Multiracism

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Alastair Bonnett. Multiracism

Table of Contents

Guide

Pages

Dedication

Multiracism. Rethinking Racism in Global Context

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reframing Racisms

West Papua, Indonesia

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

Xinjiang, China

Tonga (2018)

Cairo (2017)

Himachal Pradesh, India (2017)

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 USSR3

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

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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

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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.

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’.

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