[…] On a deeper conceptual level, the complex history of “race” and racialisation shows that apparent skin colour is just one – highly contingent – dimension of the human categories racism has fixed on. As Cedric Robinson, the great theorist of black Marxism and racial capitalism noted in the 1980s, European societies marked off a wide range of European groups, including Irish, Slavs, Jews, Sámi and Roma, as hyper-exploitable and enslavable. Recent historians of the mediaeval period, such as Geraldine Heng and M. Lindsay Kaplan, have explored how Muslims and Jews were racialised long before the word race came into use.
Similarly, a global view pushes us away from valorising “skin colour” as the primary vector of racism. Taking a planetary perspective, a 2022 Political Quarterly collection edited by Tariq Modood and Thomas Sealy argued against “over-privileging European and American frameworks, what we refer to as Euro-Americancentricity.” They continue that instead we need “to draw from understandings derived from the relevant contexts in order to broaden the purview to include other empires, cognitive traditions and political agendas, and the legacy of their racial hierarchies today, as well as the development of new forms of racism outside the West, under the orbit of racism”. In many cases, these precede contact with European colonialism (drawing on concepts such as caste, that have their own histories) although many have been re-articulated alongside models drawn from the Atlantic lexicon. Some have been re-animated as part of rising nationalist projects: “Cases of this kind, for instance, include the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in China, Hindus and Muslims in Sri Lanka, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, Muslims in India and Christians in Pakistan.”
And even hierarchies of “skin colour” play out differently in different contexts. Anti-blackness in Mexico is not the same as colourism in Britain. Or in Sudan, where “fifty shades of blackness” range from Red at the top to Blue at the bottom. As Mohammed Elnaim notes, the hierarchy of Green and Yellow is a racial index “which make sense in Sudan, and thankfully seem stupid elsewhere” — but is far from the “craziest regime of racialization”, a distinction he reserves for the taxonomy used in plantation Haiti before its revolution, described in The Black Jacobins (1938) by CLR James, composed of 128 distinct racial categories.
David Feldman is Director of BISA at Birkbeck, University of London and a Professor of History. He has advised the UN, the OSCE, Human Rights Watch, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Antisemitism and the Labour Party on policy issues connected with antisemitism. His most recent book is Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition (2023, ed. with Marc Volovici).
Ben Gidley is a Reader in Sociology and Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and a member of BISA. His research has focused on diaspora and diversity in urban Europe, and on antisemitism in relation to other forms of racism. His books include: Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today (2010, with Keith Kahn-Harris); Antisemitism and Islamophobia: A Shared Story? (2017, ed. with James Renton); and Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience (2022, ed. with Sami Everett).
Brendan McGeever is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London and a member of BISA. His core areas of specialism include the study of racism, antisemitism and anti-racism. He is the author of Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (2019) and Britain in Fragments: Why Things Are Falling Apart (2023, co-written with Satnam Virdee).
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