Inaya Folarin Iman

In this episode, Inaya Folarin Iman, Founder and Director of The Equiano Project, examines the rise of identitarian politics and the narrowing of public discourse. She argues that dissent from prevailing orthodoxies on race, gender and lockdown is routinely caricatured as right-wing, reflecting a shallow culture in which people are reduced to fragments rather than engaged as multi-dimensional beings. Folarin Iman contends that contemporary left identitarianism has become conservative in its insistence on reifying and institutionalising race, while a more radical position would seek the transcendence of racial categories altogether. She draws parallels between current rituals of apology, guilt and “doing the work” and religious practices stripped of the possibility of genuine salvation, and criticises the rehabilitation of essentialist ideas about race and sex under the banner of progress. Highlighting the mismatch between American racial frameworks and British historical experience, she calls for a renewed universalism grounded in human dignity, agency and free speech. Through the Equiano Project, named after the eighteenth-century abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, she promotes an alternative to sectarian and intersectional narratives that degrade individual capacity and fragment society into competing racialised groups.