There’s nothing a white person can do about racism, says Dr Kehinde Andrews

After the death of George Floyd last year, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests around the world, racism is one of the hot-button issues of our time. And, according to Kehinde Andrews’s new book, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, it is embedded deeply in the West:

A central thesis of this book is that White supremacy, and therefore anti-Blackness, is the fundamental basis of the political and economic system and therefore infects all interactions, institutions and ideas.

Andrews maintains this uncompromising tone throughout.

The book is partly a historical account of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism; it is also an examination of how contemporary institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank have damaged the finances of African and Global South countries. The West is rich because the rest is poor. Before Columbus and the age of empire, Andrews argues, Europe was ‘in a dark age, dominated by religious dogma and feudal suppression’. Subsequent to this, it stole resources from the cultures it conquered in the New World. The Enlightenment was not genuinely animated by the principle of human equality. It was white identity politics; it provided intellectual justification for enslaving Africans and committing genocide against indigenous Americans. Now we are in a new age of empire: modern-day trade agreements between the West and the nations of the Global South are merely extensions of an older ‘colonial logic’.

Strikingly, Andrews is critical of China’s role in Africa. Moreover, he doesn’t think the West invented racism; he attributes that to the 14th-century North African philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Nevertheless, it is the West that truly catches his ire.

For all his condemnation of the Enlightenment, however, Andrews is clearly committed to one of its core values: moral universalism.