By “Atlantic bias” I mean a set of assumptions about “race”, racism, colonialism and imperialism prevalent on the left globally but rooted in the history and politics of the “Atlantic world” – by which I mean not only North America and Europe, but also Latin America and Africa.
This set of assumptions depends on a narrow understanding of “race” and racism (as of “modern” and “Western” origin), and an ignorance (or denial) of the histories of Eurasian empires and imperialisms.
The concept “Atlantic bias” relies on two related lines of reasoning. One is about “race” and racism, the other about imperialism and colonialism.
The first line of reasoning starts from the observation that North American and Latin American societies have roughly similar structures of racialisation. Although racial regimes in the Americas range from the extremely segregationist to the more fluid and have evolved over time, the basic structure of racial hierarchy is the same all over the Americas. It is a result of the history of European invasion and settlement, the dispossession and partial extermination of indigenous populations and the importation of enslaved people from Africa. In those parts of the Americas where indigenous people today make up only a small percentage of the population, but a significant part is descended from enslaved Africans, as in the US, black and white tend to be the most prominent racial categories.
Although I would say that anti-blackness is not quite as central to European racism today as it is to US racism (in some European settings, “anti-Muslimness” seems more salient and dangerous than anti-blackness, and racisms against Roma and Slavs/Eastern Europeans play important roles in Europe that do not have exact American equivalents), it is still important to it.
Anti-blackness was a fundamental component of the racisms Europeans developed from the 16th century onwards: racial ideas and practices which were closely linked to and reflected the growing importance of the enslavement of people from Africa for Euro-American societies, and the growing power of European states in the world.
People residing on the African continent south of the Sahara obviously had no concept of “blackness” before they came into contact with the expanding world of Islam. Through its contact with people south of the Sahara, Islamicate culture developed ideas of blackness, different from, but not entirely dissimilar to, Christian European ideas of blackness.
Later, with increasing European influence and penetration from the 15th century onwards, ideas of blackness and whiteness developed through the encounter between Africans and Europeans – an encounter that became increasingly unequal over time, culminating in the colonial domination of virtually the whole of the African continent by European powers in the late 19th century.
The situation in Asia was different. “Race”, understood in a very broad sense – as forms of social hierarchy based on a belief in fundamental and immutable differences between groups of human beings of different social value, linked to cosmology, ideas of “nature”, the body and descent – existed in different forms in different Asian societies long before Portuguese and Spanish ships first appeared in “the Indies”. These precolonial Asian racisms (in the broad sense of the term I am using here) had nothing to do with the transatlantic slave trade or blackness.
As, in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, European states began to dominate Asian powers they would have had no chance of defeating in early modern times, European racism became a globally dominant ideology and began to interface and interact much more than earlier with pre-existing forms of racialisation in Asian societies.
That is why there is today anti-black racism in China, Korea and Japan, where such attitudes and practices were unknown 500 years ago, and why in South Asia today, skin colour plays a different and greater role in determining a person’s place in social hierarchies than before European colonialism.
But this global spread of ideas of European origin about blackness, whiteness, colour, “race”, etc., does not, in my eyes, justify the assumption that there is today one unified system of racial ideas and images all over the world.
To be clear, any meaningful antiracist politics today has to challenge stereotypes about people of African descent, push back against disinterest in African (and African diaspora) history and politics, and foreground the link between antiblackness and the global distribution of wealth and power.
That said, we should also recognise that there is in fact not one “colour line”, there are many racial “lines”, some of them not “about” colour at all. White supremacy is an important piece of the puzzle of global racisms, but it is not the essence of all racism.
Rather, it seems to me that racisms of European and Euroamerican origin today coexist, merge and clash with locally specific and regional forms of racialisation in Asia – which have themselves evolved from the combination of earlier racisms of European origin with preexisting forms of social hierarchy, some of which one could call “racial”, in a broad sense.
To conceptualise “race”, as a global phenomenon, only or primarily as linked to the enslavement of African people and only “about” skin colour, is, therefore, to display what I call Atlantic bias.
[There are, of course, other problems with many of the conceptualisations of racism prevalent in global left discussions. Even European constructions of “race”, although they always involved ideas about descent and the body, were never only “about” skin colour. Nor did European racial ideas always function to justify slavery, or, more generally, legitimate the domination of the poorest and most powerless. Many forms of racism target groups inhabiting contradictory social locations or “middleman minorities”. Fantasies of (hidden) Jewish power, wealth and cunning are important elements of modern antisemitism. Some forms of racism construct “others” that are evil in both “subhuman” and “superhuman” ways. Much more could be said regarding this.]
The second line of reasoning, that about imperialism and colonialism, starts from the observation that the region we call Latin America today was colonised by Spain and Portugal, later was the theatre of colonial projects of various other European powers (of which the Netherlands, France and Britain were the most important, but let us not forget the efforts of Sweden, Denmark, Scotland and the Duchy of Courland), and then subject to European (mainly British) and later US imperialism. Similarly, the African continent was colonised by West and Central European powers. After formal decolonisation, the US, France and other Western powers did their best to keep African states locked into subordinate positions in the global economy, supported right wing authoritarian forces in general and the white supremacist regime in South Africa in particular.
In other words, the recent historical experience of both Latin America and Africa south of the Sahara is mainly with West/Central European and US political and economic domination. This, I suggest, together with the continued influence of authoritarian leftism, including “Marxist-Leninist” nostalgia for state “socialism”, is one of the main reasons for the failure of many African and Latin American leftists to recognise the capitalist and imperialist character of China and Russia, and to open their eyes to the negative aspects of “multipolarity”, the dangers posed by the increasing influence in world affairs of “non-Western” authoritarian states and the rise of “non-Western” and “anti-Western” far right politics (such as Duginism, Islamism, Hindutva, Buddhist supremacism and Confucian fascism…)
Regarding the Atlantic bias of many North American and European leftists, it is, as many critics before me have pointed out, of a piece with the Eurocentrism or “West-centrism” we find in the “mainstream” of these societies – just with the arrogance and sense of cultural superiority of the mainstream replaced, on the left, by unease, outrage and loathing.
What many supposed leftists and “anti-imperialists” share with right wing champions and ideologues of “Western” supremacy is a belief in the centrality, unitariness, immutability and total agency of “the West”.
Daniel Mang is a writer and organiser based in Sweden. He is one of the authors of For a consistently democratic and internationalist left.