Readers of this newspaper will understand one of the reasons why Kenan Malik wrote this book. He begins with an account of the extraordinary interview given last year to The Sunday Times Magazine by James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. Professor Watson declared that he was gloomy about Africa because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says, ‘Not really’ ”. The Nobel prizewinner added that we shouldn’t expect everyone to be equal because “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not so”.

As a result of these remarks, Watson had to abandon the British lecture that the interview was designed to promote — London’s Science Museum cancelled it — and he was forced to retire from the chancellorship of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

According to Malik, this furore “shows all that is wrong with the current debate about race”. On the one hand, there is no evidence that “black people” have a genetic intelligence deficit; but on the other hand, “Watson’s critics appeared to be indifferent to the spirit of free enquiry”. Ho-hum. If that is Malik’s encapsulation of the “race debate”, then we are on very stale territory indeed.

Fortunately, however, he escapes from this retread to develop a more interesting version of the debate — between those who say we should all be judged indiscriminately as equals, and those who believe that ethnicity within western society should be treated as something discrete and special, with members of minority races being judged by different standards, according to their “culture”.

As Malik observes, the latter view — sometimes called “multiculturalism” — is now associated entirely with the left, even though the notion of separate racial cultures and separate legal frameworks is something we would have associated in the past with the far right — notably apartheid South Africa.

Such a parallel will scandalise the supporters of the multicultural ideal but Malik has a point, to this extent at least: the consequences of drawing these “cultural” distinctions can be vicious. There was the case (oddly, not mentioned in this book) of Victoria Climbié, whose torture at the hands of her great-aunt was ignored by

London social workers transfixed by the notion that the “African” culture of child-rearing involved a distinctive strictness, with which it would be “racist” to interfere.

The British experience is obviously not unique. Malik dredges up some foul examples from across what one might once have been allowed to describe as “the civilised world”: in 2002, a 50-year-old Aboriginal man was given a 24-hour prison sentence for raping a 15-year-old girl. According to the (white) Australian judge, because the girl was an Aborigine, she “knew what was expected of her. It’s very surprising to me that he was charged at all”.

The prevailing official attitude in cases such as these suggests not just an underlying racism masquerading as cultural sensitivity, but also a deep lack of confidence in the values — sometimes called Judeo-Christian — on which western society is supposedly based. It represents a failure of cultural nerve on a colossal scale.

Strangely, Malik does not attempt a thorough explanation of what has caused this collapse of confidence. There is the odd reference to the loss of faith in western civilisation stemming from the first world war — and that’s it.

It is especially strange that Malik — who was born in India — does not examine in any detail the phenomenon of post-colonial guilt, which surely lies behind this disfiguration of the middle-class social conscience. The view has taken hold that because, in the 19th century, we settled in their countries and behaved as if we were still in our English villages, ignoring local sensibilities and rituals, so the descendants of those whom we once ruled should be able to lead their lives in England exactly as they would have in rural Pakistan.

Thus, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as well-meaning a character as you will find, advocates official recognition of sharia law as a way of making Muslim immigrants feel more at home in the United Kingdom. On a more sinister note, you have the West Midlands police menacing Channel 4 for broadcasting a programme that revealed the violent nature of what passes for theology in some of our mosques. If a Church of England vicar had said that homosexuals should be thrown off cliffs, his critics would not be told that to publicise his sermons was an unforgivable risk to “community relations”; but “anti-racism”, as it has evolved, makes exactly this racist distinction.

As usual, however, it is to America that we must turn for the big story about race and politics. I refer to Barack Obama’s little local difficulties with his former pastor, and former close friend, Jeremiah Wright. As recently as April, Wright expanded in a lecture on what he claimed to be a fundamental difference between white Americans and black Americans. White children are “left-brained, logical and analytical”; African-American children, insisted Wright, are “right-brained, creative and intuitive”. Unlike the remarks of the wretched Watson, however, this did not cause Wright to forfeit any future public-speaking events — which is bad luck for Obama, who, more than any man alive, must wish that the “race debate” was over.

Race is not a biological concept, writes Kenan Malik, but a social one. In 1861, when the picture on the left was published in a German textbook, it was widely accepted that races were real entities and that different races were unequal. Nowadays, geneticists say there’s little scientific evidence to support theories of race difference. We can all tell a Nigerian from a Japanese, but the broad categories of race aren’t much help in studying genetic variation.

To make things harder still, it’s impossible to find a definition of the word which is both useful and universally acceptable. One brave recent attempt was this: “A race is an extended family that is inbred to some degree.” Nice try — although since both the British royal family and the entire human population would be considered “races” under its terms, the search goes on.

Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik

Oneworld £18.99 pp288

Buy from BooksFirst for £17.09 with free delivery in the UK

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