On June 5, 2019, in the university aula in Bergen, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway handed the Holberg Prize to a Black Englishman whose life’s work argues that the slave ship sits at the center of the modern world. The prize carries six million Norwegian kroner, about 530,000 pounds. At the banquet that evening, Sir David Cannadine, president of the British Academy, rose to honor him before an audience of Norwegian officials and international scholars. The scene held a symmetry the laureate had spent forty years teaching people to see. A northern European state, rich on oil and shipping, gathered in formal dress to reward a man who reads the Atlantic as a graveyard and an archive, and who insists that Europe cannot understand itself until it counts what its ships carried.
Paul Gilroy (b. 1956) stands among the central theorists of race, nation, diaspora, and modernity in the English-speaking world. His reputation rests on two books. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987) told Britain that racism lived in the mainstream of national feeling, not on its fringe. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) moved the study of Black culture off the land and onto the ocean, and changed how scholars across a dozen fields think about slavery, music, migration, and the making of the modern West. The Holberg committee cited his contributions to cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology, and African American studies. His subject has never been race in the narrow American sense. It is the machinery that made race plausible: empire, nationalism, colonial violence, policing, memory, and the fantasy that nations are natural families rather than historical accidents.
He was born on February 16, 1956, in the East End of London. His parents met in the library of University College London. His mother, Beryl Gilroy (1924-2001), had sailed from British Guiana in the early 1950s, part of the Windrush generation, carrying a first-class teaching diploma from Georgetown that British schools refused to honor. She worked in a mail-order factory, washed dishes in a cafe, and served as a lady’s maid to an aristocrat who loved the Empire, before anyone would let her teach. In 1969 she became headteacher of Beckford Primary School in West Hampstead, among the first Black headteachers in Britain. Her memoir Black Teacher (1976) became a founding text of Black British educational life. She wrote that a Black immigrant teacher had to be twice as good as everyone else, and she lived by the arithmetic. His father, Patrick Gilroy, was a White English scientist. He died suddenly on October 5, 1975, when Paul was nineteen. Beryl raised her grief into a second career as a pioneering psychotherapist working with Black women and children.
The household explains much. Gilroy grew up inside Britain’s postwar racial order and inside a family that refuted it daily. Books lined the rooms. Caribbean migration, anticolonial politics, and the intimacy of a mixed marriage in a country still governed by imperial habits shaped his boyhood in north London. So did the graffiti. Decades later he told an interviewer about the racist scrawl he could not escape as a child, the crosses and slogans on the walls of the city that claimed not to see color.
He studied at the University of Sussex, then entered the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham for doctoral work under Stuart Hall (1932-2014) and Richard Johnson. The timing mattered as much as the training. In January 1978, Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), then leader of the opposition, went on television and said British people feared being swamped by people with a different culture. The National Front marched under the Union Jack through immigrant neighborhoods. Police stopped and searched young Black men under the old sus laws. In the Birmingham seminar rooms, Hall’s students treated Thatcherism, policing, reggae, television, and popular racism as parts of a single social field. The method was interdisciplinary because the object demanded it. Culture was where power got made.
The first collective result was The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982), produced with fellow students including Hazel Carby, Valerie Amos, and Pratibha Parmar. The book examined how postimperial Britain remade race through immigration politics, law-and-order campaigns, and the theater of national decline. Gilroy’s contribution insisted that racism could not be studied as an isolated prejudice. It ran through nationalism, capitalism, state power, and the afterlife of empire.
Gilroy’s education continued outside the seminar. He worked for the Greater London Council in the 1980s, the Labour-run county government that Thatcher would abolish in 1986, in part because of its anti-racist and cultural spending. He wrote for City Limits, where he served as contributing editor from 1982 to 1984, and later held a column in The Wire from 1988 to 1991. He wrote for New Musical Express and New Statesman and Society. He knew the sound systems, the pirate frequencies, the record shops, the dub plates. This formation became method. Gilroy never treated music as ornament. Reggae, soul, jazz, and hip-hop became archives of political intelligence. They carried memory where official institutions erased it. They showed culture moving through ports, plantations, studios, and clubs. In his work, music is counter-history.
There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack made him a major figure at thirty-one. The title came from a far-right street chant. The book attacked a comforting British myth: that racism was an import, a fringe habit, or a working-class pathology. Gilroy argued that racism was woven into ordinary national consciousness. Britishness had been built through empire, and therefore through assumptions about civilization, whiteness, hierarchy, and belonging. He criticized both political camps. The right treated immigrants and their children as permanent aliens. The left reduced race to class or cast Black Britons as passive victims. Gilroy insisted that Black British culture generated politics and thought in its own right. The book refused the polite settlement of liberal multiculturalism. Gilroy was not asking Britain to include Black citizens as colorful additions to the national family. He asked whether the national family had been imagined through exclusion from the start.
