Multiracism. Alastair Bonnett

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