However, The Black Album shows the most tolerance to Riaz's group—and invites the most readerly identification—when the group takes a stand to protect a local Bengali family threatened by racists, patrolling their estate and setting up camp in their cramped flat. Here, they are shown inheriting the kind of vigilante role once performed by those old-style antiracists celebrated by Kenan Malik, whose rhetoric was matched by action in defense of communities. This role reasserts the importance of race and racism even as the main thrust of the narrative records the end of recognizable class-based politics and its supercession by cultural identity claims.

XREF: Connects Kenan Malik's celebration of old-style antiracist action to the vigilante role in The Black Album, contrasting with cultural-identity politics.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 675