Multiracism E-Book

Alastair Bonnett

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 404

Beschreibung

Racism is a world problem. From Morocco to China, Brazil to Indonesia, racism is being debated and contested. Multiracism broadens the horizon on this global challenge, showing that racism has a diverse history with multiple roots and routes. Drawing on examples of racism from across the globe, with particular focus on cases from Asia and Africa, Alastair Bonnett rethinks the origins of racism and the connections between racism and modernity. Arguing that plural modernities are interwoven with plural racisms, he explores the relationship of racism to history, religion, politics, and nationalism, as well as to anti-Black prejudice and discourses of whiteness. Empirically rich, with numerous in-depth case studies, Multiracism equips readers to understand racism in a multipolar world where power is no longer the sole possession of the West. It provides and provokes a new, international, and post-Western vision of racism for the twenty-first century.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reframing Racisms

What is Racism?

Racism is Not Just Black and White

The Western Gaze

Organizing

Multiracism

Notes

1 Explaining Racisms Beyond the West: Roots and Routes

Explaining World Racisms

Racism as primordial

Racism as the Western disease

Interactionism: encounters and contexts

Why Racism is Modern

Pluralizing Modernities

Precursors and critics of plural modernities

Conclusions: Modern Sites of Racism

Further Reading

Notes

2 History and Nostalgia: Ruptures, Racism, and the Experience of Loss

Ruptures and Racisms

Uses of the Past: Nostalgia and Racism

Conclusions: Modern Trouble

Further Reading

Notes

3 Religion’s Furies: Racism in Fundamentalism, Casteism, and Islamophobia

Radical Islamism and Racism

Casteism and Racism

Anti-Muslim Politics and Racism in India and China

Anti-Muslim politics in India

Anti-Muslim racism in Xinjiang

Conclusion

Further Reading

Notes

4 Political Sites of Racist Modernity: Communism, Capitalism, and Nationalism

Communist Modernity and Racism in the USSR

Capitalist Modernity and Racism in Indonesia

Anti-Chinese racism and stereotypes of Chinese wealth

West Papua: Extractive capitalism in a neo-colonial settler state

Racist Nationalism

Racist nationalism in South Korea

All of the Above? The Intersection of Capitalism, Socialism, Nationalism, and Religion in Apartheid South Africa

Further Reading

Notes

5 Shifting Symbols: Whiteness in Japan and Blackness in Morocco

Globalizing Consumerism: Globalizing Whiteness

Whiteness in Japan

Anti-Black Racism in North Africa

Anti-Black racism in Morocco

Conclusion

Further Reading

Notes

Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to scholars at risk of persecution. For more information see Scholars at Risk Network, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org

Multiracism

Rethinking Racism in Global Context

Alastair Bonnett

polity

Copyright Page

Copyright © Alastair Bonnett 2022

The right of Alastair Bonnett to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2022 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Suite 300

Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3731-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3732-7(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939019

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ian Law and Anoop Nayak, to Jonathan Skerrett and Karina Jákupsdóttir at Polity, Tim Clark for copy editing, and to the many students who have taken my courses at Newcastle University, especially ‘Geographies of Race and Nation’ and ‘International Perspectives on Race and Racism’. Thanks also to Rachel Holland for the idea for the cover image. I have learnt much from all the above. Disclaimer: all the opinions in this book are my own.

Introduction: Reframing Racisms

This book argues that racism has a diverse history with multiple roots and routes. It draws on examples of racism from across Asia and Africa in order to interrogate the connection between plural racisms and plural modernities.

Ethnic and racial studies is dominated by studies of racism in the West. Many of these studies assume that racism is a uniquely Western, European, and White practice and ideology. This assumption reflects the experience of racism in Western countries. However, one of its consequences is to allow racism to be ignored, downplayed or denied completely across the majority of the world and, hence, to make the pursuit of equality more difficult. Thus, for example, China’s former ‘paramount leader’ Deng Xiaoping could be confident that ‘since New China was founded in 1949, there has never been any ethnic discrimination in the country’.1 It was a point later elaborated by Premier Zhao Ziyang when he explained that racism is common ‘everywhere in the world except China’.2 A related and officially endorsed position is that ‘foreign instigation’ is the cause of racism and ethnic tensions in China.3 Yet, racism is better characterized as widespread in China than as non-existent. Dikötter suggests that the denial of this fact is a ‘rhetorical strategy used to delay the introduction of clear definitions of racial discrimination into the country’s legal system’.4 A similar pattern of denial in the face of overwhelming evidence can be found in many countries. One can read both that racism is ‘rampant in India’ and that it does not exist in India, for ‘“racism” is thought of as something that white people do to us’.5 In some cases the existence of discrimination is denied by a refusal to acknowledge the existence of ethnic or racial differences. The Government of Pakistan’s position, as stated in their 1977 report to a UN Committee, is that, in Pakistan, ‘there are no racial or ethnic minorities but only religious minorities’.6 Since ethnic tensions are a central feature of Pakistani politics, this claim may appear bizarre. In part, it reflects the supra-ethnic role of Islam in the founding of the Pakistani state, but it also indicates a legacy of denial of inconvenient truths.7 This kind of denial is often laced with populist political agendas. The genocide of Armenians in Turkey in the early decades of the twentieth century has been met by successive Turkish governments with rabble-rousing counteraccusations of ‘Turkey-bashing’. When, in 2003, the Swiss Federal Assembly recognized the genocide of the Armenians, Doğu Perinçek, an influential left-nationalist Turkish politician, flew into Switzerland, along with a retinue of 160 academics and state officials, to give a series of speeches arguing that the Armenian genocide was ‘an international … [and] imperialist lie’ and connecting its dissemination to ‘racist hatred’ of his country.8 In other contexts, racism has been acknowledged but defined in such a restricted way as to diminish its significance. In Japan, for example, Takezawa argues that ‘the discourse around racism has been framed narrowly’ to address a particular set of troubling but limited issues such as ‘discrimination against foreigners’, thus allowing a widespread belief in Japanese racial purity to go unchallenged.9

