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