Latest Updates: ethnicity RSS
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thabet
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thabet
Ariane Sherine recalls an incident I am very familiar with. Though I have to say, no one has asked me that question in the UK, perhaps for fear of being branded a racist. Instead, the people who tend to ask me that question happen to be fellow Muslims.
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thabet
Omid Djalili says he is often cast as “the Arab scumbag” on the big screen, or asked to do Muslim stereotypes.
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johnpi
Root of the Malaysian controversy over ‘Allah’ may be in internalized British colonial prejudices that Malay Muslims are ‘precious flowers that need to be protected.’
The British colonial rule of Malaya set precise ethno-religious boundaries, with a certain level of protection for the Muslim Bumiputra, which the independent nation, and its constitution and legislation, have ideologically maintained.
Although there is clear evidence that the majority Muslim Malays have benefited from such privileges and closed the social and economic gaps with the other ethnic populations, particularly the Chinese, the continued reliance upon protectionist measures has helped to create a general feeling that these privileges are essential to maintain the equality of Muslim Malays vis-a-vis the non-Muslim Malaysians of other ethnic groups.
This way of thinking is arguably an internalization of British colonial opinions, in which Muslim Malays were seen as admirable for their artistic ability and beautiful “heritage”, but otherwise lazy by nature, unadapted to business and childish in their way of being. To the British, these negative descriptions were not made as criticisms but rather as statements of ‘natural’ fact. Hence, to preserve and protect this population, the British implemented particular protections, which at the end proved to be counterproductive in many respects.
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thabet
Trouble in Bosnia:
[...]
The economy is in tatters, with unemployment exceeding 40 percent. Serbs are talking openly of secession. Croats are leaving the country in droves. Religious schisms are widening. In December, street protests erupted after Bosnian Muslim school officials in Sarajevo tried to ban “Santa Claus” from delivering gifts to kindergartens.
There are also reports of Croats walking out of the Bosnian-Croat Federation government leading to a fear of renewed conflict.
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thabet
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thabet
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thabet
More protests in western China:
A witness told the BBC that as many as 2,000 ethnic Han Chinese have been demonstrating in the capital Urumqi.
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thabet
A news report on the insurgency in southern Thailand by ethnic Malay Muslims.
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yahya
Welcome to a long hot summer. The English and Welsh Defence Leagues alongside Casuals United are recruiting football supporters to join their street demos against “Islamic extremism”. As is the way of the world nowadays, they don’t claim to be racist, but they are having trouble recruiting Muslims and other efniks to their version of Englishness or whatever. Two of their previous demos in Luton and Birmingham have degenrated into chants of “Muslims out” and random attacks on “coloured” members of the public.
This lot are playing on the wafer-thin line that there is no Islamophobia between anti-Islamism and colour racism — but it keeps breaking down of course, much to the embarassment and consternation of those drawing room and blogosphere types who’ve lived off the distinction for years now.
[Trevor] Kelway [spokesperson for Casuals United] denied the league was racist. “We would march alongside Muslims and Jews who are against militant Islam,” he said. “There were none on Saturday and an all-white group doesn’t look good. But they can join the EDL as long as they accept an English way of life. It is the people who threaten with bombs and violence and threaten and bomb our troops – they don’t belong here.”Kelway said he had recently taken over as spokesman because the previous mouthpiece for the organisation was “Islamophobic”.
A spokesman for the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight said: “There are a number of fascist elements that have attached themselves to EDL and Casuals United, but these groups are not extreme rightwing organisations.”
Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, has said the events in Birmingham were “nothing to do with us”. The clashes had reminded him “very much of the position just before the £20m riots in Bradford” in 2001 when whites and Asians fought over two nights. He accused the left and the UAF of trying to turn young Muslims “into stormtroopers for their leftist revolution”.