The identification of racism as being a uniquely Western project and, hence, as having a single geographical and political source, is explicable by reference to the world-changing power of Western colonialism, as well as to the conceptual elaboration and global enactment of European supremacy from the seventeenth century onwards. Although my focus is on Asia and Africa, this book shows how, globally and in many specific contexts, racism emanating from Western nations and empires caused and created the expression and practice of racism elsewhere. Moreover, although different racisms can be compared, in terms of their impact they are not equivalent. Western racism has mattered because the West has been more powerful than other places. Yet power shifts and so does the power of different racisms. To explain what I mean we can return to the example of China. In the early twentieth century what might be termed a ‘racialized Chinese modernity’ can be identified (albeit problematically, for China did not have a unique, discrete or homogeneous form of racism or modernity any more than the West), but its power to influence societies far beyond China’s borders was small. China was poor and disunited. Today China is a superpower. China’s ‘belt and road’ infrastructure-led trade initiative, which is building roads, ports, and much else besides across Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, is impacting the lives of the majority of the world’s population.10 The past forty years have witnessed a major shift away from Western dominance and the Washington–Moscow axis of political rivalry, and towards a polycentric distribution of global influence. Moreover, the majority of the world’s population now live in middle- or high-income countries.11 The dawn of an ‘Asian century’ is convincingly evidenced by a comparison of the vigorous economic growth seen in East, South East, and South Asia with the minimal growth rates typical of many major Western countries. I doubt that many people, flying from the spectacular new skylines of urban China to, for example, my home town – the rather battered, post-industrial city of Newcastle in the North East of England – would conclude they have journeyed from the ‘Third World’ to the ‘First World’. It would be better framed as a journey from a newly risen to a residual part of the world economy. Power has shifted and the familiar model of a ‘rich West’ and ‘poor rest’ has become an anachronism, perhaps even a ‘nostalgic fantasy’.12 We can rephrase and expand this observation: a singular focus on Western power and non-Western submission or resistance is not just dated, it is Eurocentric.

A ‘post-Western’ turn in global studies appears inevitable but it is also ripe for misuse.13 Registering the new reach of non-Western power, Friend and Thayer, writing about China, articulate one Western response, which I suspect we will hear more of in the years to come; namely to point the finger at ‘the rise of a superpower where bigoted views are accepted as a legitimate part of discourse’.14 Friend and Thayer’s argument is that Chinese power is a problem because Chinese racism is a problem. Even more pointedly, they claim that racism is more ‘their’ problem than ‘ours’ and that Western superiority is evidenced by the West’s anti-racist, multicultural, and critical culture:

the fundamental question for the future of peace and stability in international politics is how China sees the rest of the world and whether the norms that the West has created, particularly against racism and exploitation, could be maintained under Chinese hegemony. Knowing what the Chinese think about race, the answer is not positive for maintaining a global culture of antiracism.15

These ideas register a new narrative of cosmopolitan supremacism, in which international legitimacy is tied to possession of the capacity, supposedly uniquely Western, for interrogating racism. I have taught a university course on international perspectives on racism for over three decades and one of the first things I tell students is not to use phrases like ‘how China sees the rest of the world’ or similar constructions (other examples might include: ‘what Kenya thinks’; ‘what Japan does’). Such anthropomorphic national generalizations can be hard to avoid but they become problematic when they sit at the heart of one’s argument. Another temptation I try to steer students away from is ranking nations by how racist they are. The important point is not whether China is ‘more racist’ or ‘less racist’ than anywhere else but that what China does matters more, including its traditions of discrimination and social justice.

