Race, ethnicity, caste, descent, skin colour, and national identities intersect in complex ways. Racial and ethnic categories are confusing, complex and logic-defying and every changing. Peoples socially “assigned” racial identities may not align with their own internal racial identities.
What we call ourselves and each other is both a sensitive and powerful topic. It might seem like a small thing, but it’s worth it for us to understand and to learn how co-workers and union members identify themselves. Use the terms the person uses to self-identify and err on the side of specificity.
Race describes the broad categories that people are divided into, that are arbitrary yet considered to be generally based on ancestral origin and physical characteristics and that cannot be easily changed by environment or external factors. Raceassigns human worth and social status by a hierarchical, institutionally enforced system.
In many parts of the world, biological characteristics have not played as major a role in determining differences as compared to caste or religion. However, the growth of capitalism and the imposition of Western definitions of race and racism have increased their importance.
For some people, it comes as a surprise that racial categorisation schemes were invented by scientists to support the categorisation of groups of people as superior and inferior. Race is a made-up social construct, not a biological fact. Race and racial categories are constantly changing and vary over time and location as power relationships and social constructs change.
Eurocentric racism uses ‘White’ as the model of humanity for the purpose of establishing and maintaining privilege and power. Eurocentric racism is historically linked to European colonialism.
Castes can be defined as hereditary, endogamous groups that are assigned specific occupations and governed by strict hierarchical relationships. Dr. BR Ambedkar, the famous Dalit leader and the principal architect of the Indian constitution spoke about the “graded inequality” of the caste system in which the caste system is not merely the division of labour. It is also a division of laborers … Each class being privileged; every class is interested in maintaining the social system.”
In 2001, at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, the word “descent” was added into the UN definition of racial discrimination. Dalit activists argued for this addition, as descent and occupation are key aspects based on the caste system as it exists, not only in India, but in areas of South Asia, East Asia and West Africa.
Ethnicity, like race and caste, is a social construct. Ethnicity divides people into social groupings based on person’s cultural identity, which may or may not include a shared language, customs, migration patterns, nationality, culture, religious expression, history, or ancestral geographical base.
Nationality is based on a person’s belonging or identification with a particular nation.
Religion is both separate from, and may intersect deeply with, race in many ways around the world. According to the United States professor Khaled Beydoun, “Anti-Muslim hate and bigotry in the west … has brought about the conversion of Islam from religion to race, which as a result spawns a popular perception of Muslims as exclusively Arab, and in turn blinds many from seeing Islam as a multiracial and ethnic faith group.” The definition of anti-Muslim racism put forward for debate in the British parliament in 2019 states that anti-Muslim racism “is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”
Colourism is the privileging of light skin over dark skin. Colourism exists because of racism. In 2020, a petition in a campaign against skin whitening creams in India gathered nearly 15,000 signatures within two weeks.
In 1937, Dominican Republican soldiers murdered between 9,000 and 20,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, who are generally of a darker complexion. In 2013, the Supreme Court stripped anyone with Haitian parents of their Dominican nationality. This left more than 200,000 people in no-man's land, without the right to Dominican nationality despite having been born there, and no right to Haitian nationality.
“Brazil has many colour lines – a gradation from light to dark with many colours in between and dozens of possible racial/ethnic categories related to skin colour … but exclusion and inequality remain. Between 2012 and 2018 the number of Brazilians who identify themselves as Black has increased almost 30%. Author and activist Djamila Ribeiro explains “[a]lthough we didn’t have legal apartheid like the US or South African, society is very segregated – institutionally and structurally … Due to this myth that everyone is mixed, even Black people in Brazil sometimes have had difficulty seeing themselves as Black. Here it is not only about where you came from, it’s the way you look – so if you look White, you will be treated as White, even if your parents are Black.”
Colour-blindness can be used to minimise or deny the existence of racism. Researchers Beth Ahlberg, Sarah Hamed, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert and Hannah Brady note that in Sweden, “the neoliberal restructuring and silencing of racism has resulted in an ideology of colour-blindness which makes racism even more invisible because it removes any suggestion of white supremacy or white guilt from personal thought and public discussion while legitimizing the existing social, political, and economic arrangements which privilege whites.”
Black is often used to identify the multiplicity of the African diaspora globally. It is contested in its use. People of Sub-Saharan African descent living in white-dominated societies, and indigenous peoples of Oceania are more likely to identify as Black.
