Tensions between Black and Asian people are a distraction from the real problem: systemic racism

Yes I know just where I want to be
But how many times must I die before I'm set free

Jimmy Cliff, 'Keep your eyes on the sparrow'

If the concept of ‘race’ is considered as an oppressive power structure, there is an argument that says racial minorities cannot experience discrimination from other racial minorities. But that semantic argument falls apart in the face of the evidence that certain racial minorities have perpetuated and benefited from those racist socio-political structures that oppress other racial minorities. This hierarchy has, at its core, skin colour, with darker skinned people experiencing the most severe inequity. Understanding the recent history of this conflict is key to tackling the common enemy of systemic racism.

Many Asian immigrants of the '70s to the UK held higher socioeconomic and educational attainment relative not only to their country of origin but also to the UK population of the time. The structural context is that many couldn’t regain the employment and educational status they once held, and became small businessmen in urban settings. Their proximity to Black people was because they were only able to start businesses in the economically disadvantaged areas where Black people lived. This, coupled with the fact that anti-Black racism in financing meant Black people often couldn’t start their own businesses, fuelled a mutual antagonism.

Immigrant communities have a choice of exclusion or assimilation, and inevitably many individuals try some form of assimilation. The term ‘middleman minority’ is derived from the historical experiences of Jewish communities in Europe, and of Asian-Indians in Africa. Middlemen minorities are created to be sandwiched between prevailing and subordinate groups in society; they often work in the retail and service sectors where they have daily contact with the subordinate population. Middlemen populations often suffer discrimination but do not hold extreme subsidiary societal status. The racist stereotypes that middlemen minority and subordinate groups have assumed are exacerbated by the linguistic and cultural barriers separating them.

But the stereotypes also apply  between the dominant and middlemen groups, as characteristically evidenced by the experience of incarceration of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbour. This led to the development of the ‘model minority’ myth, perpetuating the belief that immigrants can succeed and overcome racism in the host country, but only if they assimilate wholly. This assumption also fails because it does not acknowledge the specific historical struggles of Black people born in that country, in addition to the role of skin colour in the hierarchy that fuels interracial conflicts.

Furthermore, the model minority concept is highly selective. For example, there has been a huge increase in number of Nigerian higher education students in the UK. However, Nigerians are not perceived as welcome in the UK (70% of UK survey respondents would rather there were no or fewer Nigerian immigrants, compared to 38% for Australian immigration). So the model minority myth is not about the attainment of a specific group but a way to reemphasize the existing socio-political structure

White supremacy is a term that conjures up adverse reactions from many ‘reasonable people’ as they imagine people in white sheets brandishing fiery crosses. But what the term actually refers to is the historically entrenched system that cements privilege with white people by systemic oppression and exploitation of darker skinned people. This structure primes both Asian and Black communities to mistrust each other. Some Asians absorbed the racist depictions of Black people as poorly educated and violent, and some in the Black communities fell for the depiction of Asians as consistently class- and caste- conscious. In addition there is the stain of colourism that plays out in many Asian communities. While skin-tone biases are often introduced at home, they are perpetuated by the socio-political system. It is also a contributory fact for some from the middlemen minority background that they had a history of having marginalised Black people in order to gain white proximity in colonial and post-colonial Africa.

To be white is to sit at the top of our power hierarchy – and since darker skin has historically been aligned to poverty and inferiority to Eurocentric perspectives, distance from whiteness placed you at the foot of the race pyramid. Within this structure, Asian immigrants had to find a way to integrate, often internalising the racial hierarchy and white supremacy, sometimes even against darker skinned people in their own communities.

But not all Asian communities share the same privilege. The widest economic and health gaps between are seen in certain parts of the Asian communities, greater even than the gaps seen within the black communities. For example , within the Asian diaspora in UK there exist stark 3.5-fold disparity in rates of poverty between Indian and Bangladeshi people (compared to 1.5 between black African and Caribbean people), a 1.6-fold between Pakistani and any other Asian background disparity in infant deaths  (compared to parity between Black African and Caribbean people). What these data highlight (again) is the uselessness of terms like BAME which homogenise ethnicities. They also conceal that for all communities of colour there is a significant disadvantage experienced compared to white people (more than double the rates of poverty and trebling the rates of infant death).

The inter-generational gap between Asian immigrants and their offspring offers one hope for change in the future. Younger UK-born Asians seem more willing to acknowledge the hierarchy of racism, how they benefit from it and to speak out against racial injustice. At an individual level, whatever one’s ethnicity, to be on the right side of history, one has to recognise and combat anti-Black racism. There will be no solutions coming from the top, rather they will seek to perpetuate inter-racial animus. Change will need to come from groups at grassroots level understanding each other and disrupting the existing state of affairs. It is vital to foster inter-racial relationships in order to disrupt systemic racism, which otherwise thrives when Black and Asian communities are seen at conflict with each other. All communities need to find solidarity as core to the pursuit of justice for all – calling out anti-Black racism and the structures that maintain it is foundational to that. And when Black colleagues describe their experience, all communities need to listen and acknowledge, rather than see it as a diminution of their privilege.