THE IDENTITARIANISM THAT BINDS lEFT AND rIGHT IS THE COMMON ENEMY (profanity and slur alert):

This rejection of race doesn't entail the denial of racism. Quite the opposite: race is a fiction with real effects - and Gilroy has spent much of his life pointing these out. But its constructed nature does mean that when we see a person's racial identity, what we're really seeing is a "virtual reality given meaning only by the fact that racism endures", as he has written. Subjugated people might find solace and community in their race, but the long-term consequence of anti-racist work should be to discard the idea of "race" altogether.

Gilroy spent the 90s weaving these ideas into his third major book, Between Camps - or as it was more provocatively titled in the US, Against Race - which came out when he was at Yale. The book develops a complex argument about the lingering afterlife of fascism in capitalist democracies, which is connected to a provocative critique of identity politics. Race, he argued, was becoming antiquated - and this was a good thing. "Action against racial hierarchies," he wrote, in what is perhaps his most quoted line, "can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of 'race'." Between Camps was also deeply critical of a regressive "conservatism" in corporate black American culture, which trafficked in a commodified blackness. (Among his targets were Spike Lee's decision to set up an advertising agency, and the nihilism of much contemporary hip-hop.)

Hazel Carby, who has been friends with Gilroy since their days at Birmingham, was head of Yale's African American studies department at the time. As a reporter wrote in 2001, she was hoping that Gilroy's arrival at Yale would help broaden "the field's purview beyond the borders of single nations and single-minded conceptions of race". It did, but he didn't endear himself. "The audience bristled at this limey's apostasies" is how the cultural critic Sukhdev Sandhu described one of Gilroy's public appearances during this time. Some American critics found Gilroy's arguments muddled, haughty or excessively broad. Others felt that he had overlooked the practical implications of rejecting race: would it mean the end of anti-discrimination laws, for instance? Prof Ruth Wilson Gilmore loved Between Camps, but it didn't go over well with all her students. "I found that [some of them] found it really nerve-racking and distasteful to think that race as a category should go away," she told me. "And that there was something wrong with somebody who thought that way."

When I asked him about his experiences in the US, Gilroy was hesitant. It was clear he was wounded by the period. "I don't want to make this into an argument with black Americans because I've been immensely affected by that history and culture, and it's educated me in ways that I'm really grateful for," he said. Much of his work, particularly his early books, had resonated there too. Saidya Hartman, a celebrated professor at Columbia University, told me about the formative impact of The Black Atlantic on her work. "At that moment, in US scholarship, the emphasis was still on minimising the role of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the making of capitalism," she said. "So to have the Black Atlantic argue so powerfully for its constitutive role in the making of modernity was really important."

But Gilroy admitted to me that he struggled with what he called the "parochial" elements in African American studies. Eventually, he said, he experienced such "unpleasantness at the hands of some African American intellectuals who objected to my expressing my opinions about them as an outsider" that he returned to the UK. For some thinkers in the US, this irritation persists. In his 2017 book Black and Blur, the theorist Fred Moten wrote a lengthy and unsparing footnote that took Gilroy to task: "Who are you to lecture blacks in the United States, whom you conceive in the most egregiously undifferentiated way, about their international dissident responsibilities, while speaking of 'We Britons' ... ?"

But as the dust has settled, younger people have made use of Between Camps. It "anticipated so many of the problems and questions that we are grappling with now," says the US writer Asad Haider, who cited Gilroy's work in Mistaken Identity, his 2018 book about the limits of narrow identity politics. Haider gives a first-hand account of a student politics campaign that broke down because groups devolved into bickering, racialised sub-groups. The key idea he takes from Gilroy is that "we have to go beyond the identity-based conception of politics to one of universal emancipation". ("Bringing the word identity together with the word politics," Gilroy once told me, "makes politics impossible, actually, for me, in any meaningful sense. Politics requires the abandonment of identity in a personal sense.")