The concept of multiracism employed in this book is built on two major interests, one empirical and one theoretical. The empirical interest is the regional, national, international, and transnational study of ethnic and racial discrimination in Asia and Africa. I approach this material thematically, organizing it into chapters that focus on historical, religious, political, and economic expressions of racism. Comparative global scholarship on these topics is not new but it remains disparate and marginal to the mainstream of ethnic and racial studies. Relevant early studies include two major comparative statements, both published in 1948: Cox’s critique of the idea that ‘race relations’ in the USA have a caste rather than a class character, and Furnivall’s colonial administrative studies of ‘pluralism’ in South East Asia.16 Later decades brought a number of post-imperial overviews.17 However, all these works were focused either on European and US contexts or/and White actions and non-White reactions. In 1967 Pierre van den Berghe noted that over ‘the last three decades’ the literature on ‘race relations’ had been dominated by American studies and added that the ‘scarcity of sociological literature’ on ‘important multi-racial or multi-ethnic societies’, such as Indonesia, ‘is disheartening’.18 The next fifty years saw little change.

Asia and Africa account for about 80 per cent of the world’s population. They are neither a periphery nor a ‘Third World’ but culturally, economically, and politically central and primary. The need for an internationalization of ethnic and racial studies is set out by Suzuki as follows:

race scholars are in dire need to move beyond U.S.- and Europe-based models and paradigms of race in order to (1) objectively analyze the realities of racial and ethnic phenomena of the non-Western world without a presupposed white supremacy lens and (2) create a constructive feedback loop to encourage self-reflexivity on the current dominance of the U.S.- and Europe-based approaches in the era of transitional migration in which the world is afflicted and conflicted by different kinds of racial ideologies and ethnocentrism.19

The spatial diversity of racism is widely recognized. In 1990 Goldberg urged a shift away from singular notions of racism and towards an interest in racisms, arguing that ‘the presumption of a single monolithic racism is being displaced by a mapping of the multifarious historical formulations of racisms’.20 Yet this geographical turn was not designed to challenge the idea that racism is ‘a European invention’ and a ‘European phenomenon’ but to empirically elaborate it.21 Indeed, even purportedly international works in ethnic and racial studies frequently fail to include Africa or Asia. Thus, for example, none of the thirty-four chapters in the Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms looks beyond the Americas or Europe.22 This is also true of Bowser’s edited volume Racism and Anti-racism in World Perspective.23 In other ‘international’ collections, we find the inclusion of just one or two essays on racism in Asia or Africa.24

Such is the enduring strength of this West-centred view of racism that we can call it a paradigm. A paradigm is a worldview that sets out the borders of a debate and deals with counter-evidence by ignoring it, situating it as extraordinary, or marginalizing it as supplementary. In ethnic and racial studies the ‘Western racism paradigm’ remains resilient in large part because of the way racism is theorized: it is understood as a product of modernity and modernity is understood to be a creation of the West. Before I address this theory directly, I need to give a flavour of some of the new empirical work that is throwing it into question. The past few decades have seen the publication of a clutch of studies of racism in regions and countries, as well as in historical periods, previously neglected. This body of work often shares the conclusion that a sole focus on Western forms of racism is myopic. Law calls the idea ‘that racism is a purely European invention’ an example of ‘supreme arrogance’.25 In similar vein, Berg and Wendt tell us that ‘the notion that Westerners simply imposed racism on the rest of the world in a top-down fashion may well reflect a Eurocentric interpretation of a Eurocentric ideology’. Dunaway and Clelland call for an approach that ‘decenters analysis of global ethnic/racial inequality by bringing the nonwestern semiperiphery to the foreground’.26 Dikötter worries that the ‘Eurocentric bias’ in ethnic and racial studies means ‘ignoring the persistent power of moral and cognitive traditions in Asia, Africa, America and the Middle East’. In this way, he writes, people in the majority world are portrayed

as mere passive recipients of ideas and things foreign, when instead we should recognize the importance of human agency, as historical agents around the globe interpreted, adapted, transformed and possibly even rejected racism in their own specific ways.27

The ‘dearth of literature on issues of racialization and racism in non-white settings’ is widely acknowledged but little attended to.28 Introducing his edited collection on international ‘racial and ethnic systems’, Spickard wrote that his ‘main impediment’ was that ‘it has been hard to gather expertise on enough places’.29 In another edited collection, on race and racism in East Asia, Dikötter makes a similar point and tells us that ‘the current state of the field and the available expertise on these issues is dangerously underdeveloped’.30

Dangerously ‘underdeveloped’ but also, sometimes, just dangerous. In many countries writing about racism can result in harassment, imprisonment or worse. ‘Disappearances’ of activists and scholars critical of discrimination against minorities are common, whilst other researchers have been forced into exile.31 Even in traditionally more open countries, such as India, Turkey, and Malaysia, critical scholarship is currently being squeezed out of the academy.

