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 peoples, the valued and the disposable, elemental outsiders and insiders, lie at the root of racism. Although the 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
