Multiracism. Alastair Bonnett
link between modernity and racism is complex it is compelling. Ethnic massacres and ethnic slavery have an ancient history but only the modern world could have produced industrialized, bureaucratized, and intellectually justified mass racist atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on recent historical and sociological work contending that modernity is not singular but plural, I argue that just as there are diverse modernities so there are diverse racisms. What this implies is that in order to understand multiracism we need to rethink the geography of both racism and modernity. The picture I present is of cross-hatching and intermingling sites of modern racism, a fluid landscape in which origin points are confused and borderlines always in doubt. Modernities and racisms do not exist in isolation, an observation that further reinforces and explains why – although the empirical focus of Multiracism is outside of ‘the West’ – we will be encountering Western racial and ethnic ideologies and practices at every turn.37 Western- and White-identified racisms and modernities have shaped, provoked, and enabled other forms of racist modernity. But they have never been all-powerful and, increasingly, they must be understood in the context of, and in dialogue with, other roots and routes of racialized and ethnicized modernity.
At present, the experience of racism by numerous ethnicized and racialized groups across the world is rarely registered in the international media and receives meagre and haphazard acknowledgement in the academic field of ethnic and racial studies. These experiences range from everyday acts of marginalization to genocide and slavery. The following boxed examples are designed to illustrate this range. They are not, in any way, designed to be representative of racism ‘beyond the West’ but they do indicate why it is worth taking seriously. The first three are examples of ongoing or recent practices of genocide and/or widespread ethnic suppression.
West Papua, Indonesia
Indonesia has occupied West Papua since 1963 and, for more than half a century, Indonesian regimes have overseen the settlement and colonization of the territory. In what has been described as ‘the obliteration of a people’, West Papua has been subjected to racialized subjugation and the death of 150,000 to 500,000 West Papuans.38 In 2019 the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights detailed ‘the deeply entrenched discrimination and racism that indigenous Papuans face, including by Indonesian military and police’ and called for ‘[p]rompt and impartial investigations’ to ‘be carried out into numerous cases of alleged killings, unlawful arrests, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of indigenous Papuans by the Indonesian police and military in West Papua and Papua provinces’.39
Iraq, Syria, and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
‘The Islamic State’ (I.S.), founded in 1999, seeks to recreate a pure Islamic caliphate. Because ethnic and religious affiliations overlap, the Islamic State’s drive for religious purity has been enacted as racist violence. Numerous ethno-religious groups have been its victims, with clear evidence of genocide and the establishment of slave markets, sex slaves, and the widespread use of torture and rape. The situation is summed up in the title of Amnesty International’s report, Ethnic Cleansing on a Historic Scale. Despite the supposed defeat of I.S., minorities continue to suffer persecution from its activists as well as from other radical Islamist groups. One of the most systemically persecuted groups are the Yazidis. The Yazidis’ late spiritual leader Baba Sheikh explained why his people have fled: ‘People have gone out of fear of attacks or fear of racism. This makes it hard to protect the faith.’40 The persecution of the Yazidis is recognized as genocide by the United Nations and the European Parliament.
Xinjiang, China
For many decades the Chinese state has suppressed a variety of ethnic nationalist movements, the most well-known of which outside China has been Tibetan nationalists. Over recent years the fear of separatism has intensified a pre-existing policy of deculturation for another ethnic group, the Uighurs, and a number of other Muslim communities of Xinjiang province. Extensive controls have been placed upon religious, cultural, and social life, including the widespread destruction of mosques, the prohibition of books, beards, and prayer mats, and the installation of cameras in private homes. It has been called ‘apartheid with Chinese characteristics’.41 A United Nations human rights panel noted, in 2018, that reports that one million people were being held in ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang were credible.42 In 2020 satellite research showed that there are nearly 400 internment camps in the Xinjiang region.43
These are just three examples of current or recent mass racist suppression. But it is reasonable to ask: ‘Is what is being depicted here racism or something else?’ and ‘Is what is being depicted racial or ethnic, racial and ethnic or something else?’ As I detail later in this Introduction, however we answer the second question, the fact that each of these examples shows discrimination and engrained prejudice against people because of their membership of a distinct and inherited community, marked by visible differences, tells us they are examples of racism.
These three examples are so significant, alarming, and recent that it might be imagined that trying to understand them would be a central concern in ethnic and racial studies. This is not the case.44 Indeed, only a small minority of published papers in the sub-field are concerned with Asia or Africa. One of my motivations in writing this book is to try and make this kind of oversight more difficult.
The summaries above illustrate large-scale and violent forms of racism. The three vignettes below are different: they illustrate everyday, or what might be called ‘low-level’, forms of racism. Again, they are not designed to be typical, but, again, they may provoke us to think about how racism is intertwined with religion, politics, and history as well as question our definitions of what is ‘ethnic’, ‘racial’ or something else. I’ve been writing travel books for some years and it is from these journeys that I draw the following scenes.
Tonga (2018)
I’ve walked into a mini-market in the Tongan capital, Nuku-alofa. A young Chinese woman staffs the till, whilst Tongan employees and their friends sit some distance away, chatting on the store’s porch but clearly annoyed and agitated; a situation replicated in many of the shops I have been into. The warm, tropical air bristles with animosity. I ask the woman at the till how she likes Tonga. She smiles, evidently surprised to be spoken to: ‘I want to go home; I miss my town’, she tells me, adding with a poignant certainty ‘I am lonely’. Over recent decades, a lot of businesses in Tonga have been bought by Chinese entrepreneurs. Indeed, I’ve been told that that there are no Tongan-owned stores left across the whole archipelago. This low-lying nation’s many challenges – which include sea-level rise, cyclones, emigration, and poverty – appear to have been displaced onto an enmity towards the newcomers. In 2006, rioters destroyed most of the capital’s central business district, targeting Chinese businesses. Similar stories can be found across many Pacific nations. Whilst Chinese money is courted by the Tongan elite (the Chinese bring capital and disaster relief, and have built roads and new port facilities), many ordinary people talk openly about wanting the Chinese gone.
Cairo (2017)
I’m on my way to the ‘ghetto’ of a group of Coptic Christians called the Zabaleen, or trash-pickers. This is a community who have the job, unwanted by others, of taking in the city’s waste. Their so-called ‘city of trash’ is a forbidding place but also remarkable. In every doorway different materials are being pulled apart and broken up. Because of their work, Cairo has one of the best recycling rates of any city in the world. Egypt has many minority groups and a complicated relationship with its large Christian population. The Copts are subject to frequent attacks by Islamists; some, like the Zabaleen, are ghettoized and poor, but others form part of the country’s elite. A similarly uneasy but different relationship exists with another minority group in Egypt, the so-called ‘African migrants’, that is Black African migrants. I have a local guide with me as we walk past a group of middle-aged Black men in downtown Cairo. They are sitting outside a café playing cards and drinking mint tea.