Dikötter noted of his The Discourse of Race in Modern China, published in 1992, that it was ‘the first systematic historical analysis of a racist belief system outside Europe’.32 Similarly, the ‘Mapping Global Racisms’ series edited by Ian Law (which includes studies of racism in Russia, China, and India) is billed as ‘the first attempt to present a comprehensive mapping of global racisms’.33 Kowner and Demel’s weighty two-volume collection, Race and Racism inModern East Asia, is offered as another first.34 These studies intersect and, in part, build on regional literatures on ethnic history and minority rights and, although they tend not to be framed as post-colonial studies, they can be aligned with post-colonial work that has sought to parochialize Western history and/or has focused on the negotiation and creation of new ethnicities in non-Western settings.35 Empirically rich, complex studies such as Verkaaik’s ethnography of ethnic exclusion in urban Pakistan, Ergin’s history of racism and modernity in Turkey, and Hansen’s study of ‘naming and identity’ in ‘postcolonial’ Bombay, are examples of a new genre of post-Eurocentric scholarship that reorients the geography of ethno-racial discrimination.36

Any encounter with the diversity of racism is also an encounter with the diversity of diversity. What I mean by this is that what ‘diversity’ means – what it is called, what it looks like, and what its impacts are – is not the same everywhere. For example, people from the USA and, increasingly, Europe, who have become accustomed to thinking of diversity in terms of skin colour, may have trouble seeing the kind of diversity that exists in Asian and African countries. I have heard, more than once, White British people describe China as ‘homogeneous’, and even India – the latter because its people are ‘all brown’. These representations are not just an embarrassing faux pas but a fundamental misreading. To understand racism across the planet it is necessary to realize that difference looks different in different places.

The central theoretical argument of Multiracism is that to pluralize our understanding of racism we need to pluralize our understanding of modernity. Modern practices of thought and action, such as the mass categorizing and fixing of humans into advanced and primitive peoples, the valued and the disposable, elemental outsiders and insiders, lie at the root of racism. Although the link between modernity and racism is complex it is compelling. Ethnic massacres and ethnic slavery have an ancient history but only the modern world could have produced industrialized, bureaucratized, and intellectually justified mass racist atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on recent historical and sociological work contending that modernity is not singular but plural, I argue that just as there are diverse modernities so there are diverse racisms. What this implies is that in order to understand multiracism we need to rethink the geography of both racism and modernity. The picture I present is of cross-hatching and intermingling sites of modern racism, a fluid landscape in which origin points are confused and borderlines always in doubt. Modernities and racisms do not exist in isolation, an observation that further reinforces and explains why – although the empirical focus of Multiracism is outside of ‘the West’ – we will be encountering Western racial and ethnic ideologies and practices at every turn.37 Western- and White-identified racisms and modernities have shaped, provoked, and enabled other forms of racist modernity. But they have never been all-powerful and, increasingly, they must be understood in the context of, and in dialogue with, other roots and routes of racialized and ethnicized modernity.

At present, the experience of racism by numerous ethnicized and racialized groups across the world is rarely registered in the international media and receives meagre and haphazard acknowledgement in the academic field of ethnic and racial studies. These experiences range from everyday acts of marginalization to genocide and slavery. The following boxed examples are designed to illustrate this range. They are not, in any way, designed to be representative of racism ‘beyond the West’ but they do indicate why it is worth taking seriously. The first three are examples of ongoing or recent practices of genocide and/or widespread ethnic suppression.

West Papua, Indonesia

Indonesia has occupied West Papua since 1963 and, for more than half a century, Indonesian regimes have overseen the settlement and colonization of the territory. In what has been described as ‘the obliteration of a people’, West Papua has been subjected to racialized subjugation and the death of 150,000 to 500,000 West Papuans.38 In 2019 the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights detailed ‘the deeply entrenched discrimination and racism that indigenous Papuans face, including by Indonesian military and police’ and called for ‘[p]rompt and impartial investigations’ to ‘be carried out into numerous cases of alleged killings, unlawful arrests, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of indigenous Papuans by the Indonesian police and military in West Papua and Papua provinces’.39

Iraq, Syria, and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

‘The Islamic State’ (I.S.), founded in 1999, seeks to recreate a pure Islamic caliphate. Because ethnic and religious affiliations overlap, the Islamic State’s drive for religious purity has been enacted as racist violence. Numerous ethno-religious groups have been its victims, with clear evidence of genocide and the establishment of slave markets, sex slaves, and the widespread use of torture and rape. The situation is summed up in the title of Amnesty International’s report, Ethnic Cleansing on a Historic Scale. Despite the supposed defeat of I.S., minorities continue to suffer persecution from its activists as well as from other radical Islamist groups. One of the most systemically persecuted groups are the Yazidis. The Yazidis’ late spiritual leader Baba Sheikh explained why his people have fled: ‘People have gone out of fear of attacks or fear of racism. This makes it hard to protect the faith.’40 The persecution of the Yazidis is recognized as genocide by the United Nations and the European Parliament.

