Strange Fruit

The debate about race is back—and with a vengeance. Huge in its reach and powerful in its grasp, Strange Fruit uproots the conventional ways of thinking about race, science, and identity, and reveals why challenging the politics of difference has become as important as challenging racism. Kenan Malik shows that race is not a biological reality – but also why it is so useful in scientific and medical research. Controversially, he claims that it is not through scientific research into human differences but through our obsession with identity and diversity that dangerous ideas about race are once more catching fire. Blaming the preservation of racial ideas on the liberal antiracist movement with its emphasis on human difference over human commonalities, Malik shows how antiracists have, in recent years, become increasingly hostile to both scientific ideas and freedom of thought. Deftly blending politics, history, science, and philosophy, Malik explores the science of skull measurement and the politics of the Holocaust; diabetes rates among Hispanics and the fate of the Elgin Marbles; the genetics of altruism and the struggle for Aboriginal rights; the successes of the Human Genome Project and the failures of multiculturalism. Confronting issues such as the link between race and intelligence, the promotion of race-specific drugs, the fashion for genealogy, and why scientific research into controversial areas should not be constrained, Malik proves beyond a doubt that the debate about race is back - and shows us how to deal with it.