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ADL fights all forms of antisemitism and bias, using innovation and partnerships to drive impact. A global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism and battling bigotry wherever and whenever it happens, ADL works to protect democracy and ensure a just and inclusive society for all.

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The first step in stopping racism is understanding what it actually is. But that's not always easy. If you're not sure what racism is and what it looks like, that's okay. We've put together this handy guide to help you.

What is racism?

Have you ever wondered why a black person can say the n-word, or why Asian people can make jokes about their own race, but as soon as a white person joins in, it's seen as racist?

Well, the reason why some things are considered racist and others aren't comes down to three important ideas: history, institutions and power.

Why is history important in understanding racism?

History gives us an explanation for why some races face discrimination and disadvantages. For example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have to deal with a number of barriers that other Australians don't face. They are less likely to be selected for jobs, which leads to a lower standard of living and less access to health care, leading to a shorter average life expectancy and higher suicide rates. The reasons for these disadvantages go all the way back to Australia's colonial past, when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were widely seen as inferior.

'But the First Fleet was so long ago,' you might say. 'Can't Aboriginal Australians just get over it?' The short answer is 'no'. The long answer is that you can't just 'get over' a racist history. Not to mention that Australia's colonial history of hundreds of years is quite a short time, when compared to the thousands of years of Indigenous history and culture that existed before this.

Why are institutions important in understanding racism?

Institutions play an important role in perpetuating racism. They include schools, the court system, the media, and organisations.

Institutions and history work together to give certain groups of people more of a say in how their country is built. The history of British colonisation in Australia means that our laws, schools and other bodies were shaped by the dominant group, while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were excluded from this process.

This meant that racist government policies such as the White Australia policy and The Stolen Generations happened without much resistance from the dominant, white group. The high rates of Aboriginal deaths in police custody and of imprisonment of Aboriginal young people are just two modern examples of how institutionalised racism can shape racist policies that have long-lasting effects.

Power and racism

We've taken a look at how history and institutions add to racial disadvantages. But the most important way these two things work together is by creating an imbalance of power based on race. This is why a black person can use the n-word, or why Asian people can make jokes about their own race. There is no imbalance of power in that exchange. But when a dominant race uses certain language or makes stereotypical jokes about another race that lacks the same historical and institutional power, this is called 'racism'.

Remember that it's not just language that can be racist. Racist stereotypes can have a big impact on other aspects of a person's life. Certain races and cultures are the targets of stereotypes that paint them as lazy, dirty or untrustworthy. This can have a pretty big impact on things like their job or housing opportunities.

It's also important to remember that racism can occur among minority groups. Everyone, including minority groups, who lives on Australian land also benefits from the systemic racism against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

What does racism look like?

The first step in tackling racism is recognising what the different types of racism look like, and identifying appropriate ways to handle them.

Casual or indirect racism

Subtle or 'casual' racism can also appear in the form of a 'microaggression'. This is an intentional or unintentional offensive message that targets a person based entirely on their being a member of a minority group. Any form of racism is unacceptable, even a comment or an action that is subtle or occurs in a casual environment. It's just not on.

Examples of casual racism include:

intentionally choosing not to sit next to a person because you feel uncomfortable about the colour of their skin

telling a person of a different race who was born and raised in Australia that they speak 'good English'

making fun of someone's background, even if it's disguised as a joke.

Direct racism

This type of racism is conscious and intentional - for example, someone writing a negative Instagram post about a particular ethnic group.

Systemic racism

This type of racism occurs when organisations in our society such as the government, media companies, police, hospitals and schools discriminate against certain groups of people. This stems from institutions and power throughout history, as we've discussed above. For example, the Black Lives Matter global movement is a direct response to police brutality against black people, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Why is racism a problem?

For anyone, experiencing abuse or comments that make you feel uncomfortable can have an impact on your wellbeing. It can impact your mood and if it happens often enough, this can negatively affect your self-esteem and confidence. Racism can also often make you feel unsafe or put you in physical danger.

Racism can make people of different ethnic groups feel unwelcome and isolated, and may even affect their opportunities to study, work and socialise. This can later affect their quality of life, access to health care and life expectancy.

What can you do about racism?

So, you've had a read about what racism is and what it can look like in day-to-day life - what can you do now? What's important is that there's always something you can do, whether it's learning more or exploring how you can support people from different cultural backgrounds. If you've still got some questions, check out some videos to help you further understand racism.

Want to chat with a peer worker who can listen to you and support you? You can ask questions and chat about your thoughts in a non-judgmental space. Book a free, text-based session with ReachOut PeerChat.

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The first step in stopping racism is understanding what it actually is. But that's not always easy. If you're not sure what racism is and what it looks like, that's okay. We've put together this handy guide to help you.

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Race is natural, Racism is not

The first time my son met an African American kid, he was shocked.

"The sun is extreme here," he told me, "Look at that kid's skin."

My five-year-old has been playing for hours with this boy he met on a beach in Puerto Rico. It was his first encounter with someone with black skin. We had just moved from Argentina where less than 2% of people have dark skin.

My son didn't perceive the other boy's as different because of his color- he was only concerned about the sun effects on his skin. This observation taught me a lesson. Race is a social concept; it's not part of our DNA, we learn it as we grow up.

Our mind is race agnostic until society teaches us that not all skin colors are equal.

The Color of our Minds

Kids naivety aside, the color of our skins are indeed determined by the sun. I'm not talking about getting tanned. Nature is wise; human skin has adapted over centuries as our early ancestors migrated across our planet.

There's a direct correlation between skin color and latitude. The closer to the Equator, the darker the skin of those populations - the body creates a shield to protect itself from ultraviolet rays. In areas where winters are more extreme, and sunny days are limited - like in Chicago where I live now - a whiter skin helps produce more vitamin D.
All people alive today are Africans - like it or not, that's how everything started.
The Homo Sapiens species evolved in Africa. We are all descendants of that continent as explained in this fascinating National Geographic piece. Modern genetic research has shown that all humans are closely related. We all have the same collection of genes, but slightly different versions of some of them.
The color of our skin has nothing to do with race - it's a byproduct of adaptation.
Science has proven that the different types of skin are a consequence of how our ancestors dealt with sun exposure. However, when we think about race, the first thing that comes to mind is skin color. And, what's even worse, not all are equal- white skin seems more special than the rest.

This hierarchy is artificial though. Someone got the science wrong, and many people conveniently took it as true. Hint: it helped start a war.

Science Debunks Race Myths

"The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis."

- Craig Venter, DNA sequencing pioneer

The article mentioned above sheds light on how science created a racial hierarchy.

Studies performed by Dr. Samuel Morton wrongfully concluded, by studying skulls from various ethnic groups, that some races were superior to others.

Back in the 1820-30's this Philadelphia physician collected and measured hundreds of human skulls to confirm that there were differences among the races - in particular, a difference in brain size.

Morton assigned the highest brain capacity to Europeans - with the English highest of all. Second was the Chinese, third was Southeast Asians and Polynesians, fourth was American Indians. The smallest brain capacity was assigned to Africans and Australian aborigines.

In the decades before the American Civil War, Morton's ideas were used to justify slavery. Also, his belief that Native Americans could not integrate into modern industrial society was central to Andrew Jackson's policy of Indian Removal.

Modern science has debunked the myth that certain races have more gifted brains than others. However, many people still take that belief as true. Our society is still paying a high price for it.

One Color Doesn't Fit All

There are several manifestations of racism. Understanding them will help you understand how other minds work when it comes to the color of your skin.

Internalized racism refers to the feelings of self-hatred among oppressed groups. Their traits have been devalued in Western societies.

Colorism is discrimination based on skin color - darker-skinned groups are treated worse than lighter skin ones by whites or even members of their own race.

Subtle racism is described as a person who has implicit racial or other negative attitudes towards another group. It doesn't always include acts of bigotry; it also involves everyday behaviors such as ignoring, ridiculing or treating people as less worthy of respect because of their race.
Regardless of the prejudice degree - many people are suffering the color of their skin, rather than feel proud of it.
Most recently, reverse racism has also gotten the media attention. Whites, who have been historically privileged, feel left out when society is trying to level the field for minority groups. However, many social activists challenge this notion.

Shadism and colorism are two phenomena that have flourished because of social pressure too. People feel insecure about their aspect and want to adapt to social ideals. Like the skin-whitening app on Facebook, that Vaseline launched in India, to allow users to whiten their profile pictures.

The Art of Intolerance

"In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate." -Toni Morrison

We have a hard time understanding and accepting those who are different - either because of how they look or think.

Intolerance is natural, rejecting the unknown is part of a self-mechanism. However, considering the limitless access to education and information, it's hard to believe that racism continues to be so prominent. It's unacceptable that, in the 21st-century leaders continue to manipulate people by turning a (racial) group into a common enemy - they've turned intolerance into an art.
Rather than taking people for who they are; we are told to judge them by the group they belong to.
Professors at San Francisco State University released a study titled "When an Educated Black Man Becomes Lighter in the Mind's Eye" exploring a concept they call "skin tone memory bias."

The study provides evidence for the subconscious bias where educated black men are remembered as having lighter skin. The results also imply that successful black people are thought of as exceptions to their race.

Implicit Bias - also referred as Unconscious Bias - include the positions we hold about others. It's a filter that clouds our conclusions about other groups or races.
Past experiences shape this filter - we jump to conclusions without reasoning or thinking.
By the age of six, we start to make unconscious associations. Though scientists link racial bias to the activation of the brain's amygdala - which governs our fear response - stereotypic images play a more prominent influence.

Movies, magazines, the news, to name a few, feed our mind with distorted symbols that shape our definition of race.

Color Blinded, not Color Blind

What we don't know we don't know, gets us into trouble.

Your biases are not evident to you. However, your blind spots are always visible to others, as I wrote here. Awareness is important but is not enough.

The incident at Starbucks is a perfect example. The Chicago Tribune said the event wasn't about 'unconscious bias,' but about racist behavior in America. It wasn't that the employees weren't aware of their biases; they acted upon them.
The paradox of racism in the US is that people are more prejudicial than they want to admit.
During the past decades, measures of explicit bias have declined. Take interracial marriages for example - only 11% of respondents said it disapprove it (Gallup, 2013). However, people are not as accepting and open-minded as they self-report on surveys.

Americans care about being perceived as non-prejudicial.

Starbucks recently announced that it would close its stores to train all its employees on what is being called "racial-bias education." The problem with the implicit-association test (IAT) is deceiving. Most people feel deflated after taking the test; they feel guilty about their associations (i.e., darker skin with violence).

Also, as David French explains in this piece, the IAT results are also unreliable. The author and many others claim to have taken the test many times and their results varied between 'woke' and 'bigoted.'
Moreover, the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior is weaker than we think.
Recent research shows there's little evidence that modifying Implicit Bias, drives behavior change. Being aware that you are a compulsory eater, won't make you stop eating in between meals. You get the point.

The worst part is that putting all the responsibility on the Unconscious Bias removes ownership. People can assume it's not their fault that they being blinded by the color of someone else's skin -the Implicit Bias should be blamed for it.
We cannot leave people off the hook.
The notion of equality doesn't help either. That's why I prefer inclusion or, even better, acceptance.

Equality is about being color blind - we are all the same. The problem is that, rather than celebrating our differences, it feels we are trying to wash them away. We are all unique, not special as I explained here. Being different should make us feel proud, not ashamed.

We must overcome being blinded by our intolerance, not to become blind to our differences. Diversity of thinking makes a society more interesting, pluralistic, and prosperous.

We shouldn't force people to fit in, but to embrace their uniqueness.

Don't Forget Cultural Biases

Being prejudicial is not socially accepted, that's why people say they are not.

John Dovidio, a professor at Yale University, estimates that the majority of white Americans - about two thirds to three quarters - have implicit, racial biases.

You may not be aware of how your bias affects your behaviors - but it has an enormous impact in the workplace and your everyday life.
We believe that the way we live is how everyone else should too.
Cultural bias  - judging other cultures or groups based on our individual cultural preferences - drives misunderstanding and prejudice too. It limits your ability to learn from people who live differently.
Cultural bias prevents us from seeing other people's humanity.
Ethnocentrism is the idea that a person's own culture and experiences are the norm. We believe that our group is at the center of everything. This belief is based one's sense of superiority. For example, religion-centric constructs claiming a divine association like " God's Chosen People " or "God's Promised Land."

We Have Biases, Now What?

"Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong." - Muhammad Ali

Values are hard to change; so, how can we produce behavior change without asking people to change their values?

Social norms do influence people but don't change their thinking. Since the 1960s, the civil rights legislation made racism more subtle. Not only because it is immoral, but it became illegal to discriminate.
To solve prejudice, we need to treat it as a habit, according to Patricia Devine - an stereotypes expert.
A habit is ingrained in our way of behaving both consciously and not. It's influenced by external and internal factors. The author believes that an effective prejudice habit intervention requires addressing both Personal Awareness and Societal Awareness.

Devine recommends five strategies:

1. Stereotype replacement:

Let's say you meet someone who's Latino, and your immediate reaction is thinking that the person might be an illegal resident. What to do?

First, recognize your automated reaction. Rather than judging yourself, realize it's driven by a stereotype. Second, label the thought as 'stereotypical.' Third, reflect on what drove your response. This process is meant to undo your automated reaction and challenge the stereotypes in your head.

2. Counter-stereotypic imaging:

Rigid ideas and images that you have about people in your mind. That's what a stereotype is. To defeat those images, look for examples that debunk the stereotype.

As I mentioned previously, science wrongly determined that African Americans were less smart than whites. Well, think of well educated and successful examples. Barack Obama and Oprah are a powerful demonstration that being black is not an inferior race, as some want us to think.

3. Individuating:

Prejudice is based on assuming that everyone that is part of a group will behave according to the stereotypical behavior. We evaluate people for the race or group they belong, not for who they are.

Individuating is about evaluating every person for who they are. To assess each based on personal skills, merits, and behaviors; not through the lens of group-based attributes.

