Multiracism. Alastair Bonnett

Silver, Bonnett who ran, or walked by, or stood their ground. The alliances and feuds were messy but racism soaked everything and I guess that is why I thought about it so much and why, in one way or another, I’ve been thinking about it ever since. As my studies have broadened, and become more international, they have brought in doubts. What right does a White Englishman have to sit in judgement on racism in China? Or Sudan? Or Turkey? It is a question that hovers over this book because the Western history of racism is entangled with the history of how and why White people have the power to represent the world and be listened to. Moreover, as books such as Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race illustrate, knowledge of race – if not ethnicity – and racism is often associated with the direct experience of being racialized as non-White. However, Eddo-Lodge’s argument is not that White people should walk away from the topic but that they should engage harder and listen.

The way I engage harder and listen may appear paradoxical and controversial since, to some extent, it shifts ‘our’ gaze outwards. A misuse and misreading of Multiracism would be to claim that it gives credence to the idea that racism is not a Western problem. It does nothing of the sort but this kind of worry helps explain why there are so few studies of racism outside the West. In his monograph on cultural racism in China, Kevin Carrico writes that in ‘the field of anthropology, the denunciation of the colonial past and the discipline’s role therein has produced an environment in which critique can seemingly only be applied to “the West”’.⁸³ Similarly, in his exploration of the impact of ideas of racial whiteness in Turkish history, Ergin reports that his research was met with consternation by nationalist Turks. For them the duty of Turkish scholars is to burnish the image of the nation and the topic of racism is ‘an insulting chapter in the past’ that is best ‘forgotten’.⁸⁴ Yet Ergin was not daunted and he is not alone. Despite the considerable challenges, even dangers, they sometimes face, critical scholars from across the world are increasingly part of a debate on racism that is comparative and transnational, dissecting multiple routes and roots and drawing into conversation but also destabilizing notions of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’. Cheng connects the need to think about racism ‘not just in a binary framework of the West and non-West or between whites and non-whites’ to the ‘fresh dynamics brought about by the new reality of globalization’ as well as the new appetite and need to appreciate the relationship between racism and ‘ethnic consciousness, cultural tradition (especially religion), nationalist sentiment, xenophobia’.⁸⁵ The bibliography of this book is a compendium of Asian, African, and Western experts dissecting racism. It reflects a new transnational geography of critical scholarship. Multiracism aims to be part of this global conversation.

Organizing Multiracism

Racism is, in large part, created and enabled by modernity, and just as there are diverse modernities so there are diverse racisms. These forms connect and overlap and are unequal in terms of their power. This is ‘multiracism’. I also argue that debate on racism needs to be conceptually and empirically expanded to engage essentializing forms of ethnic discrimination. These arguments are developed thematically across the following five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces and critiques existing explanations of global racism and then outlines the theoretical basis of this book, fleshing out what is meant by ‘modernities’ and explaining why an understanding of their pluralization helps us understand diverse racisms. This approach is not presented as an entirely satisfactory or complete solution but as a useful way forward. Chapter 2 examines the racist use of history by drawing on examples from Rwanda, Turkey, and China. It then looks at how nostalgias that were shaped in part by Western colonialism feed into racism, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Eritrea, and China. Across Asia and Africa religion is often central to practices and ideologies of ethnicized and racialized intolerance and exclusion. Chapter 3 addresses the relationship between religion and racism, first in radical Islamism, then in casteism in India and, finally, in anti-Muslim racism in India and China. Chapter 4 discusses politics, economics, and nationalism, exploring ‘red racism’ in the USSR, capitalist racism in Indonesia, racist nationalism in South Korea, and the intersection of capitalism, socialism, nationalism, and religion in South Africa. Chapter 5 uses Japanese examples to look at the interplay of whiteness and the globalization of consumer culture, before examining the changing nature of anti-Black racism in North Africa and, more specifically, in Morocco.

      At first, I was tempted to organize the book by place: a chapter on India, one on Morocco, and so forth. However, it soon became clear that this would have given free rein to geographical reductionism and determinism. In other words, it would have made it appear that certain forms of racism are anchored in particular places. An uncritical reliance on geographical labels homogenizes and naturalizes nations and regions. If we are not wary of the generalizations and borderlines that spill from the world map, we not only misrepresent racism but, by reifying ethno-national units, reproduce ethno-racial narratives.

      Good advice no doubt, but do I stick to it? Not really. After all, my chapters may be thematic but my examples are nationally labelled. Avoiding geocentrism is not easy. It may be useful to think of geocentrism as an inevitable problematic rather than as something that can ever be completely banished. The ‘where’ of racism draws inevitably on a variety of geographical essentialisms that may, as Diana Fuss says of essentialism more generally, be unavoidable and a risk ‘worth taking’.⁸⁶ Whether we are discussing ‘racism in the West’ or ‘racism in Asia’, ‘China’, or ‘Xinjiang province’, we are dealing with questionable but necessary categories.

Notes

      1  1 Cited by Barry Sautman, ‘Myths of Descent’, p. 75.

      2  2 Ibid.

      3  3 Barry Sautman, ‘Preferential Policies for Ethnic Minorities in China’, p. 87.

      4  4 Frank Dikötter, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

      5  5 Mari Marcel, ‘There’s No Escaping Racism in India’. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Modernity and Ethnicity in India’, p. 145.

      6  6 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ‘4th Periodic Report of Pakistan Before the Committee’.

      7  7 See Javaid Rehman, The Weaknesses in the International Protection of Minority Rights; also Anwar Ouassini and Nabil Ouassini, ‘“Kill 3 Million and the Rest Will Eat of Our Hands”’.

      8  8 Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds, p. 304. Perinçek was charged in a Swiss court with genocide denial and incitement to hatred. He subsequently appealed to the European Court of Human Rights which in 2013 upheld his appeal.

      9  9 Yasuko Takezawa, ‘Translating and Transforming “Race”’, p. 5.

      10 10 Green Belt and Road Initiative Center, ‘Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative’.

      11 11 World Population Review, ‘Middle Income Countries 2020’.

      12 12 Peter Taylor, ‘Thesis on Labour Imperialism’, p. 176.

      13 13 Examples of post-Western studies include Oliver Stuenkel, Post-Western World and Laurence Roulleau-Berger, Post-Western Revolution in Sociology.

      14 14 John Friend and Bradley Thayer, How China Sees the World, p. 127.

      15 15 Ibid.

      16 16 Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race; John Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice. See also Edmund Soper, Racism: A World Issue.

      17 17 Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism; Philip Mason, Patterns of Dominance; Guy Hunter, South-East Asia.

      18 18 van den Berghe, Race and Racism, p. 5.

      19 19 Kazuko Suzuki, ‘A Critical Assessment’, p. 287.

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