(Source: Guardian)
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thabet
The state’s need to define the boundaries of ‘religion’ and ‘race’:
A London school, the [Jewish Free School], rejected a boy whose mother’s conversion to Judaism it did not recognise.
Faith schools may discriminate on religious grounds but the Court of Appeal held that this involved a test of ethnicity – which is unlawful.
More commentary from Simon Rocker and Ruth Gledhill.
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thabet
Beating the censors: web keeps up to the minute with the Urumqi clashes.
Or follow Al-Jazeera’s Melissa Chan who is in the area.
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razib, murtad fitri
Fondly, Greenland Loosens Danish Rule. this part is interesting:
The right to self-determination, particularly for indigenous people like Greenland’s Inuit, more commonly known as Eskimos, was a recurring theme this weekend. Two exotically dressed visitors from Norway’s Sami Parliament, which represents the country’s reindeer herders, appeared at a trade exposition here on Saturday, marveling at how far the Greenlanders had come.
“They’re many steps farther along than we are,” said Marianne Balto, Parliament’s vice president. “It gives hope to the Sami people.”
to some extent this is like church-state separation. a really nice clean idea in the abstract, but where do you end up drawing the line? the greenlanders are luckly that they are the majority in greenland. if they lived in denmark it wouldn’t matter, they’re barely a moderate sized town (a substantial minority of the residents of greenland are ethnic dates, and intermarriage means that there are few “pure” greenlanders remaining. apparently a substantial proportion of the capital’s population can trace their lineage back to a 19th century jewish american merchant). there are 2 to 3 times more sami than the whole population of greenland, but they’re dispersed across 3 nations and minorities across much of their traditional homeland.
quebec is illustrative. the “first nations” of northern quebec always threaten that they will secede from quebec and rejoin canada if quebec secedes. but what about diversity within the first nations? someone has to draw a line somewhere. not all peoples are created equal.
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razib, murtad fitri
i had some further thoughts today on the persecution of the rohingya in burma. clearly there’s a plain out & out racist element here insofar as the dark-skinned “bengali” rohingya are different from most of the other ethnicities of burma, aside naturally from the indian minority which arrived during the british raj (most of whom left, but of those who remain many have switched their identity from hindu to buddhist in the surveys i’ve seen).
my thoughts were triggered by the fact that the rohingya do not use bengali script, but traditionally used arabic modified scripts (like urdu, ‘hanafi,’ etc.), and more recently have used burmese or roman script. the rohingya are also uniformly muslim. the burmese, in particular the dominant ethnic bamar, do not view them as a national minority because they are perceived to be recent immigrants from bengal. the rohingya themselves don’t seem to agree with this, and many claim arab or non-bengali antecedents. the latter is not totally atypical for south asian muslims, who wish to suggest exogenous origins so as to identify with the ‘ashraf’ elite muslims. but with the rohingya there are i think more details in their specific circumstance, most especially because there have long been muslims in burma, and many burmese muslims are not rohingya, and these muslims do not suffer the same degree of persecution as the rohingya.
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thabet
There has been speculation since the start of the year that the owner of Leyton Orient is thinking of moving out of its 70-year home in east London.
Some fans are suggesting that the ethnic profile of Leyton has changed so much that most of their supporters, largely white English, no longer live in the area; thus, it makes financial sense to move to an area where their supporters live — a predominantly white area further up the Central line or out into Essex. (I’ve been to Brisbane Road a few times and, yes, it is largely white.)
Workers from the new EU countries in, like Poland, are accused of not developing an interest in the local club because they are in the area for a short period.
Another complaint is that second generation Asians and blacks who do watch and play football tend to support successful clubs like Arsenal or Manchester United* rather than local sides. In my experience, this is probably also true (but not exclusively so; family and friends in Leicester support the local football club).
This would probably make for an interesting study given how much the game has changed, but I think trying to blame the misfortunes of a struggling lower league club on the local Asian or black population is a bit harsh, if not outright stupidity**. It appeals to a prejudice that is rife across the country (‘foreigners are taking over’, ‘over way of life is dying’).