4. Perspective Taking:

Prejudice is based on misunderstandings but, also, in seeing others through our cultural preferences. Perspective taking is an act of empathy - walk in someone else's shoes.

Think like an anthropologist. Observe without judging (and without applying your bias). When you imagine yourself to be a member of a stereotyped group, you feel close to that group. Empathy lessens the need for automatic reactions.

5. Increasing opportunities for direct contact:

The anthropologist mindset works here too. Interact with people from other racial groups. Join their festivities or social events. Capture what you see without jumping to conclusions.

Focus on what's unique about their experience. Live it first hand. Focus on learning new aspects of their culture; avoid rejecting what's new, unfamiliar or goes against your 'standards.' Accept others lifestyles as valid, even if you don't agree with them.

This might feel uneasy - adapting to other lifestyles always is. Turn it into a learning experience. Not just about others, but also to challenge your own prejudices. Learn to be more accepting and open-minded.

The effort is worthy. It's much better to recognize one was wrong than continuing to let race biases drive your life.

Putting it all Together

My son was right, the color of our skin is a consequence of the sun.

When you understand that the color of the skin is not correlated to anything else, it's easier to realize that the world does not revolve around you. It's not that white people are not superior, no one else is.

Being color blind is wrong; is neither desirable nor possible.

We need to become aware, and embrace, the differences. Let's celebrate each one's uniqueness and promote a culture where diversity of thinking (and looks) is valued, rather than censored.

Having open conversations helps. Having biases is natural, just as the color of your skin. However, being blinded by skin colors is a social and artificial thing - modern science has debunked race stereotypes.

The color of our skin says a lot about our minds. I choose to keep mine open. The brain is a flexible muscle, don't let stereotypes rigidify your thoughts.

Sources
There's no scientific basis for race Vaseline app One thing Americans always get wrong about British people Scientific racism in the transatlantic world One race or several species? Types of racism Interracial marriages approval Chicago Tribune Racism not Unconscious Bias John Dovidio interview Destabilizing stereotypes
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Why Racism Is About the Color of the Mind, Not Your Skin

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Race is natural, Racism is not The first time my son met an African American kid, he was shocked. "The sun is extreme here," he told me, "Look at that kid's skin." My five-year-old has been playing for hours with this boy he met on a beach in Puerto Rico.

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In the 1996 China edition of the Lonely Planet's Guidebook, a text box aside comment from a street interview provided some interesting conversation fodder, "... there is no racism in China because there are no black people," a Chinese woman was reported to have said. This became a little running joke in my small study abroad circle, since I was the only black student in my program of fifty students. It was 1997, and I was in Beijing studying Chinese. "There is no way you could be experiencing any racism in China," one classmate sardonically told me, "because you are the only black person here." We all laughed.

While China is officially home to 55 ethnic minority groups, the Middle Kingdom is far more ethnically homogeneous than the United States. Han Chinese make up 91.59 percent of the population, and the majority of the remaining 8.41 percent are visually indistinguishable from their Han counterparts. In part due to this difference, race and nationality are often conflated in China. A white foreigner is likely to be called laowai, or "old foreigner," while a black foreigner is more likely to be described as heiren, or "black person."

White Americans face no barriers to claiming their nationality, but blacks are often assumed to hail from Africa, a place thought to be more backwards and poorer than China, and one more than likely receiving Chinese government economic aid in the form of loans and infrastructure projects. This leads to either resentment or denigration on the part of some Chinese. The Chinese media tends to focus on the generosity of the Chinese government toward Africa -- a sore point among Chinese who feel their government is not doing enough for the Chinese themselves -- and not on the valuable natural resources gained or access to lucrative growth markets for cheap Chinese goods.

MORE FROM TLN

Traditional standards of beauty in China have also shaped perceptions of black foreigners in the country. In China, "whiteness" is seen as a highly desirable trait for women. Stores that sell beauty products without fail have a wide variety of whitening creams. The Chinese and Western models that fill the screen and print ads all fit one standard type of beauty -- very white skin, tall, thin with jet-black hair. There is even a Chinese saying: "A girl can be ugly, as long as she has white skin."

Growing up in the United States, I looked at Chinese and other Asian people as persons of "color" who shared a similar experience with white racism. There was some sliver of solidarity in being a "band of minorities." For most black people or other people of color in the American cultural context there is some tacit understanding of the mutual experiences of white racism that binds seemingly disparate American ethnic groups together in solidarity. I naively took that assumption with me to China on my first visit. I did not expect that everyone would welcome me with open arms, but I did not expect what I did encounter.

My own experience in China began in the late 90s. While working for a major international language company, I taught English to Chinese people from all socio-economic backgrounds. By all accounts, my supervisors and other teachers respected my skills and knowledge in the classroom. Around 2003, however, I noticed a shift in the market and it became increasingly difficult for me to hold on to assigned classes. There were a number of complaints from students. My supervisor investigated. She clandestinely and randomly listened in on my classes via the company intercom system. After a couple of weeks she called me into her office. She told me I was an excellent teacher and could find little fault in my methods and teaching of the prescribed curriculum. Students just wanted a "different" teacher.

While on break, I overheard students speaking in Chinese about how they were paying so much money and wanted a white instructor. One student went so far as to say, "I don't want to look at his black face all night." There was nothing my supervisor could do. The market was demanding white teachers and the company was responding to that demand. Not only did they want white teachers, they wanted attractive ones. I overheard a number of students discussing and comparing the physical attractiveness of one teacher over another. Students were even willing to accept a white, non-native English speaker over a black, native English speaker. This was a far cry from my first days of teaching English in China in 1999, when students were just happy to have an English speaker in the room.

In the first half of the 20 th century, Chinese and black American intellectuals frequently collaborated. Langston Hughes, the world-renowned black American writer and poet, met Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, in Shanghai in the 1930s to work on theories and language for a universal, pluralistic, transnational form of cooperative nationalism. Paul Robeson, a professional actor/singer and social activist, was also a staunch ally of China's. He actively fundraised for the Chinese Defense League, the precursor of the China Welfare Institute founded by Soong Ching-ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen, a Chinese revolutionary considered to be the founder of the Republic of China (ROC). He also popularized the current Chinese National Anthem, the March of Volunteers, to a global audience by singing the song in Mandarin Chinese for audiences around the world. A number of other black scholars visited China during the first half of the 20 th century, including W.E.B. Dubois, one of the founders of the NAACP, and Rayford Logan, a Howard University history professor.

While in exile in Cuba in the early 60s, black internationalist Robert F. Williams corresponded with Mao Zedong to support the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Mao wrote his, Statement Supporting the Afro-American in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism on August 8, 1963. He declared:

I call on the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals ... whether white, black, yellow, or brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism and support the black people in their struggle against racial discrimination.

Mao issued another statement of support in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But despite these expressions of support, there is scant evidence to prove Mao or any other Chinese political leader at the time would have been willing to align themselves actively with the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Chinese foreign policy in the 1960s mirrored much of that of the West, due in part to the Sino-Soviet split and the coming détente with the U.S.

After the deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai, the era of alignment with the developing world and oppressed peoples gave way to Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic plan for economic development epitomized by his statement, "To get rich is glorious." From the 80s to the present, this new mantra has fueled a single-minded devotion to the pursuit of wealth, leaving little room for concern with past ideals. The isolation of China in the decades before its economic coming of age also limited the exposure most Chinese had to people of other ethnic origins, creating a vacuum of knowledge, drawing in stereotypes and prejudice.

Unlike their parents and grandparents, China's youth have grown up with access to information, entertainment, and art from all over the world. Many have consequently come to reconsider stereotypes of black people, and they are in turn influencing the opinions of their older, more "traditional" relatives. The popularity of American popular culture in China, particularly the NBA, which as of 2011 was made up of 78 percent black players, is an example of this. The NBA has over 41 million combined followers on Sina and Tencent micro-blogs, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The Chinese Basketball Association estimates that there are 300 million people in China who play basketball. NBA stars flock to China on multi-city tours every summer to greet crowds of adoring fans.

My Chinese wife recounted a story of her younger cousin, who became a huge Allen Iverson fan to the dismay of her mother. During every game, she would don a Philadelphia 76ers jersey and plop down in front of the TV to cheer on her favorite basketball player. In order to spend more quality time with her daughter and understand her better, the girl's mother began watching games with her child, and in no time became an avid Sixers fan as well.

Another friend related a story of about his uncle in Beijing, who sent his high school daughter to America for a summer camp. At the end of the camp, during the parent pick-up, his daughter burst into tears as she said goodbye to her summer camp roommate, who just happened to be black. The Chinese father recalled thinking, as he surveyed the scene of his emotionally distraught daughter, "I never thought my daughter could have such an emotional connection with a black person. Maybe I need to rethink my biases."

Many black people from around the globe are living, working and traveling in China now. Some of us are American, European, Latin American and African, with a wide range of cultures, languages, religions and professions that defy neat categorization. While different histories have been a source of racist ideas and assumptions, perhaps our shared present and future will give Chinese a reason to reflect and reconsider.
This post also appears at Tea Leaf Nation, an Atlantic partner site.

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In the 1996 China edition of the Lonely Planet's Guidebook, a text box aside comment from a street interview provided some interesting conversation fodder, "... there is no racism in China because there are no black people," a Chinese woman was reported to have said.

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Beijing

In March, amid the pomp of China's annual rubber-stamp parliament meetings in Beijing, a politician proudly shared with reporters his proposal on how to "solve the problem of the black population in Guangdong." The province is widely known in China to have many African migrants.

"Africans bring many security risks," Pan Qinglin told local media (link in Chinese). As a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the nation's top political advisory body, he urged the government to "strictly control the African people living in Guangdong and other places."

Pan, who lives in Tianjin near Beijing-and nowhere near Guangdong- held his proposal aloft for reporters to see. It read in part (links in Chinese):

"Black brothers often travel in droves; they are out at night out on the streets, nightclubs, and remote areas. They engage in drug trafficking, harassment of women, and fighting, which seriously disturbs law and order in Guangzhou... Africans have a high rate of AIDS and the Ebola virus that can be transmitted via body fluids... If their population [keeps growing], China will change from a nation-state to an immigration country, from a yellow country to a black-and-yellow country."

On social media, the Chinese response has been overwhelmingly supportive, with many commenters echoing Pan's fears. In a forum dedicated to discussions about black people in Guangdong on Baidu Tieba-an online community focused on internet search results-many participants agreed that China was facing a "black invasion." One commenter called on Chinese people (link in Chinese) not to let "thousands of years of Chinese blood become polluted."

The stream of racist vitriol online makes the infamous Chinese TV ad for Qiaobi laundry detergent, which went viral last year, seem mild in comparison. The ad featured a Asian woman stuffing a black man into a washing machine to turn him into a pale-skinned Asian man.

Not about reality

Of course, while a growing number of Africans work and study in China-the African continent's largest trading partner-the notion that black people are "taking over" the world's most populous nation is nonsense. Estimates for the number of sub-Saharan Africans in Guangzhou (nicknamed "Chocolate City" in Chinese) range from 150,000 long-term residents, according to 2014 government statistics, to as high as 300,000-figures complicated by the number of Africans coming in and out of the country as well as those who overstay their visas.

Many of them partner with Chinese firms to run factories, warehouses, and export operations. Others are leaving China and telling their compatriots not to go due to financial challenges and racism.

"Guangdong has come to be imagined to embody this racial crisis of some kind of 'black invasion,'" said Kevin Carrico, a lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia who studies race and nationalism in China. "But this is not about actually existing realities." He continued:

"It isn't so much that they dislike black residents as they dislike what they imagine about black residents. The types of discourses you see on social media sites are quite repetitive-black men raping Chinese women, black men having consensual sex with Chinese women and then leaving them, blacks as drug users and thieves destroying Chinese neighborhoods. People are living in a society that is changing rapidly. 'The blacks' has become a projection point for all these anxieties in society."

The past year or so has seen heated debate among black people living in China about what locals think of them. In interviews with Quartz, black residents referred to online comments and racist ads as more extreme examples, but said they are symptomatic of broader underlying attitudes.

Senegalese journalist Madeleine Thiam in Beijing.

Madeleine Thiam and Christelle Mbaya, Senegalese journalists in Beijing, said they are saddened but not shocked when they are discriminated against in China.

"Sometimes people pinch their noses as I walk by, as if they think I smell. On the subway, people often leave empty seats next to me or change seats when I sit down," said Thiam. "Women have come up to rub my skin, asking if it is 'dirt' and if I've had a shower."

Yet on a recent coffee break most passersby politely admired the fashionable women as if they were going down a catwalk.

One Chinese man, gazing at Thiam in her purple lace blouse and a yellow dress flaring around her hips, let out an admiring "wow" as the elevator doors opened to a third-floor café. Servers greeted their regulars with warm smiles and asked them in English, "How are you?"

Racism or ignorance?

Such experiences speak to the duality of life for black people in China. They may be athletes, entrepreneurs, traders, designers, or graduate students. Some are married to locals and speak fluent Chinese. Yet despite positive experiences and economic opportunities, many are questioning why they live in a place where they often feel unwelcome.

They grapple with the question: Is it racism or ignorance? And how do you distinguish the two?

Paolo Cesar, an African-Brazilian who has worked as a musician in Shanghai for 18 years and has a Chinese wife, said music has been a great way for him to connect with audiences and make local friends. However, his mixed-race son often comes home unhappy because of bullying at school. Despite speaking fluent Mandarin, his classmates do not accept him as Chinese. They like to shout out, "He's so dark!"

The global success of black public figures, such as politicians, actors, and athletes, appears to have a limited effect on Chinese attitudes.

"After people heard my accent, they would often yell out 'Obama!,' in recognition that I was black American," said Jayne Jeje, a marketing consultant from Maryland who has worked all over mainland China and now lives in Hong Kong. "Their perception was that I was somehow better than a black person from Africa because of my Americanness. Part of this is rooted in... mistaken beliefs of American wealth and power versus stereotypes of African poverty and suffering."