His masterpiece followed six years later. The Black Atlantic shifted the frame from nation to ocean. The phrase names a transnational world created by slavery, migration, commerce, exile, rebellion, and memory, a world linking Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, Europe, and the Americas without reducing Black culture to any single homeland. The image at the book’s heart is the ship in motion between continents, at once the instrument of the slave trade and the vehicle of Black cosmopolitan life. The deeper claim is larger still. Slavery was not marginal to modernity. It was constitutive. The modern world produced liberty, rights, reason, and democracy, and it produced the slave ship, the plantation, racial terror, and the categories used to rank human beings, and it produced them together.
Gilroy’s decisive move was to read Black writers and musicians as theorists of modernity rather than witnesses standing outside it. Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Richard Wright (1908-1960), and Toni Morrison (1931-2019) become thinkers of freedom, terror, doubleness, and survival. Du Bois’s double consciousness expands in Gilroy’s hands beyond an African American concept into a way of understanding everyone formed by both the promises and the betrayals of the West. Black Atlantic subjects stand inside and outside Western civilization at once. They speak its languages, fight in its wars, sing its hymns, and invoke its universal ideals, and they know those ideals were built alongside racial domination. This gives their art a double force. It exposes the West to itself.
The book also turned its critique on America. African American cultural studies, in Gilroy’s view, could treat the United States as the master template for modern Black life. He rejected that provincialism and traced a more unstable circuit in which sounds and political languages moved back and forth across borders. Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970), who found his creative freedom after moving from America to London, served as a favorite example. Black Atlantic culture does not radiate from a center. It is made in transit.
Gilroy taught at South Bank, Essex, and Goldsmiths through these years. Then, in 1999, he left for Yale. The departure belonged to a wider exodus of non-White British academics seeking institutions that would promote them. From New Haven he watched Britain conduct one of its periodic seances over national identity. In 2000, the Runnymede Trust published the Parekh report on the future of multiethnic Britain, a measured document that observed that Britishness carried unspoken racial connotations. The Daily Telegraph put on its front page the claim that the report called British a racist word, and the tabloids joined the pile-on. The offending sentence carried a footnote. The footnote led to Gilroy. He had become the ghost in Britain’s argument with itself, cited in its official self-examinations and blamed for their conclusions, from an office three thousand miles away. In 2002 he became chair of Yale’s new Department of African American Studies.
The same year the Parekh storm broke, Gilroy published Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (2000), issued in America as Against Race. The book moved from the analysis of racism to the critique of race, and it remains his most misunderstood argument. Gilroy does not deny racism. He denies that race is a truth about human beings. Race is a fiction with real power. It kills, sorts, humiliates, and seduces. Because it is a destructive fiction, anti-racism should not preserve it as a sacred identity. He asked his readers to imagine giving it up. The book drew on Du Bois, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), and Primo Levi (1919-1987), and it proposed what Gilroy called a planetary humanism, a universalism rebuilt after catastrophe rather than a colorblind evasion of it. The position irritated nationalists, who need the nation pure, and some identitarians, who need race permanent. Gilroy has held it for a quarter century.
He returned to Britain and to British questions with After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004), published in America as Postcolonial Melancholia (2005). The diagnosis: Britain never mourned the end of its empire. Unable to work through the loss, it converted loss into resentment, nostalgia, migration panic, and dreams of restored greatness. Written from his post as the first Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory at the London School of Economics, the book read like prophecy after June 2016. Commentators reached for postcolonial melancholia to explain Brexit more than a decade after Gilroy coined it. The book’s counterweight was conviviality, his name for the improvised, mixed life of cities, where people share streets, buses, slang, food, humor, and grief across inherited lines without turning every encounter into doctrine. Conviviality is not utopia and not a diversity advertisement. It is fragile and real, and Gilroy finds more political hope in it than in official multiculturalism.
Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010) extended the musical argument, its title a nod to Curtis Mayfield (1942-1999). Black Atlantic music, for Gilroy, carries moral argument: a record of suffering, aspiration, critique, and world-making. This is one reason artists, filmmakers, and curators cite him as often as academics do. The Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah (b. 1957) belong to the same cultural formation, one that treats the imperial past as lodged in ports, monuments, museums, and the ordinary layout of the metropolis.
He moved to King’s College London in September 2012 as Professor of American and English Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2014 and an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. Then came Bergen. In his Holberg lecture, titled “Never Again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human,” he surveyed a Europe where ultra-nationalism and neo-fascism were corroding political culture, and he restated his answer: refuse race, salvage the human. He told the prize committee that his research responded to a deficit of imagination about who counts as human.
