thought and determined to go beyond stereotyping members of any group. He has described identity politics as “a beguiling compound of insight, partial truths, circular reasoning, and dogmatism operating within a self-enclosed system of reference immunized against critique.”
Ali Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim.
Ali Rizvi is a Pakistani-born Canadian and ex-Muslim. He lived for a decade with his family in theocratic Saudi Arabia. Now based in Toronto, he wrote the best-selling book The Atheist Muslim in an attempt to champion Enlightenment values of free inquiry and critical thinking about religion.
Rizvi, 44, thinks the cultural left is wrong about Islam and the populist right is wrong about Muslims.
“On the left people say that if you have any criticism against Islam, then you were a bigot against all Muslims. On the right (people say) there are a lot of problematic things in Islamic scripture, so everyone who is Muslim must be banned, or profiled or demonized.”
We’re called upon to challenge ideas, Rizvi says, not to cancel out those who disagree.
Rizvi says the term “Islamophobia” was popularized by militant groups such as Hamas to equate bigotry against Muslims with “completely legitimate criticism of Islam” as a religion, in order to silence internal reformers. Rizvi appreciates how Christian doctrines have for centuries been openly debated in the West, and welcomes how the Internet is making it slightly less explosive to question traditional Islamic beliefs. He and his wife have been subject to death threats.
To some North Americans the voices of Rizvi, Yang, McWhorter, Smith and Salam might be surprising, shocking or even perceived as offensive. But unlike ideologues, they support dialogue about difficult ideas and don’t necessarily expect agreement.
They’re the kinds of non-doctrinaire voices that need to be heard these days. Taking thinkers like them seriously might stall the West’s increasing descent into exaggerated camps, in which true believers of all sorts practise mutual contempt for the other.
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