In response to international criticism of racism against blacks in China, some commentators have argued that the racism is not as serious as it is in other countries. Hong Kong columnist Alex Lo wrote in the South China Morning Post that criticism from Americans is "rich coming from a country that was founded on black slavery... China has racial problems. But murderous racism against blacks isn't one of them."

And of course racial tensions occur elsewhere, sometimes with ethnic Chinese as the victims. In France this week, Chinese protesters gathered in northeast Paris to protest the shooting of a Chinese man by police. Many complain of racism directed against them, and also of being targeted by gangs (video) of North African descent.

Looking deeper into history, evidence suggests a preference for slaves from East Africa in ancient China. African slavery in the country peaked during the Tang (618 to 907) and Song (960 to 1279) dynasties.

More recently, violence broke out after the Chinese government started providing scholarships allowing African students to study in the country in the 1960s. Many Chinese students resented the stipends Africans received, with tensions culminating in riots in Nanjing in the late 1980s. The riots began with angry Chinese students surrounding African students' dormitories in Hehai University and pelting them with rocks and bottles for seven hours, with crowds later marching through the streets shouting anti-African slogans.

In the past few years, loathing among some Chinese toward foreign men who date local women has led to a recent rise in violent attacks against foreigners.

Staying optimistic

Yet most respondents Quartz interviewed remain optimistic. Vladimir Emilien, a 26-year-old African-American actor and former varsity athlete, said that for him, learning Chinese was crucial to better interactions with locals. Emilien volunteered last year as a coach teaching Beijing youth the finer points of American football. He said that once he was able to have more complex conversations in Chinese, he was struck by the thoughtful questions locals would ask.

Go deep.

"They'd say, What do you think about Chinese perception of black people? How does that make you feel?' So they are aware that there is a lot of negativity around blacks and against Africa as a very poor place."

Emilien hopes that more interactions between Chinese and black individuals will smooth out misunderstandings. But others say that improving relations requires more than black people learning the language, since that shifts responsibility away from the Chinese.

"The government has never done anything serious to clean up racist ideas created and populated by the [turn-of-the-20th-century] intellectuals and politicians that constructed a global racial hierarchy in which the whites were on the top, Chinese the second, and blacks the bottom," said Cheng Yinghong, a history professor at Delaware State University who researches nationalism and discourse of race in China.

Instead of addressing discrimination, the Chinese government has focused on promoting cultural exchanges while pursuing economic partnerships with African countries. However, many have pointed out that relationships appear unbalanced, with China taking Africa's limited natural resources in exchange for infrastructure investment.

"Racism is racism, period, and although some people would say that in different places it is more explicit, nuanced, or implicit, as long as there are victims we have to call it racism and deal with it," said Adams Bodomo, a professor of African studies focused on cross-cultural communication at the University of Vienna. "China can't be the second-largest economy in the world and not expect to deal with these issues."
You can follow the writer on Twitter at Correction: A quote from Jayne Jeje's husband was inadvertently included and attributed to her. It's been replaced with a quote from her directly. @joannachiu.

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China has an irrational fear of a "black invasion" bringing drugs, crime and interracial marriage

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Beijing In March, amid the pomp of China's annual rubber-stamp parliament meetings in Beijing, a politician proudly shared with reporters his proposal on how to "solve the problem of the black population in Guangdong." The province is widely known in China to have many African migrants.

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[Compilation] Opinion and analysis pieces about the notorious #RacistChineseAd

The opinions and analysis below are chronologically organised

1. On why the racist Chinese ad MAY NOT be as racist as you think

By Roberto Castillo for AfricansInChina.Net

On May 26th, The Shanghaiist broke the (SinoAfrican) internet by bringing a Chinese ad to the attention of its mainly American audience. The ad - which you can watch below (Youku see here) - is a commercial for a Chinese detergent called Qiaobi and has been deemed as 'highly racist' or the 'most racist advert ever' by a whole host of American media outlets like this, this and this.

In the video, a paint-splattered black man catcalls a Chinese woman and approaches her confidently as she lures him with her finger. As he attempts to kiss her, she places a detergent bag in his mouth and shoves his body into a washing machine. Once the machine cycle is done, a young (robotish, if you ask me) Asian man emerges as clean as can be. At no point during the short ad, are we the audience aware of the status of the men in relation to the woman. Is the black man her boyfriend, fiancee, or husband? My original reading! Or is he only the painter, or maybe an 'immigrant worker' (as one of my Chinese friends in Australia saw it)? Is the young and clean machine-made Asian man the replacement for the black guy? Where will he replace him, in painting, or in a relationship?

Amid the outcry, users of diverse Chinese online platforms have reported that the ad is running on national television and before the movies at Wanda Cinemas (owner of AMC theatres). Contrasting versions report that the ad is no where to be found both in offline and online media environments on the Mainland. Latest reports (May 27) claim that the ad has disappeared from Chinese social media platforms.

There are a few ways in which one can read and interpret this ad - I will come back to these readings some paragraphs down. Meanwhile, after cringing in horror and anger when I first saw the ad, I became even more irritated to read the ways in which the ad was decoded by American writers, and the ways they explained it to their (Western) audiences. In short, the discussion was totally ki dnapped by the (hegemonic) way of discussing issues of race that Americans are so eager to export/impose. Don't get me wrong, I think that the ad is fucked up in every single, possible aspect. In nicer words, scholarly, it is profoundly (and maybe naively) insensitive and very very problematic. As the most recent manifestation of a century-old trope it is indeed 'racist'. But I don't necessarily see it as evidence of a 'Chinese' racism, or a culturally specific form of racism. And this is what troubles me.

Having done research for the last 6 years on African presence in China, and being very interested in all kinds of SinoAfrican exchanges, I'm often suspicious of people/students arguing that China is a 'racist' society (esp. when they've never been to China). 'Really, how do you know that?' I usually reply. Again and again, people point to incidents like the detergent ad. (By the way, this is not the first online incident relating to blackness in China. It may be, however, the one that has gotten the most play ever). The ensuing explanation is often short - as if the instances were always self-explanatory - and concludes that Chinese are ALSO 'racist' and that there's 'racism' in China. At this point, I usually go into 'I can't overemphasise' mode, overemphasising indeed the importance of understanding that 'racism' (and the same goes for the constructed category of 'race') is a context-based multilayered phenomenon, with uncountable ramifications (e.g. specific hybridisations with class and gender), that needs to be understood against the lived realities of diverse social contexts. In other words, there's no one kind of 'racism', and 'racism' (whatever you may call that) is culturally specific.

The way I understand 'racism' (and feel free to lambast me for this, if you need), is as a covert, systematic, and persistent (e.g.that is almost inescapable) form of discrimination embedded in social institutions (like the mighty American police, in case you were looking for an example), that grants privileges to one group while denying them to others. Racial prejudices, and isolated forms of discrimination, although central to 'racism' are not inherently always 'racist'. T he '-ism' here, at least for me, denotes a set of systemic practices. These practices, embedded in the '-ism', are just not present in China (and I have countless evidence to prove this). Any foreigner (whites included) that has lived in China knows that there are plenty of racial prejudices and forms of discrimination (not only against foreigners) and that they are usually very overt (as you now know), rather than covert. Often, as I tell my students, people claiming that there's racism in China seem more interested in showing (in a justificatory way) that there are 'racist' societies outside the Euro-American world. Interestingly, they are usually rather lazy (or incompetent) to point towards evidence of deep-seated, systemic, practices of 'racialisation' as those pervasive in, say, the land of freedom and justice, the USA. Indeed, from my conversations with multiple non-Western foreigners in China throughout the years (many of them from Africa), I have argued here that while many feel that some Chinese people dislike foreigners, 'there is no structural racism' in China. Many foreigners that arrive in China assuming that they will confront the types of racism they have confronted elsewhere (or that construe certain Chinese practices as 'racist'), soon find their views changing.

In short, the ad is not evidence that Chinese society (whatever that means!) is 'racist' but rather that many people in China are still very ignorant, naive, or plainly idiotic. No systemic practice in China (Sorry, me dear China bashers).

Now coming back to the 'readings'

Often, when discussing these incidents, you get a whole bunch of academics (me included) and pundits that quote the long-standing historical perceptions on skin colour in China. The simple explanation of this is a China 101 from my Mandarin class some years ago: in (historical) China they appreciated fairness in skin because higher classes would normally stay away from hard (under the sun) labour. Peasants were normally darker and that leads Chinese people to discriminate against dark-skinned people. 'So, you'r e like a peasant', my 101 teacher told me when I complained about something that I perceived as discrimination while hailing taxis in Beijing (note for American readers: I'm a 'brown' Mexican, but my privilege makes me 'white' in that country). The implication of this is something many Chinese pride themselves on: that China cannot be 'racist' but merely 'classist'. While I believe that 'racism' as I explained above does not happen in China, I'm afraid that in cases like the detergent ad the class/dark skin explanation may not be enough. While respecting historical and culture specific developments, I'm troubled by the simplicity of this explanation. It plainly falls short to describe something that is indeed way more complex, and it often comes across as a childish denial. "We don't like you because you're brown. It's not your fault, it's the sun, right?" "Because you're brown, we think less of you," one of my good (and racially aware) friends used to 'joke' (don't worry, I took revenge :)).

In addition to this, there's one other often invoked explanation when it comes to incidents like the detergent one. Here, the story line goes: 'it's not about Africans, the Han were historically contemptuous of dark-skin people in the southern imperial frontiers'. There's a plethora of stories about the so-called Kunlun (slaves) and debates about them either being South Asian or African. When I hear this, I think of incidents like this - in which a women calls a black man with whom she's fighting a 'zebra'. Isn't there a vicious/malicious intentionality in the video? The story line continues: 'Han disdain for southern dark skin was at some not-very-clear point in history transposed onto Africans'. That 'not-very-clear point in history' is (look no further) COLONIALISM, and Chinese intellectuals contact with Western racial theories (e.g. Kang Youwei and Liang QiQiao).

It's true, issues of racial prejudice in China are informed by deep-seated class issues, but also, and let's not fool ourselves, by global (colonial and postcolonial) imaginaries of racial superiority (e.g. white supremacy). So, as you may imagine, the iterations of something that looks like 'racism' in contemporary China, emerge out of a complex global media environment, rather than being a 'class' (or a necessarily 'Chinese') issue. Here, the often invoked media element is 'Hollywood'. Every foreigner in China has a story of a Chinese friend explaining how afraid he/she feels of black (or Arab) people thanks to American movies. This was my Mandarin 101 class 'racial explanation' number two: "Chinese are not 'racist', they are just naive and confused thanks to Hollywood's historical representation of people of colour," or so the explanations goes. Difficult to buy! But this one is a bit more complex, and it's not only about Hollywood. Watch this, and this and cry. Indeed, this one also goes back to issues in contemporary global imaginaries that keep selling whiteness as something desirable and blackness/brownness ('otherness') as the binary opposites.

Here is where the detergent ad makes a very complex turn/tweak (that makes the whole thing so difficult to grasp). It opposes blackness to a Chinese 'whiteness' (some Chinese people on my WeChat call it 'yellowness') thus inputing a 'different' answer to this (colonial racial) equation: the black individual does not serve the purpose of whiteness becoming the correct way of being (ontology). Rather, it presents the Chinese man as the correct, perfect, clean an swer. This is not new, there have been other instances of using non-white 'foreigners' (or Chinese of mixed heritage - see the case of Lou Jing) to reinforce the boundaries of Chineseness in ethno-nationalist discourse. Indeed, the ad can also be read as a great example of policing Chineseness, and the policing of Chinese femininity (obviously, more readings may emerge, as the ad makes more global rounds). There have been other historical instances in which Chinese men have policed women's sexual practices when they related to black men (e.g. the Nanjing anti-African protests). Indeed, as China grows confident in her new role as emerging/consolidating global power, the mixture of her anxieties mixed with traces of widely circulating ethno-nationalist discourses in the country, could lead to the emergence of more, rather than less, things like the detergent ad.

Having said this, I still believe that cases like this can also be seen as productive in the sense that people in China could learn about these global sensitivities. Gauging from those Chinese netizens who have condemned the ad, in the process of China's 'going out', Chinese people will have to deal with more multicultural politics (hopefully not in the American fashion) and learn about the complex and problematic histories of colonialism that inform global mediascapes. So, I'm afraid that soon scholars and pundits won't be able to invoke Chinese disdain for peasants (e.g. class issues), or the Hollywood inflicted damage (e.g. racist American ideoscapes), as the root cause for iterations of global racist expressions in China - such as the Qiaobi ad - and will have to hold some people in China somehow accountable. Not without, however, understanding/respecting the specificity of 'Chinese' views and practices.

2. Why the racist Chinese ad MAY be just as racist as you think

An advert for Chinese detergent brand, Qiaboi, has garnered widespread attention recently on social media platforms and outlets across China and overseas, after The Shanghaiist published what they deemed to be an "incredibly racist advertisement".

The commercial has reportedly appeared on Chinese television and during the advertisement slots before screenings in Wanda Cinemas this month but was first uploaded and criticised by American Expat and musician, Christopher Powell. There is definitely more than enough social engagement going on right now concerning whether or not this advert is truly representative of a deep-rooted "racism" in China, but I have decided to offer my two-cents, if you will indulge me for a moment or two.

The offering of my two-cents, is partly in response to Roberto Castillo's recent opinion piece, titled "[Opinion] On why the racist Chinese ad may not be as racist as you think #SinoAfrica" and also in part to the four-part documentary I am producing about the Black Experience of individuals and groups in China titled #TheBlackOrient. I am offering a differing perspective but hope to add value to further dialogue around this subject.

Both Castillo and I agree that the advert is "profoundly (and maybe naively) insensitive and very very problematic" - Yes, it is "indeed 'racist'" but when it comes to analysing what kind of 'evidence' this advert provides or alludes to in terms of representing a culturally specific form of racism or "Chinese racism" is where we part ways.

I'm a black woman who has been living and working in China for three years. As a journalist here, I've taken great interest in the growing black and African presence in China and have researched this and defining differences between black "expat" life and black "migrant" life. I have interviewed a number of black people from the continent and diaspora, and having listened to countless black narratives, I am often suspicious of people arguing that racism doesn't exist in China.

