nthposition online magazine

Racism is often regarded as a binary phenomenon - white against black and, in Robert Mugabe's vision, black against white. But this is incomplete. It is not too long ago that, in Europe, the Teutonic 'master race' swept out of its borders to conquer its neighbours. In Croatia, as late as last year, a government minister, Dragan Primorac, claimed to have conducted experiments that demonstrated the superiority of the Croatian race. Serbs look down on Bosnians; both look down on Albanians; Greeks complain about Macedonians; Basques consider themselves not Spanish; the Scottish leader wants independence from England. All these nationalisms have also a form of racism - a national 'personality' inscribed in their peoples - that claims to set them apart from others and, often, encourages them to do violence to others and, as late as the closing years of the 20th century, to eradicate and 'ethnically cleanse' those who are Other.

Nor is it all black and white on other continents. There might have been a protracted black/white conflict in Southern Africa, but elsewhere black against black racisms were fought out. In Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi fought and a genocide was committed; at the dawn of Nigerian independence, a great civil war erupted between Nigeria and Biafran secessionists; and, even in Zimbabwe, long before Mugabe turned his anger on the white farmers, he had launched a war led by his Shona army against his own Ndebele citizens. The nationality of 'Zimbabwean' was of no protection to the Ndebeles in the pogroms that came in the 1980s.

And in the Far East, the Japanese 'Rape of Nanking' at the turn of 1937-8 remains an infamous event where huge numbers of Chinese civilians were casually slaughtered on the grounds that they were ethnically inferior to the Japanese, to the point of being sub-human. Yet, as the rather dark humour in that part of the world goes, there is one thing on which Japanese and Chinese are agreed, and that is what an inferior species are the Koreans.

The examples can be multiplied: Kurds against Turks, the conflict among 'tribes' in Iraq and Afghanistan (conflated greatly by religious schisms), and the racism that exists between Jewish and Palestinian peoples, despite both being equally Semitic. Racism, in the end, doesn't depend only on skin-type and external appearances, but on a huge complex mixture of beliefs, traditions, and histories of self-protection against unremitting hordes of outsiders who looked and behaved a bit like those now discriminated against.

Having made that basic point, there is still some evidence of a new millennium in which the white superiority to black and all other races might be rivalled, if not supplanted, by a series of far more subtle but triumphant racisms against white people. It will not be as geometric and harsh as the early white against black racism. There will be far more interaction and miscegenation. One has only to wander the streets of London to find the British capital is full of mixed-race couples with children who will develop new ways forward. In the United States, Obama is president. In South Africa, when the factions within the ANC battle it out for their favoured candidate to succeed Thabo Mbeki, before the triumph of Jacob Zuma, everyone's default candidate - their second choice - was the finance minister, Trevor Manuel, who is lightly-coloured and certainly not black. This is extraordinary in a country that gained black majority rule so late in contemporary history. And yet, in South Africa itself, and certainly in neighbouring Zimbabwe, there is a 'black renaissance' - a thoughtful, if not thoughtfully complete, African-essentialism - that depicts black Africans as culturally equal to whites, as superior to whites in national politics, and as rightly assertive and critical in international politics, and as part of a global solidarity that is pointedly not white. This is a racism established on a rebellion against centuries of political, economic, and cultural exploitation and denigration. It is a backlash, but it is not shallow.

This phenomenon can be seen in other former colonised and imperialised peoples. A key sub-text of the rise of 'Vedic' sciences in India is the claim that, in the complexity of Hindu scriptures, lies not merely the mystical and metaphorical rendition of complex nuclear physics but, properly interpreted, actual principles, laws and proto-equations of advanced physics. The sub-text claims that the Indians had it first and, in the markers of civilisational sophistication, were way ahead of the slow and lumbering Europeans - who then had the brutish audacity to colonise India. Something of this lies behind Chinese racial attitudes as well. The Chinese term, 'white ghosts', used as a generic term for Europeans, probably didn't acquire racist connotations until the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s, in which the British inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Chinese and corrupted large parts of the coastal population with drug addiction. Stung by such reversals, the recourse was to language where 'ghosts' and 'devils' are synonymous terms. 'White devils' they have remained, despite all the friendship ceremonies - and, as China bides its time rising slowly to become a superpower, the sub-text expressed in this one single and simple term is of a superiority that once was and, after a brief imperialised interlude, will be again. And it must come again to assuage and compensate the humiliations of being on the receiving end of an expansionist racism.

