2026-01-21
57 分钟This is The Guardian.
My name is Johan Koshy.
I'm a deputy opinion editor here at The Guardian and I am the author of The Last Humanist.
how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide to our age of crisis.
What drew me to this story was very simple, actually.
The editor of the Guardian Longread section, David Wolf, asked me if I wanted to profile Paul Gilroy.
I hadn't expressed an interest in doing so.
I don't think I'd even spoken to David about this idea or about Paul Gilroy before, but I had seen Gilroy speak once before at a vinyl bar in East London called Brilliant Corners where he was playing records and talking about each particular song and it became clear what an interesting subject he would be, not just because he has so much to say about race and racism and nationalism in Britain, but because he is also a very interesting presence.
visually and hourly.
As I mentioned, the PC has this amazing voice and he sounds like a kind of late night DJ.
And he also has a very interesting physical presence, which is always a nice bonus for someone profiling somebody because the reader wants to get a sense of what they're like physically as well, how they move through the world.
We spoke a couple of times over Zoom because this was 2020 and 2021 and it was the height of the pandemic but eventually we were able to meet up first in Finsbury Park and later in Hampstead Heath and after a while after I think he warmed to me somewhat and was a bit less suspicious of me than he was at the beginning of our interview process.
He suggested I go birdwatching with him on Hampstead Heath at the crack of dawn and I think that was when I finally knew that this was going to be quite a unique and worthwhile assignment.
This piece was published in the summer of 2021.
It was about a year after the Black Lives Matters uprisings in England.
It was a period of resurgent anti-racist politics with lots of people thinking about race and racism.
It was a somewhat different moment to today, so it was before the rise of reform.
It was before the return of Nigel Farage as the leader of Reform UK.
It was before the renewed far-right street movement, which has benefited so greatly from the scapegoating of asylum seekers, really took off.
And it was before this renewed attack on cities and multiculturalism that the right has been waging relentlessly, particularly on social media.