Xinjiang, China

For many decades the Chinese state has suppressed a variety of ethnic nationalist movements, the most well-known of which outside China has been Tibetan nationalists. Over recent years the fear of separatism has intensified a pre-existing policy of deculturation for another ethnic group, the Uighurs, and a number of other Muslim communities of Xinjiang province. Extensive controls have been placed upon religious, cultural, and social life, including the widespread destruction of mosques, the prohibition of books, beards, and prayer mats, and the installation of cameras in private homes. It has been called ‘apartheid with Chinese characteristics’.41 A United Nations human rights panel noted, in 2018, that reports that one million people were being held in ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang were credible.42 In 2020 satellite research showed that there are nearly 400 internment camps in the Xinjiang region.43

These are just three examples of current or recent mass racist suppression. But it is reasonable to ask: ‘Is what is being depicted here racism or something else?’ and ‘Is what is being depicted racial or ethnic, racial and ethnic or something else?’ As I detail later in this Introduction, however we answer the second question, the fact that each of these examples shows discrimination and engrained prejudice against people because of their membership of a distinct and inherited community, marked by visible differences, tells us they are examples of racism.

These three examples are so significant, alarming, and recent that it might be imagined that trying to understand them would be a central concern in ethnic and racial studies. This is not the case.44 Indeed, only a small minority of published papers in the sub-field are concerned with Asia or Africa. One of my motivations in writing this book is to try and make this kind of oversight more difficult.

The summaries above illustrate large-scale and violent forms of racism. The three vignettes below are different: they illustrate everyday, or what might be called ‘low-level’, forms of racism. Again, they are not designed to be typical, but, again, they may provoke us to think about how racism is intertwined with religion, politics, and history as well as question our definitions of what is ‘ethnic’, ‘racial’ or something else. I’ve been writing travel books for some years and it is from these journeys that I draw the following scenes.

Tonga (2018)

I’ve walked into a mini-market in the Tongan capital, Nuku-alofa. A young Chinese woman staffs the till, whilst Tongan employees and their friends sit some distance away, chatting on the store’s porch but clearly annoyed and agitated; a situation replicated in many of the shops I have been into. The warm, tropical air bristles with animosity. I ask the woman at the till how she likes Tonga. She smiles, evidently surprised to be spoken to: ‘I want to go home; I miss my town’, she tells me, adding with a poignant certainty ‘I am lonely’. Over recent decades, a lot of businesses in Tonga have been bought by Chinese entrepreneurs. Indeed, I’ve been told that that there are no Tongan-owned stores left across the whole archipelago. This low-lying nation’s many challenges – which include sea-level rise, cyclones, emigration, and poverty – appear to have been displaced onto an enmity towards the newcomers. In 2006, rioters destroyed most of the capital’s central business district, targeting Chinese businesses. Similar stories can be found across many Pacific nations. Whilst Chinese money is courted by the Tongan elite (the Chinese bring capital and disaster relief, and have built roads and new port facilities), many ordinary people talk openly about wanting the Chinese gone.

Cairo (2017)

I’m on my way to the ‘ghetto’ of a group of Coptic Christians called the Zabaleen, or trash-pickers. This is a community who have the job, unwanted by others, of taking in the city’s waste. Their so-called ‘city of trash’ is a forbidding place but also remarkable. In every doorway different materials are being pulled apart and broken up. Because of their work, Cairo has one of the best recycling rates of any city in the world. Egypt has many minority groups and a complicated relationship with its large Christian population. The Copts are subject to frequent attacks by Islamists; some, like the Zabaleen, are ghettoized and poor, but others form part of the country’s elite. A similarly uneasy but different relationship exists with another minority group in Egypt, the so-called ‘African migrants’, that is Black African migrants. I have a local guide with me as we walk past a group of middle-aged Black men in downtown Cairo. They are sitting outside a café playing cards and drinking mint tea. This is the first time since I arrived in the city that I’ve seen a group of Black Africans. My guide is oddly cagey. He is sympathetic towards the Copts but talking about these migrants, fellow Muslims, he’s wary: ‘they have their own schools but there are too many’, he says. Later I learn that the Arabic word for slave, ‘abd’, is still applied to Black Africans in Egypt, an indication of disrespect for the ‘Black south’.

