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. This is the first time since I arrived in the city that I’ve seen a group of Black Africans. My guide is oddly cagey. He is sympathetic towards the Copts but talking about these migrants, fellow Muslims, he’s wary: ‘they have their own schools but there are too many’, he says. Later I learn that the Arabic word for slave, ‘abd’, is still applied to Black Africans in Egypt, an indication of disrespect for the ‘Black south’.
Himachal Pradesh, India (2017)
As the old car grinds up some of gentlest slopes of the Himalayas, I’m hearing plenty about what the Indian army is doing in Indian-occupied Kashmir and the plight of Muslims across India. My guide and driver are both Muslim Kashmiris and have had to come down to Himachal Pradesh to find work. I recall that at the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies, where I’m staying and which sprawls across a vast British colonial mansion in the state capital of Shimla, there is a decided political chill in the air. Many of the young scholars talk about how academic appointments are increasingly in tune with the Hindutva worldview of India’s right-wing ruling party and that they will have to pursue their careers abroad. The car judders to a halt next to a tiny farmstead and a dark pond, in which a fat buffalo slumbers. An old woman wearing a colourful shawl sits cross-legged on the farm porch, a naked child tugging at her knees. My guide and driver jump out and proceed to empty all the rubbish that has accumulated in the car, which turns out to be a lot, in front of her home. Seeing my worried expression they laugh, ‘do not worry, they do not care’. It’s obvious neither man has a high opinion of these farmers. ‘Who are they?’ I ask. ‘No idea!’ my guide says and laughs harder. I make a guess that they are ‘tribal’ people but my guide’s resolute ‘no idea’ lingers with me. Discrimination isn’t based on knowledge but on indifference. But I too am indifferent: I just let it happen, leave the rubbish on the baked mud. Every day, something similar happens. Over one quarter of the population of Himachal Pradesh are Dalits (once called ‘Untouchables’), a group of such low social standing that they are outside of, or rather beneath, India’s caste system. Time and again, when I encounter abject poverty, here or back in the UK, I look away, my pace quickens, my footsteps echoing a familiar refrain, ‘no idea’.
What is Racism?
Racism is defined here as discrimination and inequality that arise from ethnicized and racialized forms of power, supremacism, and essentialism. ‘Supremacism’ is the ideology and practice of asserting that one particular group is inherently superior to others. ‘Essentialism’ reinforces this process by naturalizing difference. Naturalization, as Hall writes, works to produce a ‘representational strategy designed to fix “difference” and thus secure it for ever’, usually by attributing inherent and inherited characteristics to a group of people.45 This also helps explain why one of the characteristic features of racism is its concern with childbirth, population numbers and, more generally, the bodies of women.
A world of multiracism is a world of multiple inequalities and multiple essentializations. The