Two months after Bergen, in August 2019, he joined University College London as Professor of the Humanities and founding director of a new center for the study of racism and racialization. In 2020 the center took the name of Sarah Parker Remond (1826-1894), the free-born American abolitionist who became the first woman to lecture against slavery in Britain and who studied at UCL before practicing medicine in Italy. The choice compressed Gilroy’s entire project into a name: a Black Atlantic life, moving between continents, joining the fight against slavery to the pursuit of science. He directed the center from 2019 to 2024, building it through a pandemic into an international reference point, and now holds the title of Emeritus Professor of Humanities. The honorary doctorates accumulated: Goldsmiths, Liege, Sussex, Copenhagen, Oxford in 2023, St Andrews in December 2024. A Media Education Foundation documentary on The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness appeared in 2024, and in 2026 he lectured in Oslo under the title “Transformed in Transit,” pressing his old arguments toward new emergencies: migration crisis, ecological danger, the hardening of borders.
The honors sit oddly on him. When the Guardian profiled him in 2021 under the headline “The last humanist,” friends expressed surprise that he had agreed to the profile at all. He deflected personal questions and winced at his old quotes. The profile caught him the day after his inaugural UCL lecture, delivered by videolink, in which he dissected the Johnson government’s Sewell report on race, a document he read as an official invitation to dismiss anger at racism as chippiness. The culture wars, he noted, had been running his entire life. In the 1980s the press accused Labour councils of destroying free speech with anti-racism. The script had not changed. Only the fonts had.
His importance lies in making the study of race bigger. He moved the field past moral accusation toward a grand account of modernity. Racial thinking is not a local prejudice added to modern life. It is one of modernity’s organizing codes. Black culture is not a minority supplement to Western civilization. It is one of the places where Western civilization has been most powerfully understood, judged, and reimagined. His work resists ownership. Nationalists cannot use him because he dismantles the purity of the nation. Racial essentialists cannot use him because he dismantles the purity of race. Liberal multiculturalists cannot use him because he sees through symbolic inclusion. Academic radicals cannot domesticate him because his humanism refuses despair.
His career reads as one long argument against enclosure. Against the enclosed nation, the Atlantic. Against enclosed racial identity, diaspora. Against imperial nostalgia, the hard work of mourning. Against corporate diversity, conviviality. Against the metaphysics of race, a humanism that has passed through the fire and still wants the word human to mean something.
The Guardian profile ended with a scene from Finsbury Park, near the north London home Gilroy shares with his wife, the writer and academic Vron Ware. On his early-morning walks he had begun finding Celtic crosses, a White supremacist symbol, cut into the logs and tree stumps overnight. The council had an app for reporting vandalism. He did not bother with it. “I’ve been rolling over the logs so it doesn’t show,” he said. The man who received a crown prince’s prize for mapping four centuries of racial terror across an ocean walks a city park at dawn, turning wood with his hands so the children who play there will not see the sign. The graffiti of his childhood found him again in his sixties. He answered it the way he has answered it all along, without permission, without ceremony, and without much hope that anyone would notice.
Notes
Ceremony and prize details, including June 5, 2019, Crown Prince Haakon, NOK 6 million, and David Cannadine‘s banquet speech, come from the Royal House of Norway, the British Academy, and King’s College London.
The Holberg lecture title and content, and the “deficit of imagination” interview remark, which I paraphrased, come from the Holberg Prize lecture page and the Holberg Prize interview with Paul Gilroy.
The Guardian profile by Yohann Koshy, August 5, 2021, is the source for the Finsbury Park scene and log quote, the childhood graffiti, the Parekh report episode, the 1999 Yale departure and academic exodus, the Sewell report inaugural lecture, and his reluctance about the profile. See the original Guardian profile and the UCL mirror.
Beryl Gilroy details, including her arrival, factory and maid work, Beckford Primary in 1969, the twice-as-good line, Patrick Gilroy‘s death on October 5, 1975, the meeting at the UCL library, and homeschooling, come from the Camden People’s Museum profile and Wikipedia.
The UCL appointment in August 2019, the founding directorship of the Remond Centre from 2019 to 2024, and emeritus status come from the UCL profile of Paul Gilroy.
The Remond Centre renaming in 2020 and Sarah Parker Remond‘s biography come from UCL’s announcement.
Career chronology, including the GLC, City Limits from 1982 to 1984, The Wire from 1988 to 1991, NME, South Bank, Essex, Goldsmiths, Yale chair in 2002, King’s in September 2012, FBA in 2014, American Academy in 2018, wife Vron Ware, and north London, comes from Wikipedia and the British Academy.
Extrapolations I made without a link, all of which I judged self-evident or standard history: the Thatcher swamping interview, from World in Action, January 1978, which is easy to source through the Margaret Thatcher Foundation transcript if you want the exact wording; National Front marches and sus-law policing as the ambient conditions of late-seventies Britain; the GLC’s abolition in 1986 and Thatcher’s reasons; the general texture of sound-system culture; and the Telegraph front page on the Parekh report, which the Guardian profile confirms in detail.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, it shatters Gilroy’s anti-essentialist optimism and renders his planetary humanism a biological impossibility.