There is a difference, however, between a racism that is a key ingredient of national pride and one that is expansionist and forcibly internationalist. Neither China, nor India, nor Africa will seek to colonise Europe or the United States. But, if one particular form of colonisation has ended, a new era of cooperative dependencies - and plain dependencies - will arise. Many African states have learned something from Hugo Chavez and are delighting in the competition between the United States and China, both assiduously wooing petroleum-rich African states; and the United States is seriously concerned about the success of the Chinese - not only because of the more generous terms of aid and initial trade offered by the Chinese, but by the determined Chinese portrayal of themselves as never having been a coloniser of Africa and always having been a friend of African self-determination. As natural resources diminish, and as energy consumption nevertheless increases, those who have will make those who need into their dependents. The acting out of future alignments in the UN Security Council - where a newly resurgent Russia consistently objected to US pressure on Iran; where China will most reluctantly apply pressure on Sudan - is an acting out of future international relations where it will not be a question of black against white, but black and friends of blacks against those whites that have afflicted them in the past. It will be an 'our turn' condescension, a certain schadenfreud, rather than a brutal exploitation, conquest and occupation with racist legislation. But it will make very interesting third and fourth decades of the 21st century.

Let us now investigate some of the intellectual roots of Afro-essentialism, Sino-essentialism and, most controversially of all, Iranian-essentialism. Just as Euro-racism had Victorian and equivalent roots that were two-fold (technological superiority and accomplished nationalism), so also these are ingredients in the rise of the new racisms. The rush of the Iranians to become nuclear-capable is part of the quest for at least technological equivalence to the West, but there is a very sophisticated sense of Iranian nationalism in even the most arid pronouncements of the Ayatollahs. The gradual, painful and pain-staking progress of African states on the road to being also nations is reaping visible if uneven progress 60 years after independence began to come. The 100th anniversary will see far greater unity within nation-states in Africa than might even be imagined now.

Curiously, given the huge number of tribal or ethnic groups in Africa - some primordial and others encouraged into place by colonial administrators anxious to impose sectional forms of administration - the new African sense of renaissance proposes a continental identity of blackness. It is an intellectualised pan-Africanism, drawn not only from reactions to white domination but the Africana discourses of black academics in the United States. It is in many ways Senghor's Parisian negritude of the 1950s, looped through the academies of North America, and integrated with a continental African desire for assertion and pride. Because of the Senghor roots, it is above all a cultural renaissance and, as in the case of Mugabe, economic factors and consequences are secondary.

The problem with this is that negritude never existed in isolation. Senghor, his compatriots and immediate predecessors were members of the entire Parisian cultural revolution that included surrealists like Breton and Picasso, existential philosophers like Sartre, experimentalists like Cocteau, and a host of others. All were for the literary and visual forms of thoughtfulness. They were not festooned with scientists and economists. This is where those who accuse Picasso of having stolen inspiration from Africa are wrong. He was, indeed, inspired for his Cubist period, but each member of this Parisian community inspired others. When it was his turn, Senghor looted European thought too.

The upshot is the roots of a contemporary racism that is somewhat sophisticated and cosmopolitan - with variants: neo-Marxist, corporate executive, authoritarian, and democratic - but the unifying marker is that African culture, thought and philosophy should all be taken as equivalent in complexity to their European counterparts and that, in the African century to come, they should be elevated in value beyond that of Europe. The pasty white man who can't sprint 100 meters is also the pasty white man without style and rhythm but, more importantly, he is also the pasty white man whose thinking belongs to yesterday.

If this negritude is recently resurgent (but with more international and politicised aspects than Senghor's), then the Chinese sense of self is millennia older than even any European sense of self as a continental and thoughtful species. The ancient self-designation of China as the 'Middle Kingdom' might be better translated as the 'Central Kingdom'. It was the centre of the world, if not the centre of everything under heaven. As late as the 18th century this conceit held regional sway. The tributary kingdom of Okinawa, now part of Japan, was gifted a plaque by the Chinese Emperor. It was hung above the Okinawan throne and read 'In the Centre of the Mountain, there is only Sho' - Sho being the Okinawan dynastic name. This was simultaneously flattering (Sho dynasty is as strong as the heart of the mountain, it is has the strength of something that is the centre of stone) and asserting a fundamental pecking order (you may be the centre of a mountain, but the Chinese are the centre of the world). It was a subtle condescension, but the Okinawan king was delighted to receive any recognition at all from his powerful neighbour.

