Pankaj Mishra: "Everyone who doesn’t agree with him is furious" (©Windham-Campbell Literature Prize)


What is a racist? Like many people, I had thought it was someone who believed a particular race (generally their own) to be innately superior to all (or some) others. But since almost everyone has now designated the new American President to be a racist, I am left wondering.

The central justification for labelling Donald Trump “a racist” is something he said on the campaign trail. In one typically free-wheeling speech he claimed that Mexico was not sending its “best” people to America: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re [their?] rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” It is hard to transcribe Trump speeches accurately. But I think it would require an especially hostile attitude towards the speaker to ignore the fact that they are evidently meant to contain an element of humour and do not assert that all Mexicans are rapists.

Nevertheless, this has become the main evidence for the prosecution. And if few people want to investigate the validity of the charge it is because so many people benefit from making it. Recently, this advantage has been pressed by almost every famous actor and actress and by the Speaker of the House of Commons. But does nobody care about the currency devaluation they are engaging in?  Were someone to come along — in America or elsewhere — who actually held the racial views of Joseph Goebbels or Eugene Terreblanche, how might anyone signal this fact, the word having been used up on Donald Trump?

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Language devaluation aside, I must admit that I am slightly enjoying this new era. BBC Radio 3 invited me on to a discussion with, among others, Pankaj Mishra, who was publicising his new book The Age of Anger.  Though I say so myself, throughout the whole discussion the only person who didn’t seem remotely angry was me. By contrast, it was evident that Mishra himself is a very angry man: indeed, I would say, a sort of zealot. So it caused me some amusement that he should have written a book which — in an effort to deride all views he does not share — insists that everyone who doesn’t agree with him is furious. Even off-air, Mishra continued his ranting, insisting, for example, that there is now a “serial groper” in the White House. Even were this true, it would seem to me to be an improvement (so far, at least) on the behaviour of the last President to be accused of sexual impropriety, suggesting that there are specific, as well as general, improvements going on at present.