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Anti-Black Racism and Anti-Asian Racism


Bridging Divides, Renewing Solidarities

As we emerge from a summer rife with anti-Black racism and deadly violence against Black people, followed by police brutality against peaceful protestors, I reflect on the different histories of racism – anti-Black racism on the one hand, and, anti-Asian racism on the other – and their connections with one another. Often these are regarded as separate and unconnected, operating in parallel universes: anti-Black racism affecting one community and anti-Asian racism affecting another, with very little dialogue and exchange among the affected communities. 

In this short essay, I make a case for speaking of these racisms together, to get past the silences that keep these communities and experiences apart, to bridge the divide and recognize the common ground on which racism treads, while also acknowledging the distinct histories and trajectories of our racialized locations.

To speak of race and racism from a South Asian perspective, as I do, is to be keenly aware of the contradictory identity of South Asians, especially Indian Americans, in the racial hierarchy of the United States. On the one hand, South Asians face racist attacks: one of the more recent shocking attacks, widely covered in the media, was the fatal shooting of Srinivas Kuchibotla in 2018 in a bar in Kansas City. Several decades earlier in New Jersey, in the summer of 1987, the “Dot Busters” – a reference to the red dots worn by Hindu women – vowed to get rid of Indians. In that year, there were a spate of brutal attacks and murders of people of Indian origin in and around Jersey City. The paradox is that, while South Asians are targets of racist violence, South Asians are also known to perpetrate anti-Black racism and colorism. Moreover, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim stereotyping are also rife in the Indian American diaspora that is majority Hindu-identified. How does one grapple with these contradictions?

Isabelle Wilkerson’s new, pathbreaking book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents could not have come at a more appropriate time to help in navigating this treacherous minefield of multiple and multi-layered racisms. Wilkerson points to the caste-like structure of race in America, where Blacks and Whites are positioned as the two “poles of the American caste system” and multiple racialized “others” occupy places in between. Dr. Ambedkar, the anti-casteist crusader of India and the architect of the India’s constitution, coined the term “graded inequality” to describe the structure of caste – where, in relation to oneself, there is always one group that is positioned as superior and another as inferior. In this way, we are permanently divided and segmented from one another. In Wilkerson’s eloquent phrasing, “caste is the bones, race is the skin.”

We must learn from the others before us who have refused such racist hierarchies and divisions. One example that stands out is the Southall Black Sisters, an all-Asian organization in West London, established in 1979 to advocate for and support Black and Asian women’s rights. The events that summer in London that led to the founding of the Southall Black sisters eerily resemble our own summer of 2020; in 1979, the police shot and killed an activist, a school teacher who was participating in a rally against the National Front, a far-right fascist party in Britain. We have seen similar attacks and killings of peaceful protestors here in the U.S., including Federal armed forces called in against protestors in Portland. In solidarity with Black women, Asian women took the name Southall Black Sisters, identifying as Black and explicitly rejecting the anti-Black racism of the Asian community. The Southhall Black Sisters, an organization that continues to be a progressive force to this day, offers a powerful example of bridge-building and disruption, relevant and applicable to the caste structure of American society today. As Ayad Akhtar writes in Homeland Elegies, his new novel about growing up Pakistani American, rather than engage in representational politics, we must interrogate and transgress the imposed, received identities that maintain the caste structure of American society.

The struggle to end racism must confront how racial “others” – Brown and Black – are divided and pitted against one another and must work to revive old solidarities and to build new ones in these times of global supremacist politics. There is no only way to construct a new political horizon and a just democracy.


Sangeeta Kamat is Professor of Comparative and International Education in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.


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