White Thinking – Lilian Thuram: A Sermon Masquerading as Scholarship

 

Lilian Thuram, the footballer-turned-moralist, has written a book with all the subtlety of a referee’s whistle and all the depth of a half-time pep talk. White Thinking sets out to dismantle what he sees as the hidden architecture of Western racism, but instead of analysis we are subjected to a sermon: loud, repetitive, and utterly convinced of its own moral superiority.

Thuram’s central thesis – that “whiteness” is not just a skin colour but a system of oppression, internalised and invisible to its beneficiaries – is hardly original. It is lifted wholesale from the boilerplate of French critical race theory and repackaged in the style of a celebrity memoir. His chapters recycle the catechism of grievance politics: privilege, systemic power, invisible structures, unconscious bias. The book is less a work of inquiry than a confessional tract in which history is plundered for villains and contemporary society is reduced to a crude binary: the guilty white and the victimised other.

The problem is not merely the unoriginality; it is the dishonesty. Thuram claims to “unveil” truths long buried, but what he really does is bury complexity beneath dogma. The great currents of history – colonial expansion, slavery, industrialisation, nationalism – are flattened into one explanatory key: whiteness. The poor white labourer? Whiteness. The Irish migrant starved out of his land? Whiteness. A modern teenager working zero-hours contracts in Marseille or Manchester? Still whiteness. This is not analysis but theology.

Thuram’s background as a footballer is meant to lend him authority: he has seen racism firsthand, and therefore speaks with moral force. But lived experience, however real, is not the same as rigorous argument. Instead of engaging with inconvenient facts – such as the demonstrable advances in legal equality, social mobility, or the rise of mixed and multicultural societies – Thuram insists on painting the West as locked in an eternal racial original sin, one that can never truly be absolved. It is not history he wants, but perpetual confession.

The book’s greatest flaw is its lack of generosity. There is no attempt to persuade, only to accuse. Anyone who doubts the framework is already guilty of “white thinking.” It is a closed circle, an ideological trap: if you agree, you confirm the thesis; if you disagree, you embody it. It is not just bad reasoning; it is anti-reason.

What makes this especially galling is that Thuram, once celebrated for his achievements on the pitch, has allowed himself to become a cheerleader for an imported intellectual fad. The richness of French republican ideals – liberty, equality, fraternity – is abandoned for the imported jargon of American campus radicalism. He thinks he is dismantling prejudice; in fact, he is reinforcing division, turning society into a permanent theatre of grievance where identity trumps solidarity and resentment trumps citizenship.

White Thinking is not a book that liberates; it is a book that shackles. It chains people to their assigned roles in the racial drama – victim and oppressor – and leaves no room for exit. It is the literature of a dead end, where history is a court and all of us are trapped in the dock.

One finishes it not enlightened but exhausted, longing not for another lecture on “invisible systems” but for a vision of common humanity. In the end, Thuram offers only one thing: division in the guise of virtue.