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 description imposes labels that hardly fit the memory. It was a boys’ comprehensive (i.e. state) school and we called each other by our second names: it was Flack, Macfarlane, Silver, Bonnett who ran, or walked by, or stood their ground. The alliances and feuds were messy but racism soaked everything and I guess that is why I thought about it so much and why, in one way or another, I’ve been thinking about it ever since. As my studies have broadened, and become more international, they have brought in doubts. What right does a White Englishman have to sit in judgement on racism in China? Or Sudan? Or Turkey? It is a question that hovers over this book because the Western history of racism is entangled with the history of how and why White people have the power to represent the world and be listened to. Moreover, as books such as Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race illustrate, knowledge of race – if not ethnicity – and racism is often associated with the direct experience of being racialized as non-White. However, Eddo-Lodge’s argument is not that White people should walk away from the topic but that they should engage harder and listen.
The way I engage harder and listen may appear paradoxical and controversial since, to some extent, it shifts ‘our’ gaze outwards. A misuse and misreading of Multiracism would be to claim that it gives credence to the idea that racism is not a Western problem. It does nothing of the sort but this kind of worry helps explain why there are so few studies of racism outside the West. In his monograph on cultural racism in China, Kevin Carrico writes that in ‘the field of anthropology, the denunciation of the colonial past and the discipline’s role therein has produced an environment in which critique can seemingly only be applied to “the West”’.83 Similarly, in his exploration of the impact of ideas of racial whiteness in Turkish history, Ergin reports that his research was met with consternation by nationalist Turks. For them the duty of Turkish scholars is to burnish the image of the nation and the topic of racism is ‘an insulting chapter in the past’ that is best ‘forgotten’.84 Yet Ergin was not daunted and he is not alone. Despite the considerable challenges, even dangers, they sometimes face, critical scholars from across the world are increasingly part of a debate on racism that is comparative and transnational, dissecting multiple routes and roots and drawing into conversation but also destabilizing notions of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’. Cheng connects the need to think about racism ‘not just in a binary framework of the West and non-West or between whites and non-whites’ to the ‘fresh dynamics brought about by the new reality of globalization’ as well as the new appetite and need to appreciate the relationship between racism and ‘ethnic consciousness, cultural tradition (especially religion), nationalist sentiment, xenophobia’.85 The bibliography of this book is a compendium of Asian, African, and Western experts dissecting racism. It reflects a new transnational geography of critical scholarship. Multiracism aims to be part of this global conversation.
Organizing Multiracism