I do not argue that China is wholly a racist society, however I believe that racism is well and alive in a number of different arenas throughout China. I do not necessarily believe that racism should be critically analysed as "context based" either - this would open up a pandoras box of accessing who's eyes and ears are beholding and defining these "contexts". Evaluations of racism using this practice would undoubtedly be formed based upon positions of privilege or under-privilege, I do however understand the importance of acknowledging how multilayered and complex racism is and has become.

Considering racism to be "culturally specific" and so redefining what 'racism' is or resembles is dangerous territory. Yes, culturally, Chinese prefer lighter skin as it is traditionally acknowledged as a sign of wealth. Yes - "peasants were normally darker" in China which leads to discrimination against People of Colour or darker-skinned people, but the same can be said for parts of Africa, the Caribbean, India and so on. The classist theory, Castillo is right, will not suffice. And if the advert is simply invoking Chinese perceptions about class/dark skin, why was an African man cast, rather than a 'dark' native Chinese man from one of the many ethnic minority groups here in China?

Racism is not always covert, nor systematic or persistent. Racial prejudice or isolated acts of racial discrimination is a part of the make-up of racism and is not always institutionalised but can manifest itself in a number of ways. This includes, expressed thoughts and deeds that perpetuate ideals of Eurocentric beauty, superiority and the subjugation and discrimination of those that do not meet these 'ideals'.

Overtly expressing your dislike for my broad nose and "dirty" skin because your cultural frame of reference deems my aesthetics so, does not make this kind of statement any less racist then if expressed covertly, behind closed doors, which was then systematically used with intent to deny me a privilege that someone else would later be offered. This is a rather simplified example but none the less, in principal, conveys my point.

Racial prejudice in China as a result of colonial and postcolonial "Imaginaries" of racial superiority doesn't just look like racism - it is. Just like imperialist views of the East and Africa as primitive nations can be added to the many "global imaginaries" people contend with - naivety, and being "confused" as a result of this, would and does not stand as a legitimate rationale to maintain sentiments of racial prejudice or superiority over another.

The granting of privileges to one group while denying them to others transcends the systematic practices of institutions and does not entirely define what 'racism' is. Isolated forms of discrimination are indeed central to 'racism' and are too, 'racist' - the denial of a job as an educator because you're black, the lack of freedom to walk down the street without being the subject of racial slurs, to be denied entry to a social space because your the 'wrong' colour, to be subject to tighter vetting/screening in work and social settings to that of your 'white' counterparts, to be dehumanised and represented as a stereo-typed caricature in an advert - ALL racist.

Many of the Chinese individuals who have kindly agreed to feature in my documentary have all been asked outrightly - Do you think racism exists in China? The prevailing answer is yes, the cause and impact, multilayered. Ignorance and lack of exposure are the themes that commonly raise their heads, however views that Africans, are dirty, smelly, uneducated sub-human criminals (often in the face of evidence that proves otherwise) cannot be reduced to an explanation rooted in "people in China are still very ignorant, naive or plainly idiotic"... [ KEEP READING HERE]

3. Reply to: Why the racist Chinese ad MAY be just as racist as you think

By Roberto Castillo for AfricansInChina.Net

Nicole, as I told you in a previous conversation, I truly appreciate that you took the time to engage with some of the ideas that I shared on my blog. Here, I intend to give you a formal reply. I will leave it at the level of 'post comments', but feel free to reply as you find more convenient (if you want to reply at all).

Also, as I told you on Twitter, I agree with most of your ideas and I do not find that our pieces are in stark opposition but rather in a fruitful conversation. Rather than parting ways with you here, I am hoping to get our ideas and understandings closer. So, here I offer 'my two-cents', as you say, on certain aspects of your piece that called my attention (or that made me feel something). It is important to note, however, that I fully respect your insights, and appreciate your experiences in China. Here, I only intend to share with you what I think, in a fraternal way, rather than explaining/arguing that things are like this or that. I am also looking forward to see the work that I hear you have been doing.

For the sake of clarity, I have divided this reply in six sections.

Minor clarifications:

First, I do believe that you dissected some of the things I wrote and approached them separately. Thus, at times taking them out of context, in order to make your argument. I am not fully against this, but I hope that by having extracted the paragraphs and quotations below, I have not done that to your writing.

Second, when I say that 'I am often suspicious of people/students arguing that China is a 'racist' society', I am referring to those - as noted in my post - that have never been to (or have little experience in) China. It is not uncommon to find people that arrive in China with many preconceived ideas (prejudices), and narratives about racism are amid these preconceptions (I partially did this 10 years ago). As Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong argue in this SMCP piece, people tend to generalise about a 'Chinese tendency to be racist'. By me saying that I am suspicious 1) I am not absolutely denying the possibility that 'racism' could exist in China; 2) I am highlighting the fact that many people have prejudices about China and that I am not necessarily alright with that - at least not when I teach, or write.

Rejecting 'contextualisation'

I understand that you have it that China is not a 'racist society' but that 'racism is well and alive in a number of different arenas throughout China'. I partially agree with you. Certain practices that could be read as 'racist' emerge in the experiences of different individuals (despite the darkness of their skin) in their journeys throughout the country (I have personally experienced this). Often, as you may agree, these practices affect and impact on the lives of foreigners (I personally did not get some jobs because I am not white). What strikes me from your discussion is your suggestion that 'racism' does not need to be critically analysed as 'context based'. I read this as: racism does not need to be contextualised, correct me if I am wrong. It is almost impossible for me to accept this premise. It goes against my most fundamental beliefs about the need for different/multiple voices to fight oppression and hegemony (I hope not to sound academic/militant here but the need for critical contextualisation has been clear to me since before I got into academia - and it may as well be the reason why I abandoned my journalistic pursuit).

Having said this, I like to think that I understand where you are coming from when you talk about opening up "pandora's box". There is always the risk that people with more power would define/shape/lead the definition/interpretation of what anything is (i.e. as in when white people try to explain away racism in the 'West', I will come back to this below). I hope I am correctly interpreting your fear. In my understanding, in particular when we live in transnational spaces, this risk is higher if we do not fight to highlight the importance of contextualising.

Indeed, I find your (partial) rejection of the need for context in this case a bit paradoxical. My reading of your piece is that you are actually trying to provide certain context. Weren't you trying to explain/argue whether or not 'racism' exists in China? (Or whether or not the ad is representative of deep-rooted 'racism'?). To me, you are attempting to contextualise what you have found in China (e.g. the ad and other practices) using your background and your experiences as a 'Black British' woman and mixing them with your experiences in China. This is what I value most in your piece. However, since you are a journalist, it kind of troubles me that you may not recognise the need to contextualise such problematic issues as the ones we are discussing.

As I hinted in our tweet exchange, my take here is that if we fail to contextualise the racial prejudices and discrimination that (may) lead to what you call 'racism' in China, then, what are we talking about? Especially when this conversation is 'global'.

If 'we' do not make an attempt to critically contextualise what you call 'racism', then what is 'racism'? How are 'we' supposed to know what we're talking about? And this ' we ' is the bunch of people from different cultures/languages that have read both our pieces - and that are thinking through these issues right now. Is 'racism' self-explanatory/self-evident (globally)? Does it need no explanations? Is it a 'given' that 'we' all understand? Is it, then, something that exists by itself in 'nature' beyond all social constructions (how many times have I heard white people saying that ALL human societies are 'racist'?)? And if so, how do 'we' understand it? Is there only one way to understand it? Who defines what is racism constituted of (or what qualifies as 'racist')?

If we do not provide context to certain practices that may be decoded by some people as 'racist', then are we supposed to import explanations from other places (e.g. other 'contexts') like Britain and the US? Wouldn't this be 'Eurocentric'? Yes, I know that I am taking this a bit too far, but there is a reason. I believe that if we do not attempt to contextualise we run the risk of allowing 'Eurocentric' (and by this here I don't necessarily mean 'white') views to tell/impose a single story of what constitutes 'racism'. The same goes for anything else that goes without contextualisation. I have been through a fair share of discrimination in my life to let things be explained by one single story/answer.

Now, contextualisation is not 'evaluating', as you seem to imply. To provide context is also not to 'justify', 'defend', or 'splain away', as an award winning journalist (Oh me God!) seemed to suggest on Twitter. To contextualise is to do away with monolithic explanations in the name of multiplicity and heterogeneity. Contextualisation serves to reject the Universal in light of the specific. In this day and age of hyper-communication and transnationality, I believe the work of contextualising to be of paramount importance. I cannot overemphasise how much I believe that by contextualising we are more likely to protect against powerful, hegemonic, voices taking over. So, if 'racism' is not a given and it is a social construction as I hope you will agree, then it follows that in different societies this complex and multilayered phenomenon would have 'specific' characteristics. Why not try to unveil/unearth/understand them in their specificity? Should we allow our anger (from 'racist' experiences elsewhere) to take us into a higher moral ground from where to judge other 'culturally specific' forms of 'racialisation'?

Contextualising is important because if I try to contextualise your 'rejection' of the importance of context, then I may be able to understand that some people coming from histories oppression would be sick and tired of 'contextualisation' - especially when this 'contextualisation' has been historically performed by the oppressing group and used as a justification. Here, I am thinking of some white people in Australia (don't know if it's the same in Britain) when they attempt to 'contextualise' (in a justificatory sense) and diminish the violent, brutal and destructive history of their presence in the continent/island, in order to appease their own guilt (or to distance themselves from guilt). Had I grown up exposed to this type of 'contextualisation', I would certainly also reject contextualisation outright: 'Enough', I would cry. But when we go to other lands (or move in transnational settings), when we get immersed in other cultures, things are a bit different. Especially, when you go somewhere outside the 'West'. I hope that you can see that in this case, I am not trying to 'contextualise' - in that justificatory sense - Chinese racial prejudice, and obviously I am not trying to appease my mind here. I am trying to understand the Chinese cultural context to see what happens, why it happens, what forms this may take in the future, and how to bloody fight this!

Anyway, I think it is enough with contextualisation (for the moment).

'Racism'

I do not want to get into definitions here. I have provided what I think is my understanding of 'racism' and I fully understand that you may have some things to ad to that. That is the beauty of exchanging ideas (Actually, I think that if we put our ideas together, we will get a more solid/robust argument, rather than a contrasting one). So, when you claim things like:

Racism is not always covert, nor systematic or persistent. Racial prejudice or isolated acts of racial discrimination is a part of the make-up of racism and is not always institutionalised but can manifest itself in a number of ways. This includes, expressed thoughts and deeds that perpetuate ideals of Eurocentric beauty, superiority and the subjugation and discrimination of those that do not meet these 'ideals'.

Or,

Racial prejudice in China as a result of colonial and postcolonial "Imaginaries" of racial superiority doesn't just look like racism - it is. Just like imperialist views of the East and Africa as primitive nations can be added to the many "global imaginaries" people contend with - naivety, and being "confused" as a result of this, would and does not stand as a legitimate rationale to maintain sentiments of racial prejudice or superiority over another.

Although, I find myself mostly in agreement, I have certain qualms. I strongly believe, for instance, that racial prejudice and racism are not the same thing. I noted this in my piece. Simply put, we all have prejudices and they do not always amount to (or transform into) racist views. Yes, when the expectations embedded in prejudice become institutionalised or internalised, then we can talk of an '-ism'. But that does not always happen. In the case of China, these types of prejudices (that we now call 'racial prejudices') date from before European contact and are exemplified by the ways in which the Han (which didn't call themselves 'Han', then) imagined 'otherness' at the borders. As you may know, these prejudices got revamped and built into a more solid body of 'knowledge' (I like to think of it as a 'body of stupidity') after Chinese thinkers tried to accommodate Western racial theories with Confucianist hierarchies and ethnocentric perceptions of Chineseness.

I, as well as you, have interviewed (talked to) a number of black (and brown) people in China, and I have also listened to different narratives and experiences. Many of the people that I been working around and befriending have it that in China, once you learn the language and are able to perform 'Chineseness', things change. Prejudice (which I think is mainly an ignorant response) fades in both directions once you learn to communicate with Chinese. This is reported by most of my contacts and it is something I underwent my self while living in the country. Now, I am not saying that prejudice magically disappears once you speak Chinese, but things change - generally for good, ask around! Prejudice is different to racism in that it may transform, change, or even disappear (at the individual level). Racism, on the other hand, is - as you know - much more resilient and does not go away (easily), as American and European histories of (murderous and violent) racism show. In other words, prejudice tends to disappear when people meet and befriend (NOT in Europe? Well, maybe not). I wish racism could just fade like this.

Also, I have always felt that going to another country to impose your own views, even when they emerge out of your own struggles against oppression, is itself oppressing. I do not know what goes on in your circles, but if I have learnt something from Africans in China is that while many of them find issues of racial prejudice and discrimination, they are usually very careful when it comes to qualifying these practices as 'racism'. This is a perception, I must disclose, that I found more amongst Africans that have lived many years in the country. From my conversations with both young and old, newcomers are more prone to interpret certain practices as 'racist'.

All this makes me think of your point of racism being 'well and alive in a number of different areas throughout China'. I wonder: when was the moment when you decided to qualify those things you saw in China as being 'racist' (or as evidence of 'racism')? Is there a process behind this statement? Did you get to this point after number of years/experiences? Did this feeling emerge early on in your sojourn in China? As you claimed in an interview for The China Africa Project, 'being a Black British woman makes you be particularly sensitive to certain issues'. Did you allow some space for those issues not to take over your experiences and, more importantly, your interpretation of things you saw in China? Or, did you decide to use your British experience 'lens'?

Subtext reading without context: Is the black male a 'helper'?