Gilroy doesn't endorse a colour-blind politics that pretends the idea of race can be wished away. The post-racial world has to be fought for, against the odds. When Haider asked if Gilroy would provide a quote for his book, which he did, Gilroy sent him a favoured photograph of his, taken at the Manchester Pan-African Congress of 1945. The scene features placards with slogans like "Arabs and Jews united against British imperialism!" and "Labour with a white skin cannot emancipate itself while labour with a black skin is branded".

In recent years, the appeal of an academic current known as Afropessimism has brought home just how untimely Gilroy's ideas are. Its best-known proponent, Frank B Wilderson III, at the University of California, Irvine, contends that black people are viewed by all other people, including people of colour, consciously or not, as outside humanity. The result is that they are subject to a "gratuitous" violence that is unlike any other type of racism. To Wilderson, slavery is not a thing of the past - in fact, it has never really ended.

The rise of Afropessimism is a bleak sign for the likes of Gilroy, schooled on Stuart Hall's argument that race is made politically meaningful through the struggle against capitalism, which is itself not eternal. Gilroy sees Afropessimism as part of an "ontological turn" - ontology is the study of being - in which race becomes an unassailable barrier between the self and the world, and anti-black violence an immutable fact. "What's interesting to me is how resonant the Afropessimist outlook has proved to be," Gilroy said. "I can't help thinking that it's got something to do with the fact that it absolves you of having to do anything at all. That really what you have to do is just be black. And there's a sufficiency in that."

In sharp contrast, Gilroy wants to reinvigorate an old ideal: humanism. In some scholarly circles, calling oneself a humanist can sound not just antiquated, but suspect. It was, after all, the name of the woolly ideology of equality propagated by Europeans at the height of empire, who spoke of the liberty of man while denying it to millions. But to Gilroy, there is hope in the promise of a radical humanism, illuminating a post-racial world. This, he believes, is the humanism of figures who regularly appear in his work such as Du Bois, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison and the French-Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon. If thinkers who had lived through the 20th century's abominations could hold on to the idea of a humanism worthy of the name, then so can we.

Gilroy's prose can be difficult. His style is meditative, incantatory. He does not so much pursue a thesis in a linear fashion as solder ideas together into striking shapes. Writers, political figures and musicians are plucked from history and the present, placed in conversation with one another; a chapter might begin with two epigraphs, one from Walter Benjamin and the other from Michael Jackson. Sometimes the effect is frustrating, sometimes revelatory. A single poetic sentence might illuminate paragraphs of slow, swirling argument.

In 2019, after winning the Holberg prize, Gilroy travelled to Norway to give the laureate's lecture, which he titled Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human. It is perhaps the clearest and most succinct statement of his worldview to date. "If you want to be serious about the struggle against racial orders," he said, explaining his motivation behind the lecture, "you have to adapt your understanding of what it is to be a human being and why that is worth fighting over."

The central scene is taken from the 1789 autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, the former slave and abolitionist. Equiano describes how he took control of a floundering ship during a storm in which the white crew had "become inert, apparently indifferent to their own fate". With a few others, Equiano rescued the vessel, working so hard that the skin was flayed from his hands. Equiano's actions scrambled the ship's racial hierarchy. He was temporarily recognised as a kind of "chieftain" by the crew.

Gilroy's point is that disasters can create the conditions in which we are forced to look beyond race towards our common humanity. What does he hate so much about race? It's not just that it is a bogus concept, not just that it leaves behind it an endless trail of atrocities, but that, on a smaller scale, it tries to limit what a person can be, telling them that they are one thing or the other, rather than many things at once.

In the lecture, he offered this summary of his politics, which might be best imagined daubed on the walls of a future flooded city: "It is imperative to remain less interested in who or what we imagine ourselves to be than in what we can do for one another, both in today's emergency conditions and in the grimmer circumstances that surely await us."

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