Multiracism. Alastair Bonnett
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as worthy of opprobrium and intervention. Throughout this book we will be encountering the efforts of different marginalized groups to have ‘their oppression’ recognized as a form of racism. One of these struggles has been waged by some of the leaders of the Indian Dalit movement. The Indian government and some leading Indian scholars dispute that this ‘untouchable’ sub-caste are the victims of racism, but many Dalit activists have tried to convince the international community otherwise (see Chapter 3). Another prominent example is the debate about the relationship between Zionism and racism. In 1975, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 declared ‘that Zionism is a form of racism’. This Resolution was interpreted by many Israeli politicians as a severe challenge to the legitimacy of Israel. Identifying Zionism as racism was a political win for the Resolution’s main backers (Palestine, many Arab states, and the USSR) and a loss for Israel and its principal ally, the USA. The Cold War context helps, in part, explain why the US government was adamant that this definition of racism would not stand. The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Moynihan, responded: ‘The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that it is not.’72 This position later won out and in 1991 the Resolution was revoked by the UN General Assembly. The story of whether Zionism is ‘officially’ to be called racist or not is far from over and has its own, unique, history. Like the Dalit campaign, it is illustrative of a more general point: that the word ‘racism’ is a site of political conflict that is often intense and bitter.
Racism is Not Just Black and White
White racism against Black people has been uniquely widespread, long-lasting, and violent. It enabled practices of race slavery and race segregation of unsurpassed scale and cruelty. This helps explain why, even though racism is rarely defined only in terms of White racism against Black people, this is often what people think of when they think of racism. This focus is reflected in academic debate. Thus Spickard writes that ‘most scholars of race treat the encounter between Blacks and Whites in the United States as if it were the master narrative of race’, adding that there ‘is an abiding fixation on the idea that race is something limited to, or generated from, the relationships between Black and White, and something found mainly in the United States’.73 Since race and racism are so often conflated, it follows that discussion of racism is also framed in Black and White terms. Moreover, because people outside of the USA look to the USA for ideas and ways of framing racism and anti-racism, this binary has an international impact. In recent years the Black Lives Matter movement, although rooted in US politics and history, has sparked a range of activisms across the world, with a variety of marginalized groups taking inspiration from the simple assertion that their lives, too, should matter. This phenomenon can be seen from Palestine to Japan. It has had a significant impact in West Papua, Indonesia. ‘In Papua, we have a lot of names like George Floyd’, explains Elvira Rumkabu, adding that it is ‘interesting to see just how much Papuans are relating to #BlackLivesMatter’. For Rumkabu, Black Lives Matter has given confidence to Papuans: ‘we don’t always talk about racism, even though racism is of course at the root of the Papua conflict … we are black people. Black is Papuan, Papuan is black.’74
As this voice from West Papua implies, adopting ‘blackness’ can be a vital moment in creating the possibility of anti-racist resistance. This worldwide creative process has been accompanied by the globalization of blackness as the key symbol of anti-racism. However, this also means that the multiplicity of racisms becomes even less visible. One consequence is that if you type ‘racism in China’, ‘racism in India’, or ‘racism in Egypt’ into a search engine, you are likely to be presented with a set of results relating to the treatment of migrant sub-Saharan Africans. More profoundly, it means that racism has come to be framed as something alien, or marginal, to the majority of the world’s people, and that the racism that led to so much loss of life within Europe, including the Holocaust and many other acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing, is removed from view.
The argument that debate on racism has been Americanized often uses the internationalization of a Black–White model of race and identity as core evidence. When they inveighed against the ‘quasi-universalization of the US folk-concept of “race”’, Bourdieu and Wacquant branded this process ‘the cunning of imperialist reason’.75 However, the Americanization of the language of racism does not reflect ‘cunning’ but the cultural power of the USA. One reflection of this power is that global institutions, such as the World Bank and the UN, have disseminated US-models of racial categorization and racism. The evidence collected by Laurie and myself in a study of anti-racism in Peru, and by Sansone in Brazil, shows how anti-racism, globalization, and Americanization intertwine, forging a discourse of identity and emancipation articulated through the lexicon of US-American racial culture.76 Thus Sansone writes of the dual globalization of neoliberalism and what he calls ‘black symbols’ from ‘English-speaking regions of the Black Atlantic’. These streams of symbols, Sansone argues, circulate a set of US-Americanized clichés of race that are employed and deployed by Afro-Brazilians as new, liberating expressions of a suppressed identity, ‘linking young black people to leisure, physicality, sexual prowess, musicality, and naturality, whilst juxtaposing them to work, rationality, and modern technology’.77 This argument bears comparison with Mocombe, Tomlin, and Callender’s class analysis of the ‘African-Americanization’ of the international Black experience; what they call ‘the convergence of black folks around the world towards the amalgamated racial-class dialectic of black America’.78
It seems that, although Americanization brings visibility to Black communities, such as Black Papuans, Afro-Peruvians, and Black Brazilians, it frames these identities through a particular set of symbols and erases the complexity and regional specificity of racism. An instructive example of the consequences of framing racism as exclusively or essentially a Black/White issue is Catherine Baker’s Race and the Yugoslav Region. Baker cites Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic as a template for the ‘Yugoslav region’, envisioning the political and intellectual possibilities of a ‘black Adriatic’.79 Yet by framing racism in the ‘Yugoslav region’ almost entirely in terms of anti-Black racism her approach cuts itself off from the work of scholars and activists who have explored how discrimination and genocide in this part of Europe connect race, racism, and ethnicity.80 In this way anti-Black racism is made visible at the cost of the invisibility of other racisms. Other erasures follow, such as the long and complicated history of colonization in the Balkan region, including its relationship to Russian and Soviet imperial ambitions, and Yugoslavia’s history of internationalism (including the relationship between the Tito regime and China and Turkey).
The title of this subsection is not ‘beyond Black and White’ but ‘not just Black and White’. Challenges to the limitations of the Black/White binary have often been framed by the former rubric. In the USA and to some extent in Europe, the idea that ‘we’ should go ‘beyond’ Black and White can appear like a flight away from confronting White anti-Black racism.81 Responding to the growing body of work that uses the language of going ‘beyond’, Deliovsky and Kitossa argue that it ‘sets up blackness (interestingly enough, not whiteness)’ as a problem: ‘as an impediment to the laudable goals of a multiracial coalition and complex understanding of race relations in North America’.82 The idea of going ‘beyond’ Black and White also carries the misleading implication that understanding this binary is increasingly unnecessary. Chapter 5, which addresses the examples of anti-Black racism in Morocco and of whiteness in contemporary Japan, shows the importance, nationally but also globally, of both blackness and whiteness in understanding contemporary racism. Far from being residual categories, they are axial in the intersection of racism with globalization.
The Western Gaze
I first became aware of racism at school, more than forty years ago, where every day brought another fight between racist skinheads and Asian, Black, Jewish, and White Christian-heritage anti-Nazi children. That makes it sound almost heroic: it wasn’t, it was horrible. And my