*I have yet to meet a Bangladeshi who doesn’t support Liverpool.
**The inequality in the top tiers of the game make it difficult for a system comprised of 90-odd professional clubs to sustain itself.
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thabet
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razib, murtad fitri
a TA reader sent me a link to this interesting paper, Marriage in colour: race, religion and spouse selection in four American mosques:
In this study, marriage serves as the point of entry into discussions about race, religion, and identity in American mosques. The experience of minority status in the US shapes the ways Muslim immigrants construct difference. The intersections of race, class, gender and religion emerge as Arab and South Asian Muslim Americans talk about interracial marriage and preferences for lighter-skinned mates. Muslim American children of immigrants test the boundaries of what constitutes an eligible spouse by drawing on religious sources that challenge their parents’ ideologies of colour and racial prejudices. Islam serves as a common moral ground between generations that came of age in different cultures, creating a space for negotiating conflicting visions. Long after religion has faded as the cornerstone of social protest against racism in the US, Muslim youth in American mosques revive it in debates about race and colour.
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thabet
The European Union Fundamental Rights Agency has completed its first ever EU-wide survey of immigrant and ethnic minority groups’ experiences of discrimination and victimisation in everyday life.
Based on a quick skim read of their survey methodology (pdf), only groups considered most at risk of discrimination were surveyed (see pages 11 and 12).
The results will be published in detail throughout 2009, culminating in the Fundamental Rights Conference in December, although a summary of sorts has been made available (pdf). (The first of the detailed reports is about the Roma, who reported he highest levels of discrimination.)
The results indicate that most people who had suffered some kind of discrimination did not report their experience because they did not believe anything would happen.
Islam in Europe has compiled some of the results from Muslim-majority ethnic groups considered by the survey (North Africans, Somalis and Turks, plus Iraqis in Sweden and Albanians in Italy).
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johnpi
I am a South Asian not for Bobby Jindal….
For many, including South Asians, what will matter more than Jindal’s retrogressive positions will be his veneer: a well educated young Indian politician whose family achieved the American dream and more. For Republicans, a party with almost no diversity, he will be something different – a “beige” (instead of white) face that still has the long-standing and comforting desire to prevent women from controlling their own bodies and stop immigrants from trying to live a decent and healthy life. Like many who oppose the right of women to choose, Jindal has turned a deaf ear to the known secrets of South Asian women’s lives – the lives of women in his own community.
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johnpi
Solidarity, racial and ideological, with Bobby Jindal.
Today It makes me very proud to see a 37 year old fellow Indian-American, literally one of us, become such a shining star in the higher circles in US. Granted, the Republican Party is not very popular in US these days due to the recent harmful influence of the right wing of the party that forced a narrow and one-sided agenda on the nation. For the welfare of US the Republican Party must correct its course and get back on track as the party of Abraham Lincoln that abolished slavery in US and fought a civil war to end the oppression of African-Americans in US.
The leader to bring back the Republican Party to its original moorings of fairness, free enterprise and efficient government is Gov Bobby Jindal. America became a great nation not by pursuing the regressive socialist policies favored in Europe and Asia, but by following the unique free enterprise policies that encourage initiative in every individual and rewards them. We all who come from South Asia know very well what following socialist policies means for a nation.
Universal health care? Leaving aside the question of whether anything Obama is proposing resembles actual socialism, can somebody please illuminate for me what is the racial memory of South Asians that he avers regarding socialism?
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razib, murtad fitri
aziz’s pointer to asma gull hussein’s post in the daily beast illustrates something i mentioned earlier. she says:
“Your ancestors were the Moors,” my mom said, “who conquered Spain.”
“But Mom, I thought we were Mongolian,” I whined, confused
actually this isn’t too surprising. i’ve heard other brown south asian muslims allude to the moorish connection to explain the physical similarities to mixed black-white-and-amerindian peoples of latin america.
