Strange Fruit

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Debates about race are back and they're only getting bigger. The US government has licensed a heart drug to be used only on African Americans. A pharmaceutical company is trialling a white-only anti-hepatitis drug. A genetic study claims that Jews are more intelligent because of their history of money lending.

There has recently been a massive upsurge in scientific racial research, and in STRANGE FRUIT, Malik reveals this rise is paradoxically due to the efforts of liberal anti-racism; a movement that celebrates human difference over human commonalities.

Navigating readers through the historical and scientific thinking on the subject, Malik shows that races are a social construct - they do not actually exist. Stressing that scientists should be allowed to study population differences without the distortions of political race debates, Malik provides a gripping and essential guide to understanding difference in a multicultural world.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Starred Review. In 1996, a 9,000-year-old skull was excavated near Kennewick, Wash., and quickly became the focus of a charged debate between scientists and Native American groups who battled over the race of the skeleton and which group could claim ownership. The controversy over race, biology and genealogy is an ideal touchstone for this smart and sensible book that brilliantly encapsulates the incident, asking: Who owns knowledge? and why antiracism has come to be defined in opposition to scientific rationality. While race is increasingly regarded as a social construct, not biological reality, Malik (Man, Beast and Zombie) demonstrates how the contemporary obsession with identity has propelled a dangerous--and liberal--tendency to romanticize race. Commonalities are being downplayed, according to the author, as individuals are seeking answers in terms of history and heritage. Malik's argument will likely stimulate further controversy--he wrestles with Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies, political correctness, identity politics and racism, not to mention the repatriation of cultural artifacts. A neat summary of the history of thinking behind race, the book projects not a milquetoast middle ground but rational approaches for moving forward in a racialized world. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

British social critic Malik (Univ. of Surrey) navigates between the iron-headedness of racial essentialism and the cotton-headedness of cultural essentialism. On the one side lies a small group of right-wing racists and some geneticists, and on the other lies a larger group of left-wing multiculturalists and some geneticists. The geneticists effectively cancel each other out, and Malik gives a very valuable exposition of the history and construction of race and its fundamental unnaturalness. What we are left with, he argues, is opposite political poles making similar errors, with the Left reifying cultural difference as the Right reifies racial difference. He draws on examples from the US and the UK, and on diverse research and recent history. Ultimately, he makes a plea for multilateral rationalism; but that still leaves the wildly unequal credibility of scientific claims about race in the modern world, with only minimal guidance for distinguishing among them. Nevertheless, this is certainly one of the most thoughtful recent discussions of the subject, both erudite and accessible. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. J. Marks University of North Carolina at Charlotte