I found your readings of the 'subtext' very interesting. As I told you during our brief exchange, I believe that in terms of reading subtexts (which is a 2 nd or 3 rd level of semiotic analysis), our backgrounds and experiences are crucial, and determine what we 'read'. They provide a context to the ways in which we 'decode' meanings embedded in any cultural object (e.g. the ad). Here, I will go back a bit to the discussion on 'contextualisation'. I believe that your reading of the ad (e.g. 'that he is the "help" in the house and is over-stepping his boundaries) cries for some contextualisation. As I told you, my original reading was that he is the husband, boyfriend, or fiancée. This may emerge out of my own research. For the last 6 years, I have been working around many Africans that have married Chinese women and many live in nice apartments like the one in the ad. My question here is: without paying attention to the Chinese context (e.g. Black males are marrying Chinese women in many cities) how accurate is a reading of the subtext that places the black man as a 'helper'? In the Chinese context, I would say, not very accurate. The 'policing of Chinese femininity', a point in which we both agree, is not interested in preventing Chinese woman from having affairs with the 'help' (btw, there's no black helpers in China), this policing is more interested in telling Chinese women: 'do not marry Blacks', or 'the ascending glittering Chinese man is your portion and what is good and right', as you rightly put it.

As you may know, encoding and decoding (and 'preferred readings' and so on) are crucial stages in the process of communication. Cultural objects (like the ad) are greatly affected, thus, by the context in which they are produced, consumed, etc. A reading that places the Black man as the woman's partner is the result of thinking in contextual terms. If I was a 'Westerner' that has never been to China, maybe I would have bought into your 'help' reading. You may disagree with this, and this may be due to diverging forms of decoding the ad... but you have to agree that a context-based reading makes more sense than a decontextualised one.

Growing Afro-phobia?

Here I want to comment on the following: 'the choice to use an African man was a purposeful one and a reflection of the growing Afro-Phobia in different Chinese districts'. I am not going to dispute your view. You may as well think this. But really, a growing 'Afro-phobia'? Why call it 'Afro-phobia'?

You and I both know - as many a China watcher - that a lot of things have changed for foreigners in the country in the last couple of years, and most of them NOT for good. I am not an expert, but some people talk about a conservative backlash throughout the country. Some others even talk about the reactivation of behaviours last seen during the 'Cultural Revolution' (Mao forbid!). My friends in the English education sector in China report the radicalisation of measures of control in terms of content dissemination, as they had not seen in years (witch-hunting included). There are myriad factors involved here: among the most important, the crisis of over-production that the country is undergoing. In China, every time there is a crisis like this one, ethno-nationalistic fervour arises (gently stirred by the Party). Xenophobic attitudes and practices are often associated with these periods. (I went to Beijing a couple of months ago and, in all my years in China I have never sensed more tension against foreigners than this time. I did not sense the friendly environment I was used to when I lived there in 2009ish).

My point here is two fold: first, why talk about 'Afro-phobia' without considering a possibly wider phenomenon of 'Xenophobia'? (Note: I'm not claiming that there is Xenophobia in China). Second, since you argue that this Afro-phobia is 'growing': What is the evidence behind this statement? You seem to suggest that practices such as job denials or 'racial slurs' are evidence of this 'growing' Afro-phobia. These things have been happening for a long time, and while they are horrible, I hardly see them as evidence of something 'growing'. Here, I want to highlight that it is not only 'black' people that fail to get teaching jobs. This also happens to many non-white people, although, in all honesty we must highlight that there are a lot of 'blacks' and 'browns' actually teaching English in China (Yes, sometimes remote China, but still China). The way many Chinese see this, is that you fail to get the job because they are looking for a 'white person', not because you are 'brown' (I got this explanation a couple of times). Also, you did not bring this one up but the problem with taxis drivers not wanting to take black people is also often presented as 'exhibit A' of 'racism' in China. This also happens to non-black foreigners, a lot, and it is mostly a prejudice. So, how do you gauge this 'growing' Afro-phobia? I wonder.

Western media often frame these (and other) incidents as evidence that the Chinese are particularly 'racist', or that there is a specific form of 'Chinese racism'. For me, this is profoundly problematic not only because it tries to justify racism in the 'West' by saying: 'Oh, look, it also happens in China, and it's a Chinese "form"'; but also because it blurs the long standing historical racist practices and policies discriminating against Chinese. I am not sure that these incidents in China are symptoms of 'Afro-phobia' rather than perhaps (but most likely) some type of Xenophobia mixed with a whole host of other factors. I truly believe that there is no evidence whatsoever to claim the existence of a systematic form of 'Chinese racism'. In a similar vein, I do not see any evidence as to an 'Anti-African immigrant' campaign in Guangzhou, as has been claimed by some academics. Talking about 'Afro-phobia' and 'Anti-African campaigns' always sells (and will attract media attention*) because it does two (tricky) things: first, it casts Chinese as 'racist'; and second, Blacks as 'victims'. This, needless to say, serves the purpose of both satisfying 'Western' fantasies about a 'racist China' (I call this #RacistChinaPorn), at the same time as it soothes/appeases the guilt of some people in the 'West'.

I doubt that making claims such as the 'growing Afro-phobia' one is of any help to the general discussion and, more importantly, to the improvement of the issues we've been discussing here. Certainly not helpful if what you want to do is provide a clearer, comprehensive perspective on what is going on in China, as I like to think we do. (Actually, 'Afro-phobia' may work better to describe what is going in India, although I am not acquainted with the situation there). I personally believe that telling a more comprehensive, complex China (and Africans in China) story benefits us all and pushes forward in the struggles against different forms of oppression.

I really appreciate your engagement in this conversation, it has been a learning process for me.

Respectfully,

Roberto Castillo

* Because these narratives fit perfectly with the 'China pollutes', 'China the despot', 'China the neo-coloniser' narratives that racist fear-mongers in the West have historically spread about China (and without much self-critique of their own implication).

Ps. Yesterday I overheard this: "We always blame China and the Chinese for copying, not being original, not having the capacity to be original. So, why is it that in the case of this ad we don't take the same approach? They're just copying, it's not theirs, then it's not their fault." - While I don't necessarily agree with this, I thought it was an interesting comment on the ways that global discussions approach the 'China thing'.

4. Black people in China organise round table to discuss #RacistChineseAd

5. Outrage over the #RacistChineseAd: what did we learn?

Quoted articles:

'Why the MAY NOT be as racist as you think': bit.ly/1WQJTDK

'Why the MAY just be as racist as you think': bit.ly/1PayVXI

Roberto Castillo's Reply

And 8 (early) things I learnt from the #RacistChineseAd row

6. Barry Sautman & Yan Hairong say #RacistChineseAd doesn't make China racist

By Sautman & Yan for SCMP

By now, there has been a fairly comprehensive discussion of the racist ad produced by the detergent company Qiaobi that depicts the laundering of a "dirty" black man into a "clean" Chinese. Beyond condemning the ad, those of us in China should also call for its perpetrators to be sanctioned under Article 9 of China's Advertising Law, which forbids ads containing discrimination based on nationality, race, religion or gender.

One key aspect of the discourse has yet to be treated, however - its political uses. One of us has been interviewed about the ad by journalists for several "top" Western news sources. The main question posed was whether it shows that "the Chinese are racist".

As of 2010, there were 43 million companies in China. Not all advertise, but even if only 2 per cent do, that's almost one million companies. Many firms have issued a multiplicity of ads. Arguably, no conclusion about racism among the 1.4 billion Chinese can be made based on a single ad. When racist ads or statements appear in the Western media - and there have been plenty - no one claims they show "the Americans", "the French", and so on, are racist.

That said, the question of whether a racist world view is more common among Chinese than among other people needs to be answered, if only because Western media foster that impression. The idea of unique Chinese racism has spread to such an extent that "Are the Chinese Racist?" is one issue taken up in the recent, useful book by Marte Kjær Galtung and Stig Stenslie, 49 Myths about China.

A few recent surveys relate to this question. A 2008 World Public Opinion survey done by the University of Maryland among people in 16 countries concluded that the Chinese rank among the top with the greatest support for the importance of equal treatment for different races and ethnicities, second only to Mexicans. China also has the second-largest majority who disagreed that employers have the right to discriminate based on race or ethnicity, and are among the largest majorities that favour their government making efforts to prevent racial and ethnic discrimination.

A 2016 Amnesty International survey about refugees found that among people in 27 countries, Chinese were the most welcoming: almost half said they would welcome refugees to stay in their homes, compared to one in 10 among the whole sample.

In a study a few years back, scholars in Kansas, United States, and those in several Chinese cities applied the standard psychological instrument used to measure ethnocentricity. They found that Kansas university students were much more ethnocentric than their peers at the Chinese universities.

These surveys do not "prove" Chinese on the whole are less racist than other peoples. They do indicate, however, that it is spurious to imply, without substantial evidence, that racist views are more common among Chinese, not to speak of insinuating that Chinese in general are racist.

What much of the discourse in the West about the racist detergent ad has sought to do is most likely for political reasons. If, instead, the issue is being framed in that way to self-aggrandise Westerners, it is ironic. Europe is where African and African-descended people are particularly subject to violent racist victimisation.

According to the newspaper Die Zeit, more than 130 people, some Africans, were killed in racist street violence in Germany from 1990 to 2008. A study by US criminologist Richard Arnold noted that in Russia, in 2012 alone, racist skinheads killed 187 people. Such violence is far from rare in several other European countries as well. Attacks in Europe, as well as against African students in India and Malaysia, contrast with what African students in China have told us; they are generally able to move about in relative safety.

In discussing the racist detergent ad then, not only should generalising be eschewed, but the ad itself and the relationship of Chinese and people of African descent must also be seen in its larger context.
Barry Sautman is a professor in the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. Yan Hairong is an associate professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University

7. US media outrage over detergent ad is pot calling the kettle black

"Chinese television commercial was certainly offensive and racist but criticism from America - which was founded on slavery - is a bit rich"
By Alex Lo for SCMP

The Qiaobi detergent TV commercial on the mainland is indeed racist and offensive. Yet, even more interesting, is why it seems to provoke outrage only in the US media and not anywhere else in the world.

US and English-language news media have been quick to report on the commercial, yet few bother to tell their audiences that the long version with the black actor that went viral online was never broadcast; only the shorter version was shown without him.

Americans are quick to condemn.

The popular Vox.com waxed indignant: "This ad is blatantly racist... it's also a reminder that attitudes over race and skin colour in China can be very bad."

CNN editorialised along a similar vein.

By now, you have probably seen the viral version. A muscular black man whistles and winks at an attractive young Chinese woman. She calls him over, puts a detergent packet in his mouth, and pushes him headfirst into a washing machine. She then sits on the lid while the man shrieks and the washing machine spins. Moments later a young, Asian-looking man emerges in clean clothes, and the woman grins.

I don't know about you but I find the Idris Elba-lookalike black actor far sexier and attractive than the effeminate lady boy that came out of the washer.

Still, what's intriguing is the US news media blasting China for being racist towards blacks, and the commercial is being offered as Exhibit A.

That's a bit rich coming from a country that was founded on black slavery, whose devastating legacy still haunts the current generation. Thirty-seven per cent of prison inmates in the US are African-Americans, though they make up only 13 per cent of the total population. Blacks on average live five years less than whites. A typical white family has a net worth of US$134,200, while a black one scrapes by with slightly more than US$11,000. US police killed at least 102 unarmed black people last year; unarmed blacks are five times more likely to be killed by police than unarmed whites. Such awful statistics roll on and on.
What you have is a politically correct media that helps to hide the underlying racism running deep in American society and projects it on to other countries.
China has racial problems. But murderous racism against blacks is not one of them.

8. Context matters: The racist laundry ad was ignorant, but so were the reactions

I am as black as black could ever get, I am from the factory of black people; sub-saharan Africa. But I was not offended by the Chinese laundry commercial which recently caused such an uproar among netizens, at least when I decided to take off my liberal western saint's spectacles. For those who have not seen it, the commercial in question portrays a nice looking black man trying to seduce a Chinese woman. After kissing him, the Chinese woman pops some detergent into his mouth and quickly pushes him down into the washing machine, and then the black man is transformed into a 'cleaner' pale Chinese man. Ignoring the plot plagiarism for a minute, I think it is important to discuss what happens when symbols are interpreted outside the context they are created. Those who might have tried to ask questions of their Mainland Chinese friends about the commercial might have realized one common theme, namely that the commercial was worthy of one thing: a laugh and that is it, nothing more, but why?

Overnight, the Western media and western-influenced netizens had jumped on their high horses condemning the Chinese for being racist. The west for a moment felt good that they now had an equal competitor for racism - well, I have some bad news. No-one in this world can yet to compete for the trophy of racism with the West.

The outcry among netizens was indeed a 'clash of ignorances'. The ignorance of the Chinese in using racial stereotypes whose connotations outside China they did not understand, and the ignorance of the West in quickly judging Chinese affairs through a western lens. Race carries totally different connotations in China than elsewhere. In the West, with its history of colonization and slavery, I understand why people get so sensitive about racial issues. Take for example how hair is politicized especially in Great Britain, and a comment or a simple question which seems to enquire about someone's hair, especially short kinky hair, might cause an uproar.

But if this same enquiry happened in China, one needs to step back and get the context right. In China this is just a question of curiosity, and carries none of that racialized ideas that would cause an outcry in the US or UK. I tend to spend more time with kids in Hong Kong, and it's not uncommon for kids to call each other names like, 'fat pig', or to refer to their more tanned friends as black. And this is all that it means, it simply means fat pig or black kid, nothing more. It does not reflect any superiority complexes or some repressed unconscious secret Ku Klux Klan within, using Freud's terms, if you may.

Are there racial classifications and hierarchy in China? Yes, there are, but they are totally different from the western notions of race. Many Chinese can't even differentiate between a dark Sri Lankan and a dark Zimbabwean like me, not to mention how much time I take unsuccessfully explaining to a Chinese friend the difference between a South Indian and Will Smith. "Come on, look at the hair", I would say, and she would take a closer look but she just would just shake her head, afraid to disappoint me, seeing how much conviction I had about racial issues.