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aziz
There’s a funny excerpt from Asma Gull Hasan’s new book Red, White, and Muslim
at The Daily Beast, about being mistaken for Latino as a child. This happens to me all the time whenever I travel to California in particular, though it never happened once in my nine years in texas that I recall.
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razib, murtad fitri
socioethnic pecking orders are funny. below i mention that many south asian muslims take pride in their trivial fleck of persian ancestry. the christians of kerala are syrian christians, and though there are about 10-20 times as many christians in syria as brahmins, every other syrian christian i meet seems to have come from a brahmin convert family (which means that most brahmins in kerala are christian!). among south indians, i have encountered people from andhara pradesh who take umbrage with being confused with madrasis (those are the real south indians). in the ethography i recall reading that north indian dalits sometimes don’t want to be seen as in the same category as south indian dalits, because the pecking order here is pretty obvious (ceteris paribus being north indian is preferable to being south indian). punjabis take pride in their scythian ancestry. high caste hindu mythologists make up stupid stuff up about how their aryan ancestors migrated from the north pole.
contrast this with persians; muslims, but despite the fact that many have arab ancestry, they are snobbishly proud of being persian. the chinese, japanese and koreans are so proud of their purity and lack of taint they sometimes wander into the bizarro-world of pretending as if they evolved from a distinct proto-human species from other humans! do the scandinavians ever claim they are greek or italian in ancestry? do the greeks claim that they have jewish heritage?
there are some people who have an inferiority complex. muslims in south asia and africa will claim persian & arab origins, though obviously most of their heritage is the same as the local populations. mestizo individuals often self-identify as white. a lot of this seems to be due to aesthetics, black and brown people seem to perceive themselves as less attractive as less black and brown people. but though the european look is now somewhat preferred in east asia, they’re still continuing with the fiction of pure autochthonous origins, so it can’t explain all of it.
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thabet
A look at the Muslims who fought for the USSR in the Afghanistand.
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thabet
More news from Stable India: Assam’s troubles with immigration.
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thabet
Sarfraz Manzoor finds Ziauddin Sardar’s latest offering on British Asian popular culture is “only fitfully successful”.
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thabet
I just returned from my company’s iftar dinner.
I was a little late and something struck me as I tried to find a table.
All the English (white) people were sitting on the same table together.
All the Filipino people were sitting on the same table together.
The rest of the tables were filled with Indians.
By chance (?) I only found a table with the half-dozen (British-based) Pakistanis who work in the office.
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thabet
Perry Anderson looks closely at Kemalism’s “brittle secularism”, noting the complicated picture prior to the (official) end of the Ottoman sultanate than is typically portrayed in the literature of certain Islamist groups.
But, as noted earlier, Kemalism was not the sharp break with the ‘past’ it attempted to be or is thought to be:
Though it broke, sharply and abruptly, with Ottoman culture in one fundamental respect by abolishing its script and so at a stroke cutting off new generations from all written connection with the past, in its distance from the masses Kemalism not only inherited an Ottoman tradition, but accentuated it.
Plus, Anderson notes:
Kemalism did not so much separate religion from the state as subordinate it to the state, creating ‘directorates’ that took over the ownership of all mosques, appointment of imams, administration of pious foundations – in effect, turning the faith into a branch of the bureaucracy.
The article also touches on Kemal, the man:
Towards the end, photographs of Kemal have something of the glazed look of a worn roué: a general incongruously reduced to a ravaged lounge lizard, terminal blankness nearby. Stricken with cirrhosis, he died in late 1938, at the age of 57.
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thabet
Another battle in the Jewish “culture war”.
(Via Angry Arab.)
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thabet
Counting people in the US: “White people” may be a minority in the US by 2042. And apparently it is difficult to count the number of Jews, Muslims and other smaller religious groups who live in the Land of the Free.