Gilroy’s foundational contribution is the idea that culture is hybrid, changing, and transnational. He uses the image of the slave ship moving between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean to show that Black identity is a product of ongoing mixture and displacement, rather than a fixed, pristine origin. He opposes any politics that attempts to lock people into rigid, ethnic categories.
Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that while cultural artifacts (like music or fashion) can travel and mix along Gilroy’s routes, the psychological alignment of the human animal remains fiercely tied to roots. Mearsheimer notes that individuals are born into social groups that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism or choose their allegiances. By the time critical faculties develop, an enormous value infusion has already occurred. Human beings require the psychological security of a concrete, bounded tribe to survive. While Gilroy celebrates the fluid, borderless hybridity of the Black Atlantic, Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains why actual human communities consistently reject fluidity, choosing instead to enforce strict, defensive group boundaries to maintain cohesion.
In Against Race, Gilroy looks toward a future that moves entirely beyond the concept of race, calling for a “planetary humanism.” He argues that because race is an unscientific, politically dangerous construct, humanity must abandon racial thinking altogether to face global crises like climate change and fascism. If Mearsheimer is right, this universalist hope is the ultimate liberal delusion. Mearsheimer explicitly states that liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings by treating them as atomistic actors, mistakenly believing that a universal concern for rights can unite everyone on the planet. If humans are tribal at their core, they cannot scale their empathy or loyalty to a planetary level. Man is hardwired to divide the world into an inside group (the tribe) and an outside group (the competitor). If the political category of race were somehow erased, the human animal would not achieve universal brotherhood; it would simply invent new, equally fierce tribal categories based on religion, geography, or ideology to take its place.
Gilroy views racism and racial hierarchies as historical aberrations born out of modern colonial capitalism—systems that can be dismantled through political struggle, art, and intellectual critique. Mearsheimer’s anthropology provides a much darker, structural explanation for why the color line persists. The human tendency to protect the ingroup and view the outgroup with suspicion is an inborn attitude designed for group survival. When Gilroy documents the stubborn resistance of nation-states to genuine multiculturalism, or the rise of neo-fascist populist movements, Mearsheimer’s logic suggests these are not failures of education or capitalism. They are the predictable, defensive reactions of human tribes facing the dissolution of their social boundaries.
If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, Gilroy has written a beautiful, poetic account of how ideas and cultural expressions transcend borders. But his political project is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of the species. Man is not an adaptable, cosmopolitan actor capable of planetary solidarity; he is an organically tribal primate that will always choose the safety of a bounded collective over the expansive freedom of a borderless world.
To David Pinsof, Gilroy is an exemplary representative of the intellectual trapped in the misunderstanding myth. Gilroy diagnoses a massive, systemic error of consciousness: humanity has been tricked by the false, pseudoscientific category of race. In his framework, racial tracking and ethnic nationalism are irrational, outdated constructs that people cling to out of a warped sense of identity. He treats these divisions as a conceptual blunder that can be unmasked through cultural analysis and a commitment to universal humanism. If only people could abandon the myth of racial purity and recognize the fluid, interconnected nature of human history, society could move past its tribal fractures.
Pinsof offers a colder alternative. The individuals who participate in ethnic nationalism, organize around racial identity, or enforce group boundaries are not suffering from a conceptual mistake or a lack of historical awareness. They understand their immediate incentives.
From this perspective, the concept of race and the formation of ethnic coalitions are not just bad ideas that require deconstruction by a university professor. They serve as systems for zero-sum competition over status, resources, and the coercive apparatus of the state. Humans did not evolve to embrace a borderless, planetary humanism; they evolved to form alliances, protect their kin, and defend their coalitions against rivals. Partisans do not rally around racial and ethnic identities because they misunderstand biology. They do it because tracking group alignment is a savvy strategy for securing power and navigating high-stakes social hierarchies.
Gilroy frames his planetary humanism as an objective, liberating project designed to heal historical divisions and move humanity toward a post-racial future. Pinsof invites an examination of the actual motives behind this elite academic stance. Championing an uncompromising, sophisticated humanism from a prominent university chair is an excellent instrument for capturing status within the intellectual marketplace. It signals a level of moral and theoretical purity that ordinary people, occupied with the daily, material realities of group competition, cannot afford to prioritize. It allows the credentialed elite to view their rivals not as competitors with conflicting material interests, but as irrational actors stuck in primitive, essentialist delusions.
The friction between different social groups does not persist because people are confused by the text of racial ideology. It persists because human coalitions have fundamentally conflicting motives over wealth, dominance, and security. The only misunderstanding in planetary humanism is the belief that structural warfare between human groups can be dissolved by convincing them to rewrite their identities.