I took another 15 minutes at a local university trying to explain the differences between Latinos and Caucasians within an American context but they just could not see any differences between any of them. I would argue that the racial hierarchy that might exist in the Chinese context is mainly influenced by the earlier upper class/peasant life styles in early China, with lighter skin being more admirable not because they saw whites, but because they saw the Chinese upper class; the rich, who spent more time indoors and therefore had lighter skin than the peasants who spent all day tilling the fields.

Western whiteness was equally as ghostified and undesired as every other non-Chinese look. Yes, there has been some aspiration to whiteness recently but this is not as we might imagine. Whiteness is a symbol of wealth, not because white people are considered to have money, no!, but because the richer Chinese have been historically lighter in skin. If you do not trust me yet, here is another example. If a black person goes to China, most Chinese might have racial prejudice if they assume they hail from Africa, as Africa symbolizes poverty; no money. This is not because they are racist, but something else. If that black person reveals maybe that they are from the beautiful country, as they call America, all of a sudden the experiences of that black person would be different. They expect that they have money and that they should treat them with more respect.

If a white person, whom they would have assumed is from the beautiful country, later reveals that they are from Feizhou (Africa). First the shock that there are white people in Feizhou, then the respect bar drops like a hot brick. Chinese people are classist: money determines how one is treated. Period! Yes, the global market plus advertising has been playing a bigger role in shaping skin desirability among the Chinese but these desires carry relatively different connotations from those that the west imagines.

Many times, my black friends claim that the Chinese are racist because they will not sit next to them in the train or because they pinch their noses when they sit next to them or are just awkwardly ridiculous. Well, these things happen, but not only to black people but to everyone who is a foreigner in China, no matter your color, even if you are a green person, you can expect to face the same treatment as every other foreigner in China. And just to add, foreigners eat different foods and yes, their sweat smells differently and pinching one's nose, as much as it shows ignorance, does not reflect any racism. As a side note, I believe the domestic migrants in China face even worse discrimination and harsher consequences from prejudice, and yes, it has to do with how much money one is assumed to have.

In the end, contextualization is very important. Seeing Chinese issues through a western lens does nothing but show how much ignorance is rampant in the west. There is as much ignorance in China as there is in the west, and the explosion around the laundry commercial was just a result of the 'clash of these two ignorances': the Chinese being ignorant of what the racial notions they are playing with may mean outside their context and the Western-influenced being ignorant of how things are differently understood in China. The West should probably get off their high horses, there is not any competitor fit enough to fight for the racism trophy, the west is still the champion.

If there are any traces of racism in China, they are a result of the global market, but what we often misinterpret as racism is simply classism. Words or images without context mean nothing, images viewed in the wrong context cause more harm than good. The N word means different things in Nigeria than what it means in America, and these meanings are constructed historically and socially, and making the mistake that when a Nigerian uses the N word it means the same as the American use might cause other consequences of a clash of ignorances. The word kaffir means something totally different everywhere else than its meaning in South Africa. Words and images mean nothing in themselves, but the meanings we ascribe to them gives them meaning, and rarely do we have the same concepts when we show the same images or say the same words, and that is why contextualizing every image is very important in the 21st century.

9. The notorious Qiaobi: behind the scenes of an "ad controversy" foretold?

By Giovanna Puppin for UoN Blogs / China Policy Institute Blog

A Chinese detergent company's TV ad, which was reportedly screened on China's TV stations and before movies in Wanda cinemas in May, has generated international attention. The commercial for Qiaobi 俏比 washing powder began to draw attention on 26th May when it was spotted by the online publication Shanghaiist, and then uploaded on Youtube, where it hit 2 million views in just one day. And this happened not for its positive qualities: BuzzFeed was the first to "honour" it with the title of "the most racist ad of 2016".

The ad story was soon covered by international media sites - including BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera - and commented on by netizens all over the world, also through reaction videos. As a result, the debate also took off on Chinese social media: the notorious Qiaobi ad -redubbed as "the most racist ad ever" - not only was under the world's scrutiny, but it was also being read as a mirror of racism in the country (in a political way). On 27 May, Mr. Wang - a representative of the company that owns the brand - said that the ad actually never intended to promote racial discrimination, and that foreign media were possibly being too sensitive about it. The following day, though, the company formally apologised with a Chinese-language statement published on the brand's Weibo account, which caused another wave of indignation.

The 50-second ad opens on a young Chinese woman loading her top-load washing machine, while a cheerful accordion tune is played in the background; some laundry liquid detergent and colourful boxes are displayed behind her (the brand names have been deliberately blurred). A young black man passes by her flat; when he sees her, he stops at the entrance and starts winking and whistling at her from a distance. Because his face and t-shirt are covered with paint (moreover, he is also holding a brush and a can of paint) it is logical to assume that he has been decorating the interior of a flat (or, less probably, hers). She invites him to come nearer - a move that he visibly appreciates - suggesting an imminent seduction, but just as they are about to exchange a kiss, she places something that looks like a green mint candy in his mouth. Immediately, but less gracefully, she shoves him into the washing machine: then she sits on it and waits.

At this point, the music stops: the sound of the man screaming is clearly discernible from the background noise of the washing machine spinning. On the visual code, the advertised product is revealed: Qiaobi laundry gel balls (contained in the colorful boxes depicted before). Once the spinning cycle is over, the Chinese woman opens the washing machine and a young Chinese man emerges from the drum, in front of her astonished - yet pleased - eyes, and to an energetic, gripping tune. The Chinese man is wearing a flawless, clean white t-shirt, and he hands back the detergent ball she had placed into the black man's mouth (which we now recognise as the advertised product). He winks at her, and, in doing so, a cartoon-style sparkle magically appears. The last scene of the ad depicts the packaging and the product, and a cartoon-style animated dolphin - the pictogram of Qiaobi's logo. The pay-off: "Change starts from Qiaobi" ( gaibian cong Qiaobi kaishi 改变从俏比开始) appears on the screen, and a slightly altered version is announced by the voice-over: "Change is just a Qiaobi laundry gel ball" ( gaibian zhishi yike Qiaobi xiyi rongzhu 改变只是一颗俏比洗衣溶珠). The closing shot shows the national hotline number to call for further information.

When I first watched the commercial I immediately recognised it as very similar to - yet different from - two previous ad campaigns for the machine fabric dyes by Coloreria Italiana, namely: "Coloured is Better: What Women Want" (2006) and "Coloured is Better: la Vendetta" (2007). As Mr. Aldo Biasi - the president of the advertising agency - explained to me in a telephone interview, these ads were originally circulated on some minor Italian websites on Women's Day. The creative idea of transforming a scrawny white husband into a buff black man made an explicit use of race-based sexual stereotypes and had a deliberate ironic intent. In Mr. Biasi's opinion, this is not the case of the Chinese ad, which he described as "a blatant ripoff with an offensive twist". The Qiaobi ad not only follows the same storyline but, for the first half, even uses the same background copyrighted music (including the diegetic screaming sound!): this makes it quite difficult to believe that neither the company nor the creative team had never seen the original ads before, as they claimed. The company's official statement makes no reference to the ripoff, but some Weibo-users pointed their fingers at its reprehensible, careless attitude in blatantly copying another campaign, and even expressed skepticism towards the "professionalism" of the team who created and produced the ad. These are important details that need to be contextualised in the light of China's official discourse on developing creative advertising, that is being promoted by the authorities to boost a national creative industry and improve the qualitative standards of advertising - also through a new system of professional accreditation.

The main substantive difference compared with the Italian ads is that the reversal of the racial transmogrification- from a black (African) man to a fair-skinned (Chinese) man. This is precisely the aggravating factor that fuelled the allegations of racism and fury online, mainly outside China. Some viewers recognised in the Qiaobi ad the distinctive features of commodity racism, a "creative strategy" that is nothing new in the West - as the infamous campaigns for Pears' Soap in 19 th Century England demonstrate.

In China though, as explained by Prof. Liu Junhai, racial sensitivity among advertisers and the public is lower than in Western countries. This race-related ad controversy is unprecedented in the country, and the rather banal reason is that the Chinese advertising world is characterised by the almost exclusive portrayal of the Han 汉 people (even though the Qiaobi ad is not the first to depict a black person).

Interestingly, the black man doesn't appear in the short version of the ad: the "innocuous" version depicting only the Chinese man and the product (unfortunately now unavailable) is actually the one that was screened on China's satellite TV stations. The longer version gained attention when the independent photographer Benoit Florençon uploaded it on Youtube. In the light of the Chinese government's recent campaign to clean up e-commerce and online ads (also as a response to the Wei Zexi incident), it might seem surprising that the ad was not stopped earlier.

Apparently, on 5th March this year, the brand's Weibo account published the following soft-porn-sounding pre-campaign anticipation: "This is the story of a 'love triangle' between a black uncle, a little fresh meat, and a sexy goddess" ( Zhe shi yi ge jiangshu hei shushu, xiao xianrou, xinggan nvshen de 'sanjiao lian' gushi 这是一个讲述黑叔叔、小鲜肉、性感女神的'三角恋'故事). This teaser provides some useful clues for decoding how the protagonists have been typified (and stereotyped) in the ad. The three nicknames come from Internet slang and equally evoke some sexual connotations: hei shushu 黑叔叔 (literally: "black uncle") is used in this context as "black daddy"; xiao xian rou 小鲜肉 indicates a young guy with fair skin and innocent looks; xinggan nüshen 性感女神 indicates a sexy woman who is beautiful and seductive.

The primary function of advertising, elementary as it sounds, is to persuade consumers to buy a certain product (or service). Nonetheless, this might be quite challenging for a relatively new, small start-up like the Shanghai-based Leishang Cosmetics Co., Ltd.: neither the company nor the Qiaobi brand are especially well known to Chinese consumers, as demonstrated by the basic questions on the product posted by prospective buyers on Baidu, the scarcity of content provided on the brand's website, and the unimpressive number of followers of its Weibo account. As China's laundry care market is characterized by mounting competition, the company decided to position itself through the launch of a new product: the laundry gel ball, promoted as "a healthy and trendy new experience" ( jiankang shishang xin tiyan 健康时尚新体验), in contrast to traditional liquid detergents. The target audience consists of young consumers, who do their purchasing online. The word "change" ( gaibian 改变) in the pay-off, therefore, should not be interpreted exclusively as linked to the racial transmogrification, but also to the new product and washing habits of the Chinese. Needless to say, the end of breaking through the market doesn't justify the means. However, it constitutes another detail that needs to be taken into account.
Giovanna Puppin is Lecturer and Programme Director of the MA Media and Advertising, Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester. She researches Chinese advertising and promotional culture, with a focus on issues of representation, identity, and power. Picture and video: Youtube/Qiaobi.

10. Ignorance of race not equivalent to racism
By Li Anshan 李安山

Recently, a detergent ad appeared on Chinese TV that depicts a Chinese woman placing a black man in a washing machine, and when she opens the lid, she finds that his color has been "washed away," revealing he's actually a Chinese man underneath.

The ad has been denounced as racist in China and abroad, and there has been heated debate online among members of the google-email group named "chinese-in-africaafaricans-in-china." As a Chinese scholar, I would like to share my thoughts with colleagues.

After more than 30 years of opening-up, China is still facing serious challenges in its dealings with the outside world. Ignorance is persistent, and some Chinese harbor prejudices toward not just Africans but people from other continents as well.

As a historian, I look to history for a broader perspective. The Chinese have by no means been free of prejudice and discrimination against foreigners. Historically self-centered and conceited, the Chinese have looked down upon outsiders and used condescending labels for the people who lived in surrounding lands. China's name in Mandarin is zhongguo, meaning "Middle Kingdom," implying it is at the center, and those who lived outside of it were dismissed as "barbarians."

To the extreme, foreigners have been called gui, meaning "devil," with the connotation that they are inhuman or evil. Blacks have been called fannu, or "barbarian slaves;" hei gui, meaning "black devils," and Kunlun nu, or " Kunlun slaves."

White people have been called yang guizi, meaning "foreign devil;" hong mao gui, meaning "red-haired devil;" fangou, "barbarian dog;" and gui lao, "devil man" and gui po "devil woman."[i] Keeping this in mind, we can see that in the ancient time, Chinese prejudice has not been confined to blacks but also includes whites or any cultural others.

We have to admit that ethnocentrism is a universal phenomenon in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia that is rooted in the cultural environment of the people. Contrary to William Graham Sumner's notion of the term, ethnocentrism is an attitude or action of a human group who regard themselves as normal, beautiful and clever while looking down upon others.

Ethnocentrism is common among people who are isolated and incapable of achieving mutual understanding, and it was especially evident in ancient times. People always think the highest of their own kind without exception. The Romans looked at all non-Romans as barbarians, and the Greeks regarded themselves as the most civilized. Like the Chinese, the Indians thought they were living in the center of the world at one time. Africans were also prejudiced against whites. According to Ibn Battuta, Malian cannibals did not eat whites since "eating a white man is harmful because he is not ripe." Winnie Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, told us in her book that the first racist she met was her grandmother, who thought white people's pale skin and blue eyes were the symptom of some disease. There are similar cases today.

Ethnocentrism is understandable in a situation where people lack contact and an understanding of others. It is another thing when ethnocentrism is converted into racism, which was harnessed by modern colonialism to justify the military, political and economic domination of foreign people.[ii]

The overwhelming majority of Chinese people are ignorant of Africa, and there are quite a few misunderstandings. But we have to be cautious about labelling "the Chinese" as racist, since there are different cases of ignorance, misunderstanding, prejudice and racism. Ignorance alone is not equivalent to racism.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Ghanaian student Zahra Baitie recounted her experience in China and discussed the Chinese attitude toward Africans. She said that although there are good relations between China and Africa on governmental level, "on a person-to-person basis, ignorance, misunderstanding, and intolerance still persist......" Yet she stated "I never felt discriminated against or antagonized, but rather was treated with warmth and friendliness. Because I spoke Mandarin, I could often understand what people said about me, and they were rarely disparaging or maligning."[iii] This observation of the Chinese attitude toward African is verified in other cases.