Himachal Pradesh, India (2017)

As the old car grinds up some of gentlest slopes of the Himalayas, I’m hearing plenty about what the Indian army is doing in Indian-occupied Kashmir and the plight of Muslims across India. My guide and driver are both Muslim Kashmiris and have had to come down to Himachal Pradesh to find work. I recall that at the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies, where I’m staying and which sprawls across a vast British colonial mansion in the state capital of Shimla, there is a decided political chill in the air. Many of the young scholars talk about how academic appointments are increasingly in tune with the Hindutva worldview of India’s right-wing ruling party and that they will have to pursue their careers abroad. The car judders to a halt next to a tiny farmstead and a dark pond, in which a fat buffalo slumbers. An old woman wearing a colourful shawl sits cross-legged on the farm porch, a naked child tugging at her knees. My guide and driver jump out and proceed to empty all the rubbish that has accumulated in the car, which turns out to be a lot, in front of her home. Seeing my worried expression they laugh, ‘do not worry, they do not care’. It’s obvious neither man has a high opinion of these farmers. ‘Who are they?’ I ask. ‘No idea!’ my guide says and laughs harder. I make a guess that they are ‘tribal’ people but my guide’s resolute ‘no idea’ lingers with me. Discrimination isn’t based on knowledge but on indifference. But I too am indifferent: I just let it happen, leave the rubbish on the baked mud. Every day, something similar happens. Over one quarter of the population of Himachal Pradesh are Dalits (once called ‘Untouchables’), a group of such low social standing that they are outside of, or rather beneath, India’s caste system. Time and again, when I encounter abject poverty, here or back in the UK, I look away, my pace quickens, my footsteps echoing a familiar refrain, ‘no idea’.

What is Racism?

Racism is defined here as discrimination and inequality that arise from ethnicized and racialized forms of power, supremacism, and essentialism. ‘Supremacism’ is the ideology and practice of asserting that one particular group is inherently superior to others. ‘Essentialism’ reinforces this process by naturalizing difference. Naturalization, as Hall writes, works to produce a ‘representational strategy designed to fix “difference” and thus secure it for ever’, usually by attributing inherent and inherited characteristics to a group of people.45 This also helps explain why one of the characteristic features of racism is its concern with childbirth, population numbers and, more generally, the bodies of women.

A world of multiracism is a world of multiple inequalities and multiple essentializations. The act of turning imputed and/or observed difference, whether cultural or physical, into naturalized hierarchy will be at the centre of my enquiries. However, it is necessary to place another layer of complexity on this landscape, for the language of racism varies geographically. Offering a single, universal, definition of racism is a useful first step but not a destination, especially if it slams the door on understanding the diverse, fluid, and contested nature of the term. Discriminating against an ethno-racial community because of its imputed inherent and inherited characteristics is called racism in some places but not in others. And whilst I define all such discrimination as racism this does not mean that this is the only legitimate, or useful, word to use, still less that other labels should be displaced. In India, for example, ‘communalism’ and ‘casteism’ are often used to depict practices and ideologies that can overlap with what I am calling racism. In Peru ‘cholism’ is sometimes used to similar effect. The world is full of vocabularies of difference and discrimination. Rather than offering a template in which the word ‘racism’, verified by a Western canon of anti-racist scholarship, is stamped on diverse situations, it is necessary to listen and learn from different contexts.

What Law calls the ‘polycentric’ study of racism is a new field and it often exhibits the kind of definitional dilemmas that one might expect from an endeavour that is not only complex but nascent and politically charged.46 Berg and Wendt’s edited collection Racism in the Modern World can be taken as an example. The editors’ claim for the novelty and importance of the book is that it engages with multiple racializations around the world, and more specifically brings to bear ‘new global history’ approaches that challenge ‘Eurocentric interpretations of world history’.47 It is an impressive volume, yet a comparison of some of its chapters suggests the presence of definitional conflict. For example, Braude’s essay, ‘How Racism Arose in Europe and Why It Did Not in the Near East’, wraps itself in knots in order to argue that acts of ethnic violence in the ‘Near East’ have nothing to do with racism. Thus Braude notes that the treatment of Armenians in the ‘Near East’ in the first decades of the last century, during what he calls the Armenian ‘conflict’, ‘cannot be blamed on racism’. He arrives at this conclusion by defining racism in terms of biological ‘hereditarian determinism’ and finding this ideology to be unique to ‘modern Euro-American racism’.48 Yet in the next two chapters this definition and its geographical implications are overturned. First Geulen explains that racism and cultural prejudice can no longer be conceived as discrete traditions: ‘as early as the beginning of the twentieth century’ the idea of race had been ‘transformed and widened’, he tells us, ‘into something much broader than just physiology and bodily appearance’.49 In the following essay, ‘Racism and Genocide’, Barth uses what he calls the Armenian ‘genocide’ as a textbook example of how racist and cultural ideologies can combine to create the conditions for extermination.50 It is instructive that whilst Braude writes of an Armenian ‘conflict’, Barth writes of an Armenian ‘genocide’. It is a difference that reflects each scholar’s framing of racism.

