Multiracism. Alastair Bonnett
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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 in Modern 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