Yiwu, known as China's biggest commodity city, set up a Foreign Dispute Mediation Office in order to settle up disagreements in business. The office uses volunteer mediators from different nations. A Senegalese businessman named Tirera Sourakhata and his African colleague volunteered for the program.[iv] The website Guancha reported the story of this successful African businessman who speaks French, English, Arabic and Chinese serving as volunteer-mediator in Yiwu market and the comments from readers were overwhelmingly positive.[v] Readers showed ignorance and curiosity obviously, but there was not discrimination.

Another incident perfectly illustrates the difference between benign ignorance and malicious prejudice. An old lady in Shanghai Madame Zhu picked up an abandoned black infant and brought him home. She thought his black skin was merely dirty and tried to wash him clean. When she found this was not possible, she was scared and thought he had some illness, so she took him to the hospital. The doctor told her that the child's skin is black.

She named the child Zhu Junlong and brought him up through kindergarten, primary school and middle school with various difficulties. In 2014, Zhu Junlong received a Shanghai hukou, or household registration, and Madame Zhu adopted him as her son. Zhu loved the child as her own though she initially did not understand that he was even of a different race.[vi]

Regarding the attitude towards other people/culture, there are many positive and negative cases today. As the nation becomes increasingly open and ordinary people are exposed to other cultures through global media and interpersonal exchanges, the widespread ignorance that is often mistaken for racism will become a thing of the past.

Note: [i] Zhou Zikui, a Jinshi (a successful candidate in the highest imperial examinations) in the late Ming Dynasty even thought that xiyang ren (the Europeans) cannot be called yi (barbarians), can only be termed qin (birds and beasts), because barbarians were still human beings, and Europeans were not human beings.

[ii] Li Anshan, "African Diaspora in China: Reality, Research and Reflection", The Journal of Pan African Studies, 7:10 (May, 2015), pp.10-43.

[iii] Zahra Baitie, "On being African in China" http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/08/on-being-african-in-china/279136/. Accessed on 2 Feb. 2015.

[v] "Senegalese merchant turned out to be a foreign mediator for the dispute mediation commission in Yiwu", http://www.guancha.cn/video/2015_02_04_308534.shtml, Accessed on 24 Feb. 2015.

[vi] "Shanghai old woman raised an abandoned black boy for 15 years with love beyond family bond", http://world.huanqiu.com/photo/2014-06/2736818.html. Accessed on March 12, 2015.

11. Response to "Ignorance of race not equivalent to racism" by Li Anshan
By Gregory Scott and Luyolo Sijake for the From Africa to China blog

After reading Professor Li's piece "Ignorance of race not equivalent to racism", we, as people of African descent from highly racialized societies currently living in China, felt it necessary to address and respond to some of the issues raised in the piece. In addition to being a response to Professor Li's piece, the purpose of this article is to draw attention to attitudes and behaviours that are present in China that embody the foundations of racialism. Through this article, we also aim to emphasize the urgent need to address ignorance and racism in China, phenomena that by no means simply fade with time and greater exposure to other groups. We present the view that racism and ignorance are in fact fundamentally interconnected. As foreigners who have had various positive experiences in China, we write this article principally in the spirit of mutual understanding.

The core of Prof Li's article rests on the idea that a clear distinction should be drawn between ignorance and racism. It is certainly the case that groups from all parts of the world hold incorrect perceptions of people they are unfamiliar with, but the problem is that these misconceptions, this 'ignorance', necessarily shapes the way in which people treat one another. So when a commercial like the Qiaobi detergent commercial re-enforces the notion that all people of African descent are dirty and not acceptable as they are, it is not difficult to connect the dots between this view of 'black people' and their mistreatment, or discrimination against them. Whilst curiosity itself is benign, ignorance is always bad. Even though it is true that ignorance of race isn't necessarily equal to racism, it is undeniable that ignorance has underpinned some of history's worst racially driven atrocities. Are these acts to be excused, citing ignorance as the justification?

It was unfortunate to see that most references Prof Li chose to make to the African continent and its people were negative. As done in the detergent advertisement, the stock photo used for the article further perpetuates a particular stereotype often used to portray the entire African continent. The photo icon that accompanies the article on Wechat shows a malnourished boy with unidentified sacks in the background, implying, among other things, that the African continent can be summed up as being in a perpetual state of abject poverty. In fact, Africa is the world's fastest-growing continent with 5.6% GDP growth per year, and GDP is expected to rise by an average of over 6% per year between 2013 and 2023. Over one-third of Sub-Saharan African countries posted 6% or higher growth rates, and another 40% have grown at 4% to 6% per year. This is a clear sign of growing prosperity.

It is no myth that Africa has and continues to suffer from a range of problems due to ethnocentricity that have led to hostility towards foreigners and has even caused tensions among different groups on the continent. However, to frame ethnocentricity in Africa by using the example of Malian cannibals as a comparative case to the great ancient empires of Italy, Greece, India, and China is frankly insulting. There was no lack of affluent empires in Africa prior to the advent of European colonialism and subsequent unending expropriation of resources. Mali, home to Timbuktu, is a good example. In its golden age, the town's numerous Islamic scholars and the extensive trading network made possible an important book trade to which the Sankore Madrasah campus contributed greatly. This established Timbuktu as a globally renowned scholarly centre.

In addressing ethnocentricity in China as it relates to appearance, in particular, it would be misleading to assert that Chinese people today view themselves as the benchmark for beauty. Everywhere you look, western symbols of success, power or beauty are glaringly present in the cars people drive, clothes they wear and the way they seek to appear physically. There are arguably no persistent prejudices harboured by newer Chinese generations towards people of European descent. At the time of the 'reform and opening up', these prejudices may have been palpable, but 30 years later one can see that European culture has influenced China immensely.

It would appear that all things European have become the touchstone by which many things are judged. Almost every status symbol in modern China is American or European. As one walks down the street in Chaoyang district, Beijing's richest district, one can see many different models of Audi and Porsche roar past you on the street. Here one often walks by women using Louis Vuitton and Chanel bags, donning jewellery bought from NYC-based jewellery store, Tiffany's. Prejudice towards Europeans has been transformed into a pursuit of status and power through the obtaining of everything European and American. Plastic surgery is also more and more common in China. Jawline restructuring, nose realignment, and double eyelid surgery are common procedures undergone by more affluent Chinese women often in pursuit of a typically European appearance. So even in the world's second-largest economy, with a population of over one billion incredibly hardworking, beautiful people, the beauty standard has been imported from nearly 4000 miles away.

It is also in areas that should have nothing to do with appearance where people of African and even Asian descent, among others, are the victims of mistreatment or discrimination resulting from "ignorance" amongst Chinese people. This is exceedingly evident in the English teaching market in China where eloquent 'non-white' English speakers and highly qualified English teachers are often denied jobs in favour of less or equally competent 'white' people who often times aren't even from English speaking countries. Judging someone's ability based on their colour is one of the clearest forms of racism that exist. Here we clearly see the key problem in how 'ignorance' translates directly into discriminatory behaviour. The fact that Chinese parents make decisions about their children's education based on how someone looks as opposed to their credentials should be concerning. Are we to say that this too should be excused as an act of ignorance? The conclusion drawn in the article that racist acts by Chinese people should somehow not be considered racist is clearly questionable.

It thus follows that the way in which Chinese people view and refer to people of African descent cannot be compared to the way in which they refer to 'white' people. Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd (2005) states, "Race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. It derives from people's desire to classify." The term " hei ren" in Mandarin Chinese is a term often used by Chinese people when referring to people they deem to be of African descent. The inherently racist term " hei ren" conflates an entire continent of nearly one billion people with 54 different nations, 3000 distinct languages, and a global diaspora that includes an additional 200 million plus people spread throughout the world on nearly every continent and refers to them with the over reductive term "hei ren". Rarely are foreigners of European descent referred to as " bai ren" (white people) but rather as " lao wai" or " wai guo ren ", simply "foreigner". Despite these terms having xenophobic origins they are far more respectful of the variation that exists amongst 'white' people, who are nearly one billion of the world's 7 billion plus people - the same proportion as black people on the planet.

The conclusion in Prof Li's article that the misconceptions held towards people of African descent will dissipate with the passing of time and greater exposure to different people is deeply problematic, it would, in fact, make more sense that these attitudes become exacerbated with greater exposure. We have only to look at societies like the USA and South Africa to understand that even where different racial groups have been in contact for centuries some of the most inconceivable misconceptions and deep-rooted forms racism persist. We write this article in the hope that these kinds of misconceptions, myths, and fallacies will not shape the future that lies ahead in this increasingly globalised society.

12. "RACIST" OR "NOT-RACIST," THE BETTER QUESTION IS WHETHER RACISM IS BEING (RE)-PRODUCED OR DECONSTRUCTED IN CHINA

By Derek Sheridan for Node to Node

The controversy over the advertisement has centered on either the racism of its content, or racism within Chinese society. This has meant both the use of the ad to demonstrate/confirm that racism exists in China, and the use of contextualization to argue in myriad ways that the ad, or at least Chinese society at large, is " not as racist as you think. " The responses to the ad in either case have grappled with the question, "Are the Chinese racist?" This may not be the best question to ask. The better question would be, "Where and how is race and racism being (re)produced in Chinese society, and where and how is it being deconstructed?" Race and racism are the products of social interactions and inequalities rather than simply a set of prejudiced attitudes. The response to the controversy, however, has focused primarily on the latter, contributing to the conflation of racism with ignorance. This is not surprising. "Racism" is frequently talked about as a set of problematic attitudes or opinions that a person may possess in varying degrees, rather than an assemblage of systematic practices (including discourses) which produce inequalities based on constructed notions of race.

In conflating racism with "ignorance" or "attitudes," the debate has been less about the quality of relationships between Chinese and Africans/African-descendant people, and more about the identity of Chinese in a global hierarchy of tolerance and civility. A reason for this is that the primary reference point for any discussion about "race" in China is the history of Western imperialism, and the fact that "Whiteness" continues to inform global hierarchies of value. Whatever genealogies to racial thought in Chinese history, it is near impossible to talk about them today except through the lens of the standard set by Western racism. This is true not only for foreign observers who interpret Chinese attitudes based on their experiences in the United States or Europe, but also for Chinese. What this means is that these debates also are about the identity of Europeans and European-descendant peoples, against which Asian racism serves as either the dark attic of their own "forgotten" stereotypes (i.e. the afterlives of Darkie Toothpaste and Sambo in Asia), or the "they-do-it too" validation for racist ideology.

A routine debate has unfolded on a China-Africa listserv I follow between those arguing the Qiaobi ad is indicative of a problematic discourse of race in China, and those arguing the reaction to the Qiaobi ad is indicative of a problematic Western discourse about racism in China. On close examination, there are actually a number of facts the two sides seem to agree on, but as is often the case with international scandals involving Africa-China, "East-West" tropes of geopolitical competition leads any particular commentary to be suspiciously read by some as either apologia or driven by covert political motivations.

If there is one thing people have (mostly) agreed on is the need for contextualization, to avoid blanket statements like "the Chinese are racist." How one contextualizes is another matter. Robert Castillo has offered a good overview of the different "readings" and "explanations" usually offered to explain incidents of anti-black racism in China. The first is that what looks like "racism" is better understood as "colorism," an aesthetic preference for fair skin originating in the association between darker skin and working under the sun, and therefore, "classism." The second is that it is rooted in historical prejudices towards darker skinned southerners (which were extended towards Africans in the late 19 th/early 20 thcentury via Western racial theories). The third explanation is that Chinese anti-black attitudes are informed by Western racism, popularly expressed as the "Hollywood-made-me-racist" argument. Castillo supplies an additional explanation concerning the Qiaobi ad in particular: "policing Chineseness, and the policing of Chinese femininity." A potential union between a Chinese woman and a black male (it is unclear in the ad whether he is from Africa or not) is "corrected" by producing a Chinese man. The fact he is a Chinese man rather than a "white" European (an imagined alternative to the ad Chinese internet commentators sardonically suggested) suggests that in addition to the invocation of global racial hierarchies, there is the anxiety of Chinese women looking outside the population of Chinese males. This was in fact a major theme of the 1988 (male) anti-black riots in Nanjing, as Castillo points out. His assessment of these explanations is that each is simplistic in isolation, and he is right to identify the problem with "global (colonial and postcolonial) imaginaries of racial superiority" rather than a distinctively Chinese racism. It is never an either/or. Expressions of racial prejudice can emerge from the intersection of multiple forms of discrimination.

The practice of contextualizing racism, however, raises the question of how one chooses to define racism and where one locates it. Castillo defines racism in terms of structural racism, and draws a distinction between that and the surface manifestations of racial prejudice. Based on his experience and research with the African community in Guangzhou, he argues that systemic anti-black racism like that encountered in the United State or Europe does not exist in China. Therefore, expressions of racial prejudice in China are better understood to be the products of "ignorance." Nicole Bonnah's response to Castillo raises the point that calls to contextualize before calling something "racist" opens "up a pandoras box of accessing who's eyes and ears are beholding and defining these 'contexts'. Evaluations of racism using this practice would undoubtedly be formed based upon positions of privilege or under-privilege." To provide an example from the American context, it is often the privilege of the dominant group to define what is or is not racist, and to thereby dismiss those on the receiving end of "being sensitive." Bonnah writes that "racial prejudice in China as a result of colonial and postcolonial 'imaginaries' of racial superiority doesn't just look like racism - it is." It is a semiotic question because even if the signifiers of racism (in this case, the ad) can be argued to not signify a single referent (a Chinese racism or an imagined ur-racism), a signifier of racism, once out there in the world, is not just a representation of racism, it is racism. It is racist because of the global context, not just the Chinese context.

Qiaobi's public response to the controversy was a combination of denied intention to harm combined with criticism of international media for "over-sensitivity." Ironically, it's a very "American" response. In the United States, controversies over racially offensive discourses usually attract counter-complaints that the offended populations are "sensitive," or that the racism is in the eye of the beholder. But this is often the point. Those on the receiving end of devaluing, dehumanizing discourses are often better able to recognize their import than those who produce them. The producers of the Qiaobi ad may not have recognized their product as "racist," nor may they even have harbored any explicit hostility towards black individuals. Nonetheless, the long history of the black=dirty motif in Western advertising, anti-black attitudes within the Chinese public sphere, and the reading of the ad as racist means that the ad is racist, or at the very least, the ad becomes racist. The ad has contributed to the archive of global anti-black racism. It cannot be unproduced.

