THE NEW AGE OF EMPIRE

HOW RACISM AND COLONIALISM STILL RULE THE WORLD

KEHINDE ANDREWS

Allen Lane, 288pp, £20

The West was built on ‘a hierarchy of White supremacy’ and the Enlightenment and scientific theory were both intended to reinforce this White supremacy. Not only that, argues Andrews, but the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF are all racist institutions. His solution? To unite ‘Africa and the African diaspora’ to ‘create a true revolution’.

Mixed-race commentator Calvin Robinson, reviewing the book for the

Daily Mail, described it as ‘a fantastical journey through a parallel universe; or at least that’s what it reads like, for Andrews, who is Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, not only sees the world through a lens of racism, but outwardly looks for it in everything.’ Robinson found Andrews’s ‘underlying Marxism... unpalatable, especially when he rallies against the “growing middle class in the underdeveloped world who have some of the same opportunities as those in the West to spend money buying unneeded commodities”. The gall of these people, making better lives for themselves and buying things, how very dare they? They ought to know their place, otherwise people like Andrews will have no more victims to write about.’

As another mixed-race commentator, the New Statesman’s political editor Stephen Bush, noted, ‘it’s never made precisely clear... what the vision for people like me is in this united diaspora: do we get to return to Africa, or not? Is there a place for my white partner in the pan-african promised land? Do I ever get to see my mother and grandmother again?’