There are still those who seek to root racism firmly and solely in the soil of biological determinism and race ideology. Thus for Banton, racism is ‘the doctrine that a man’s behaviour is determined by stable inherited characteristics deriving from separate racial stocks having distinctive attributes and usually considered to stand to one another in relations of superiority and inferiority’.51 Although this quote is from 1970, and its definition of racism has become rare, the inference that race ideology is the foundation stone, or ultimate type, of racism remains prevalent. Hence, it is necessary to be clear why Banton’s definition is not sustainable. Conceptually it relies on two things: first, the idea that race and ethnicity are clearly distinct and, second, the idea that ‘race ideology’ is a coherent and relatively static body of knowledge. Neither is plausible: the borders between race and ethnicity are inherently hazy and ‘race ideology’ has long been in doubt. Ideologies of race hierarchy, and/or White supremacy, have always been surrounded by critics and contradictions. When Jean Finot, in Le Préjugé des races, published in 1905 (translated into English in 1906), lambasted the ‘falsely conceived science of races’ and described races as ‘outside all reality’ and ‘fictions in our brains’, he was building on a rich tradition of race-scepticism.52The transition from the narrative of ‘White civilization’ to that of ‘Western civilization’, which occurred in Europe and North America in the early to mid twentieth century, was propelled by the failure and incoherence of the race concept.53 Even intellectuals associated with Nazi ideology were not convinced. Spengler was condescending about racial science: as soon ‘as light is let through it, “race” vanishes suddenly and completely’.54 After the Second World War, the notion that ‘the word race should be banished’ – popularized in We Europeans, first published in 1935 – was given impetus by the association of the idea of race with Nazism and genocide.55 In a series of UNESCO statements and reports ‘the race concept’ was branded a dangerous fallacy.56

Any definition of racism that ties it to a belief in ‘the race concept’ is likely to conclude that racism is a doctrine from a discredited past and, by extension, a residual rather than a living force. It is worthwhile recalling that the term ‘racism’ was a creation of anti-racists. From its first use it has been a tool employed by those seeking to oppose it.57 The nature and meaning of that ‘it’ has changed as anti-racists have come to recognize the changing ways in which people are ‘othered’ and excluded. This helps explain why ‘racism’ is a vital part of today’s critical vocabulary. It no longer reflects a narrow belief in ‘race ideology’ but is routinely associated with racial and ethnic inequality and stereotyping. This conceptual expansion is widespread and appears unstoppable, but its international implications have not been given sufficient attention. For example, the ‘racism is prejudice plus power’ equation, sometimes credited to the American pastor Joseph Barndt, and which became widespread in the USA in the 1970s, is still assumed to convey the message that racism is a White problem because it is they who have power.58 Yet once prejudice and power are found elsewhere, ‘racism is prejudice plus power’ smuggles through a conceptually and geographically expanded notion of racism. Something similar can be said of other innovative categories, such as ‘new racism’, ‘cultural racism’, ‘coded racism’, and ‘racism without racists’. Noting that it is ‘a myth about the past that racism has generally been of the superiority/inferiority kind’, Barker’s ‘new racism’ framed racism as a pattern of exclusionary cultural preferences and nativist sentiment.59 Balibar also wrote about a ‘racism without races’, ‘whose dominant theme is not biologic heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences’ and ‘the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions’.60 Cohen argued that understanding how racism both works against and connects Irish, Jewish, and Black people in Britain meant understanding Britain as ‘multi-racist’.61

None of these authors give consideration to an important consequence of expanding and pluralizing racism: namely that its global geography changes. Another consequence is that the borderline between ethnic discrimination and racism becomes even more unclear. As Anthias notes, when ‘practices of exclusion, that are the hallmark of all ethnic phenomena, are accompanied by discourses and practices of inferiorisation against any ethnically constituted difference, then we can talk about racism’. She expands this point by concluding that ‘Racist discourse involves the use of ethnic categorisations (which might be constructed around cultural, linguistic or territorial boundaries as well as supposed biological ones) as signifiers of an immutable and deterministic difference.’62 So why does ethnicity continue to be relegated to an ‘also ran’ in debates on racism? There are many reasons but one is the continued influence of the traditional sociological distinction between race and ethnicity, which casts the latter as about culture and the former as about blood descent. Hence, ethnicity is said to be chosen whilst race is not. ‘Membership of an ethnic group’, Banton tells us, ‘is usually voluntary; membership in a racial group is not.’63 Morning provides a useful summary of this thesis: ‘individuals can choose the ethnic group(s) with which they most identify, and signal their affiliation with the group(s) by means of superficial behavior (e.g. choice of clothing or food)’, but race is ‘involuntary – it is imposed by others – and immutable’.64 There are three main problems with this distinction. First, casting race as ‘immutable’ and, hence, beyond the realm and reach of human agency, ignores its social construction. Second, it fails to acknowledge the blurred and tangled nature of the relationship between race and ethnicity and the geographical variation in the usage of both terms. Third, defining ethnicity as ‘voluntary’ and as ‘superficial’ is not consonant with lived experience. To refer to two of the examples introduced in the boxes earlier: Yazidis and the Uighurs are both routinely identified as ethnic groups but the idea that being Yazidi or being Uighur is a free ‘choice’ or ‘superficial’ is absurd. The weight of tradition, the bonds of descent and language, and the prejudices of the wider society in which these minorities exist – which often turn on naturalizations insisting that Yazidis and the Uighurs are inherently different – make ‘opting out’ not just difficult but almost impossible.