But the point here is not a well-worn depiction of a Central Kingdom but the fact that it saw its centrality in a subtle way. Those who inhabited the realms outside the centre were not 'barbarians' in the European sense of the term; they were not without thought and culture and, particularly, commercial and military culture; but their souls were not cultivated in harmony with the rhythms of heaven, and only those at the centre of everything under heaven could display this link to the cosmic balance. It was both an intellectual and spiritual conceit. Those aspects have diminished in the resurgent China of today - as it learns the commercial and military cultures of globalisation. But the sense of a condescension to the outside world remains. And, as with so much of Africa, a certain aesthetic is involved. Those in the outside world who have red hair are ugly. Forest Whitaker, playing Idi Amin in the film The Last King of Scotland, articulated this and it is shared by the Chinese. Together with all its other aspects, racism flourishes because something Other simply looks ludicrous.

In Iran, long before the advent of Islam in the 7th century AD, the country (Persia) was dominated by Zoroastrianism - in all its fundamental aspects and legends the antecedent of Christianity, with its single God, its universal conflict between a principle of good and a principle of evil (God and a 'Satan' figure), its virgin birth and its central messianic prophet. This religion began around 1400 BC but flourished with its adoption by Cyrus the Great about 550 BC but, even so, Cyrus promulgated the world's first bill of human rights (to do with religious freedom), and the cycle of legends from Persian antiquity were collected together in the 10th century AD in a great epic poem, the Shahnameh, authored by the Persian equivalent of Homer, Ferdowsi. Except that his characters are many times more complex and tumultuous than Achilles and Odysseus and, above all, the philosophical messages of the epic are more cosmopolitan than anything authored in the West before the 18th century Enlightenment and, particularly, Romanticism's fascination with the East. There are famous passages in the Persian epic where Zoroastrian, Hindu, Chinese, Greek, Roman and Christian philosophies are paraded and carefully debated (with approval being given to Christian ethics and non-violent modesty).

These antecedents to Islam were not obliterated with the advent of the new religion and the triumph of Shi'ite thought. The heroic past is still part of a national consciousness. It mingles unobtrusively with the heroic apocalypse of Shi'ism, whereby the 'Hidden Iman' will one day (soon) reappear and history will restart in a new epoch of justice for all the world. This is not only a parallel with the Christian expectation of the 'Second Coming' of Christ, but a parallel with the struggle for justice that has been part of Persian history since Cyrus and which was the central theme of the Shahnameh. This is not a racism in the same sense as one might take, however sophisticated, subtle, and thoughtful, the Chinese and African senses of resurgence and superiority. After all, the Iranians are meant to be an 'Aryan' race, ethnically more linked to Europeans than Arabs (although what this means to all those of Mongolian descent, whose ancestors tore through Persia with the Mongol hordes of about 1220 is another question). But, because of the efforts of the international community to isolate today's Iran, a sense of self-righteous pride and ethnic certainty has grown, and this crosses both liberal and conservative religious lines.

What these examples mean is that, in the 21st century, new discriminations are growing - not yet peaking, not yet even consciously flourishing, but growing all the same. They are not interventionist and invasive; they are not crude; they do not see other races as sub-human as in so much historical European racism - but they do assert pride in a national or continental group that sees itself as intrinsically different to others, and in a group with markers that are either visible or politicised; and such groups want not only to construct a nation but an internationalism based not only on peaceful equity but a subliminal, though rapidly surfacing, sentiment that it is 'our turn' after so many long years of denigration and forced inferiority. It is the advent of a multiculturalism on Other terms - not a non-racism but the genuine meaning of multi-racism.

It should be, as I said, an interesting century with, in the expectation of this author, a maturation point in about three decades from today. Already, European countries are behind the state of play, determinedly trying to be 'liberal' in somehow accommodating the peoples and cultures from elsewhere. But the dramas and melodramas being enacted in Western societies - as they grapple with 'minorities' who are stubbornly resisting integration, refusing to be reduced to a few colourful carnivals and festivals that are fun, community-friendly and harmless - merely reflect a reality of the wider world where these 'minorities' are the great majorities, and everyone in the diasporas knows secretly that a great historical moment is about to come.