In both the United Kingdom and South Africa, Black has been used to identify non-white peoples. The British University and College Union uses the term Black in a political sense to refer to people who are descended through one or both parents, from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia (the Middle East to China) and Latin America. It refers to those from a visible minority who have a shared experience of oppression. The word is used to further a sense of solidarity and empowerment.
People living in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in nations that are dominated by majority Black and Indigenous cultures and institutions, are likely to identify by nations and ethnicities. The Congolese writer, Vava Tampa, states that “Africans had to be dehumanised in European society to facilitate their enslavement, colonisation and exploitation of their land; hence the label “black”, because calling them African (or their Yoruba, Benga, Shanti, Igbo, Mandinka or Kongo names) recognises their humanity, history and culture.” Eniola Anuoluwapo Soyemi writes from Nigeria about the need to remove ourselves from the framework that racism proposes and “put ourselves back at the forefront of our own narratives; as it was before.”
In the Arabian Peninsula, prior to the abolition of slavery, 10 to 18 million Black Africans (an Indigenous Bantu-speaking people known as the Zanj) were enslaved and transported from Sub-Sahara Africa. Only some distinctive Afro-Arab communities survived, due to the death toll from forced labour and the assimilation of children into the owner’s families. A Zanj rebellion began in 869 in present-day southern Iraq and lasted 15 years. In Iraq there are currently 1.5 million Afro-Iraqis, descendants of the Zanj, identifying as both Black and Arab who are fighting discrimination and seeking legal minority status.
Panashe Chigumadzi writes that “[t]he indifference to the missing Chibok girls in Nigeria, the country with the largest black population on the planet, is as much linked to the unpunished police shootings of unarmed black people in America as it is linked to the murder of black mine workers demanding better wages in South Africa as it is to extra-judicial killings in Kenya. All of these different attacks on black bodies – whether on African soil or outside of it – is not unrelated to white racial capitalism and coloniality which is sophisticated enough not to need the presence of white bodies to function. This is after all why … Africans still prize White intellectual labour and cultural output as supreme (whether we admit it or not). It is why a fluency in the colonising languages of English, French, German, Portuguese, instead of our own indigenous languages, remains the true marker of not only educatedness, but sophistication and worldliness across the continent …. All of us are suffering coloniality, it’s just that the white bodies in South Africa and the United States make it easier to visualize.”
Races, castes, religions and ethnicities mix in each person, family and culture and challenge racial categorisations. The words and concepts we use to identify ourselves change as we change, both individually and collectively. We may identify our own races and ethnicities in different ways as we age and face different life experiences.
Countries vary widely in how and if they track different racial, ethnic and Indigenous groups on their census, and the census categories often change over time. We are our own experts in how these social constructs play out in our unique lives. Sharing our stories as to how we each identify can help make connections and build community in a way that statistics and opinion-sharing alone does not do.
In 1930 the US government designated Mexican as a racial category in the federal census and then then removed it. In 2020, a US journalist, Graciela Mochkofsky, asked a few friends and colleagues how they identify and how they manage the current US census questions. “A colleague said that when he filled out his census form, he marked himself as Hispanic when asked about ethnicity, but left the race box blank. ‘I identify as a Borderlander, but the census doesn’t capture that, so I adopt Hispanic as a public and social identity,” he explained. He would like to mark mestizo – “part indigenous, part European – as his race, but there is no such option. A Dominican friend said that she marks Hispanic/Latino and adds Dominican, but marks “other” in the race category and is frustrated because she is not allowed to add more: she’d like to mark herself Black and also Taíno, but “they won’t understand what that is.” A third friend said that she marks Hispanic/Latino and Puerto Rican, but, even though in Puerto Rico she is seen as white, she leaves “race” blank because she thinks that choosing white would be identifying with the hierarchies of a white-supremacist ideology.”
The European Centre for Intersectional Justice reports that “census data on race in France and Germany can only be collected through proxies such as “migration background” or “geographical location” which only partially captures race. The collection of equality data is a contentious topic in Europe, given the ways in which such data have been (mis)used in the past. Current political developments cannot guarantee that such data would not be instrumentalised for racist ends.”
The census categories in the People’s Republic of China have been determined by the state in direct conflict with how ethnic minorities and nationalities identify themselves. Many groups are not recognised, and others are denied legal rights due to how they are classified. There are 56 officially recognised ethnic minorities in addition to the Han majority.