There is another, more practical, matter to consider. For how racism is defined is not simply a question of academic debate. It reflects wider social and political shifts. The widespread adoption of definitions of racism that incorporate ethnic discrimination provides compelling evidence that the meaning of racism has been expanded. For example, a European Union statement from 2008 states that ‘Offences concerning racism and xenophobia’ include the following: ‘publicly inciting to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin’.65 Today the inclusion of ethnicity in official definitions of racism is so common as to go unremarked, even when it appears to sit uneasily with other designations. Thus, for example, in the UN’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, ‘racial discrimination’ (a term which it often treats as synonymous with racism), is defined as

any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.66

Despite the problematic implication that ‘national or ethnic origins’ are subcategories of the ‘racial’, here is further evidence of the entanglement of ethnicity and racism in public policy discourse. Elsewhere the same Committee has been even more explicit on the need to ‘expand the definition of racism to include incitement on account of ethnic origin, country of origin, and religious affiliation’.67

A lack of conceptual interrogation may be the reason why, without explanation, ‘race’ and, sometimes, ‘colour’ are nearly always listed before ‘ethnic’ or ‘ethnic origin’ in many official statements. The demographic designations commonly used in the UK – ‘BME’ (Black and Minority Ethnic) and ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) – provide another example of this practice. The suspicion that ethnicity has been tagged on is also raised in UNESCO’s definition of racism: ‘Racism is a theory of races hierarchy which argues that the superior race should be preserved and should dominate the others. Racism can also be an unfair attitude towards another ethnic group.’68 Relegating ethnicity to an ‘also’ category sidesteps a major challenge. For the implications of acknowledging ethnicity in this debate are substantial. One way of showing this is by looking at how governments deploy ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in population censuses. A survey by Morning – sampling census forms from 141 countries between 1995 and 2004 – concluded that the United States ‘is one of a small number of nations to enumerate by “race”’ and is ‘virtually alone in treating “race” and “ethnicity” as different types of identity’.69 Only 15 per cent of the censuses Morning looked at asked for respondents’ race. She also discovered that ‘usage of race is found almost entirely in the former slaveholding societies of the Western Hemisphere and their territories’. By contrast ethnicity was made use of in ‘every world region’, often combined with terms that reflect regional forms of identification.70

If we limit the study of racism to places where the language of race is to the fore or dominant, we will be studying a small part of the world. Yet expanding racism to engage ethnicity is not unproblematic. Ethnicity is a complex category and includes a range of identities and attributes that may fall outside of the processes of naturalization, hierarchy, and discrimination that indicate the presence of racism. Thus, for example, although language is an ethnic marker, differentiation between, or even conflict between, language groups does not necessarily indicate the presence of racism. The most linguistically diverse and, hence, most culturally diverse countries in the world are in Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia. By this measure, Western nations are relatively monocultural. Yet, although language use can and has been subject to processes of naturalization, hierarchy, and discrimination, the fact that social division is experienced and enacted in and through language division does not necessarily lend itself to the creation of the kind of behaviours and ideas typical of racism. What this tells us is that extending racism to include essentializing and exclusionary forms of ethnic discrimination is not the same as giving the term ‘racism’ unlimited range to include any and all forms of ethnic demarcation or enmity.

Finally, it is necessary to acknowledge that the identification of what is and what is not racist, and of how many people have been the victims of racism,71 are sites of political struggle. The stakes are high: to identify any practice, ideology, or institution, or, indeed, any individual, as racist is to delegitimize it (or them) and identify it (or them) as worthy of opprobrium and intervention. Throughout this book we will be encountering the efforts of different marginalized groups to have ‘their oppression’ recognized as a form of racism. One of these struggles has been waged by some of the leaders of the Indian Dalit movement. The Indian government and some leading Indian scholars dispute that this ‘untouchable’ sub-caste are the victims of racism, but many Dalit activists have tried to convince the international community otherwise (see Chapter 3). Another prominent example is the debate about the relationship between Zionism and racism. In 1975, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 declared ‘that Zionism is a form of racism’. This Resolution was interpreted by many Israeli politicians as a severe challenge to the legitimacy of Israel. Identifying Zionism as racism was a political win for the Resolution’s main backers (Palestine, many Arab states, and the USSR) and a loss for Israel and its principal ally, the USA. The Cold War context helps, in part, explain why the US government was adamant that this definition of racism would not stand. The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Moynihan, responded: ‘The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that it is not.’72