He does, however, provide readers with a solid grounding in the 500-year history of racial capitalism – the enduring significance of the genocide of Native Americans, the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism – as he works, convincingly, to reveal the “colonial logic and neocolonialism” still at play in the workings of contemporary global institutions such as the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO. As such, with his latest offering, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, which builds on that 2017 video and, notably, on the intellectual legacy of Cedric Robinson (author of 1983’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition), Andrews doesn’t thrill like he did before – this material feels more familiar by now. Black Panther(2018) had not yet overturned a century of racist dogma about what could and could not thrive at the commercial box office, and last summer’s actions by Black Lives Matter had not yet made the connection between police brutality in America and the legacies of Columbus, Colston and Leopold II a living-room discussion around the world.Ĭonversations around race and the deep roots of white supremacy have moved fast in certain circles in recent years, and in ways that would have been hard to imagine before Brexit or Trump.

Authors like Robin DiAngelo and Layla Saad had not yet put books bearing titles such as White Fragility (2018) and Me and White Supremacy (2020) on international bestseller lists. The strength of its polemic, presented within the context of Britain’s mainstream media, was thrilling.

European enlightenment, he argued, was from the outset a racist endeavour. I n the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University and author of Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century(2018), made a video for the Guardian arguing that the west “was built on racism” – that the US was created “in the founding fathers’ image of white supremacy” and Britain’s wealth accumulated through centuries of African enslavement.

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