The debates, however, have largely been about China, and the contests of contextualization have been restricted there. As Michael Herzfeld writes, the use of disclaimers to argue that this or that racist opinion or policy is "not racist" has already become a globalized form of contemporary racism. Contextualization is important, especially as a corrective to self-affirmative American and European interpretations, but in the Chinese context, it can become a conservative position which deflects critical attention to the object itself: racism in China.

But what does "racism in China" actually mean? What kind of object is it? I have noticed two versions of contextualization used when observers respond to blanket claims that "the Chinese" are racist towards black individuals, and in their attempt to contextualize racist situations involving Chinese society. The contextualizations I describe here are "academic" in the sense of being distinct from the popular "readings" and "explanations" Castillo summarizes. This does not mean they are exclusive, as the boundary between the "academic" and "non-academic" is constructed and fuzzy in practice, but there are distinct arguments which can be associated with the scholars who have commented on the issue.
The Genealogical Contextualization
These treatments have argued the discourse of anti-black racism is closely linked to nationalist anxieties about the place of China and Chinese in the global hierarchy of value. There is a long genealogy to this going back to the encounter between the Chinese empire and Western imperialism in the 19 th century. The narrative is well summarized by Dai Na- Mei (戴娜美) in Chinese here. There were prominent Chinese reformers who adopted the racial and Social Darwinist perspectives of such Europeans as Francis Galton to critically analyze the place of the "yellow" in the global racial hierarchy. There was a dark side to the progressivism of famous Chinese reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Dai quotes Kang Youwei in Datong Shi as writing ,"The difference between white people and yellow people is not that great, China can still vigorously catch up, but the blacks are an ethnicity (族性) which is already too inferior."

The anti-imperialist solidarity of the People's Republic of China with African liberation movements did create counter-currents, but when Maoism came under critical evaluation in 1980s China, so did China's alignment with Africa. Based on my own experience listening to Chinese expatriates in East Africa, I think Maoist anti-racism may have even had the unintended effect of reinforcing global hierarchies. A shared history of being the victim of imperialism did not necessarily entail an elevation to equality. Instead, for some Chinese I have met, the interpretation of African society through the lens of Western colonialism reinforces the association of "blacks" with "slaves." Chinese interlocutors I encountered in my fieldwork would sometimes explain various perceived deficits in the character of local people in terms of "backwards" social development: being a "slave society," lacking local cultural agency etc. When they would ask me whether "the position of blacks in the United States were very low," it was not necessarily a critique of structural racism, but a commentary about the "low position" of "blacks" in general as a consequence of an imagined ethnopsychology. Furthermore, the sentiment among some that Chinese expatriates in Africa are not "respected" because they did not achieve the same Hegelian mastery as Europeans is an example of how easily the moral evaluation of the same political assumptions can be flipped.

The problem with this genealogical approach, however, is that it flattens the possibilities of what a Chinese discourse of race might be. The construction of a textual cannon linking the writings of Kang Youwei to the language of 1980s student protestors excludes alternative voices and singularizes the Chinese discourse of race to a master melody against which individual perspectives are either in or out of tune. The work of Dikotter, Wyatt, (early) Sautman, Simon Shen and Cheng Yinhong sometimes reads like an extended series of examples, a kind of "gallery of shocking statements" primarily intended to prove that racism exists in China. In some cases, the volume of quoted statements are so offensive as to almost make it difficult to remember anything else about the articles.

For context, it would be worthwhile to compare online Chinese racism to online American racism. If online American racism is read as the public revelation of secret attitudes behind "covert" systemic racism, than what does "overt" Chinese racism reveal if, as Castillo claims, "covert" racism does not exist in China? Do online attitudes correlate with how Chinese individuals interact with Africans they may actually meet?

Cheng and Shen both emphasize how thoroughly racism "permeates" Chinese society. Shen goes further to make claims about how "the Chinese" think and feel. The problem is that this excludes entire categories of people whose experiences and discourses might trouble what we mean by "the Chinese." For example, one of the key sites of anti-black racism Shen and Cheng identify are (male) Chinese denunciations of Chinese women who date and/or marry African men (the unfulfilled outcome of the advertisement) . But we do not hear what these women have to say. To privilege male Chinese opinions is to concede the right to who determines what "the Chinese" think. There has recently been attempts to address this (Shanshan Lan and Allen Xiao. Forthcoming; Yu Qiu, Forthcoming). In a recent piece, Min Zhou, Shabnam Shenasi and Tao Xu suggest that although views of Africans online are generally "negative," those in Guangzhou who have direct interactions with Africans in business may have more positive views than those who do not. In all these cases, contextualization would mean avoiding singularization and focusing more on the positionality of where racial claims are being made.
Statistical Range (or Marketplace of Ideas) Contextualization
The second type of contextualization might be called the "statistical range," or "marketplace" contextualization because of its affinity with the neoliberal metaphor of a "marketplace of ideas." In this interpretation, there are no "discursive formations," or singular "Chinese racisms," but rather one billion Chinese individuals, and within this set, the entire spectrum of ideas about race may be found. This is exemplified in the argument of Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong's op-ed, " One Bad Advert Doesn't Make 1.4. Billion Chinese Racist. " The target of the op-ed is of course the singularization that too often occurs when people makes claims about "the Chinese." All too frequently, what applies to one Chinese individual is rapidly assumed to apply to every possible individual within that category. Sautman and Yan review survey studies to argue that racist attitudes are less prevalent in China than assumed.

Racism in this case is treated as a measurable individual property. There is a difference between the claim that an entire population is racist, or possesses racist views, however, and the claim that a discourse of race is prominent in a society. There is a common slippage in ordinary use between "population" and "society." Population in this case can be defined quantitatively as a set of individuals counted in the Chinese census. "Society" in this case could refer to a shared frame of reference, a public sphere with common points of linguistic, cultural and experiential reference wherein any individual might recognize "Chinese society" as an object to which they relate in some way or the other, and are able to make varying degrees of generalizations about.

Of course, these are both imprecise definitions, but the point I am trying to make is that the kind of claims one can make about either category are substantively different. A population, however defined, is relatively fixed, it has a number. It can be sampled and surveyed to produce statistical data. Each individual can be assigned a variable (in this case, "racist" or "non-racist," however the researcher chooses to define those terms, and whatever methods they use to determine them). The method already assumes there will be variation, but one of the products of the method is to produce data about the proportion of variation. These numbers are then used to make arguments about the norm, which in translation, often come define the entire population in a kind of "winner-takes-all" argument. Mobilized for the geopolitics of comparison, populations are ranked by their comparative racism. Sautman and Yan cite this literature not to "prove" (although they often seem to suggest) that Chinese are "less racist" than Europeans, but to disprove the assumption Chinese are "more racist" than Europeans. In either case, we learn less about racism itself and more about the ongoing politics of comparative hierarchies which continue to define debates about the "rise of China."

There are many problems with this, one of which is the assumption of methodological individualism that the measure of racism is the measurement of attitudes possessed by individuals. This is not to say such measurements do not have value. It is important, as Sautman and Yan point out in a listserv discussion, that among respondents in Nanjing, there has been a change in how people talk about race between 1994 and the present, to the extent one could argue people are less "racist" now than they were in the early 1990s. The problem is rather the classification of individuals as "racist" or "non-racist." This is implied when Sautman and Yan are discussing the fact there are "only a few surveys exist that compare Chinese racial/ethnic attitudes to those of Westerners, but so far they show that the former are by no means more racist than the latter. That is the case moreover even though almost everyone seems to agree that those Chinese who are racist are less apt than Westerners to disguise their views" (Italics mine).

The identification of a sub-category of those "who are racist," but "disguise their views" to varying degrees, reflects a persistent way of talking about racism as an individual rather than social possession. It is problematic because it helps elide an understanding of racism as a total social phenomena. In an American context, individuals who are white frequently deny they are "racist," while not only holding opinions which are racist, but also participating in social practices which reproduce racial inequalities. This is not just a matter of disguising attitudes, but also engaging in practices these same individuals themselves may not understand to contribute to "racism." For example, decisions on where to live and enroll children for schooling need not be explicitly understood to be based on race, but on considerations of "crime," which can be either coded,, affective-for example, internalized anxieties when driving through certain neighborhoods-or seemingly well-intentioned. The undecidability between the intentions distracts attention from the similarity of effects, but in the United States (and not just in the United States), moral self-definition is premised on intentionality.
The Production of Race and Racism
In the case of China, where these same forms of anti-black discrimination do not exist in the same systemic manner, the issue is more complicated. Castillo himself defines racism in terms of structural racism: "a covert, systematic, and persistent (e.g. that is almost inescapable) form of discrimination embedded in social institutions (like the mighty American police, in case you were looking for an example), that grants privileges to one group while denying them to others." By this definition, although there "are plenty of racial prejudices and forms of discrimination" which are "overt" rather than "covert," Castillo argues "'there is no structural racism'" in China." By decoupling racial prejudice from systemic racism, the explanation for Chinese anti-black attitudes is attributed to being "still very ignorant, naive, or plainly idiotic." Castillo and others have attempted to separate prejudice from racism, suggesting the former is a universal feature of human life which can be the basis for, but does not necessarily lead to, the latter.

What then, do racial prejudices, discourses or practices in China do?Does their "racism" depend on their intention or their effects? If anti-black prejudices in China do not contribute to systemic racism, then what are their effects? In the context of a global hierarchy of value which often devalues "blackness," whether or not Chinese prejudice is Chinese racism is not just a Chinese issue. As the debate has revealed, the Qiaobi ad exposes both Chinese and Western practices to question. Attempts to isolate the problem as either "Chinese" or "Western" does not answer questions about racism, it engages the geopolitics of comparison between status quo hegemonic powers and would be challengers. It also overlooks the broader situation of global inequality, including the relation of "Africa" to the world. Differences between how "the West" and "China" interact with the people who live there are ultimately less significant than the forms of inequality, dependency, and cultural hierarchies that continue to produce themselves in interactions between African societies and external actors (notwithstanding the complexities of agency and mutual constitution). The Qiaobi ad should be considered in this context rather than only in comparative domestic contexts.

Furthermore, setting the definition of racism as something possessed by individuals ignores the dialogical properties of discourse; the articulation of individual attitudes do not exist in isolation from each other, people express views on race with reference, implicitly or explicitly, to other views in circulation. Anti-racist views among elite individuals in the majority group, for example, might identify non-elite members of the majority group as embodiment of the racism they wish to disavow in themselves. In the United States, this can be seen in the practices of social distinction white American liberals adopt towards "rednecks." In my fieldwork in East Africa, I found Chinese expatriates willingly criticize different devalued categories of "low-quality" or "low cultural level" Chinese for their presumed prejudice and impatience with locals. These same individuals would present themselves as being better educated or understanding of cultural difference.

Nonetheless, even if not everyone uses the same racial terminology, there is a set of observations and comments people make about locals which indexes similar observations and comments made by those who do use explicitly racial terminology. In other words, even though there is a diversity of perspectives on "race" and cultural difference among Chinese expatriates, there is nonetheless a convergence on a shared set of cultural generalizations about heiren (black people).

For example, I met individuals who would express seemingly nuanced perspectives on race, and critical attitudes towards the attitudes of other expatriates in one situation, but participate in racialized discussions in other situations. I remember a conversation once with a couple of Chinese friends whose discussion turned to the challenges of living in East Africa. One of the young men began to describe problems with his employees and with police officers in terms of problems with " heiren," and after a few minutes, he began to speak of them with a derogatory label I do not wish to reproduce here. He had done this before, so I was not surprised. If I had to classify him, I would lean towards the "racist" category. What did surprise me was that another individual, who had expressed anti-racist sentiments on other occasions, one who I would have put in the "non-racist" category, did not respond to this. Furthermore, she actually contributed to the conversation by sharing her own experiences with the "unreliability" of heiren. These discursive interactions produce heiren as a conceptual category with an assumed set of ethnopsychological characteristics. This is not uncommon. Shared conversations of complaint about locals, whether face-to-face or online is an opportunity for each individual to share their own experiences. In other words, Chinese expatriates share a set of common complaints, even though the stance and perspectives they take on these may vary. One does not need to be a committed racist, however, to contribute to the production of racist discourse.

Even when expatriates disavow "racial discrimination," and otherwise argue for a kind of cultural relativism, they nonetheless operate in terms of generalities about "ways of thinking"(siewei) particular to either distinct cultures or to people at a particular stage of social development. This is of course not unique to the Chinese, but what is interesting is that Chinese more readily use heiren (black person) as a descriptor for individuals whereas other expatriates will use a more varied set of terminology which may nevertheless be racially coded. "Racial sensitivity" does not necessarily mean possessing enlightened anti-racist thinking, but can also simply mean a sensitivity to the appropriate use of language.

Castillo sees the Qiaobi ad as an opportunity for "people in China [to] learn about these global sensitivities." An opportunity will be lost, however, if it just morphs into efforts to police how Chinese talk about race, that is, another exercise in "raising civility." This has happened before. Following an incident in 1979 where Chinese students attacked African exchange students, the government's response was to improve the " internationalism " education of Chinese students.

This is an aspect which has been overlooked in the debate about whether the Chinese are "racist." There is a different dynamic in conversations among white Americans I know. White Americans are just as prone to make the same kinds of generalizations, but will steadily avoid the use of "black," preferring instead more particularized terms. For example, an American friend of mine in a coastal region of East Africa once described having friendships with "Arabs" and "Indians," but not "the local fisherman." In the United States, there is a "call-out" culture which sanctions improper use of racial language. Among the Chinese with whom I am familiar, not so much. Although one well-established businessman once shared with me an anecdote about a Chinese Foreign Service officer threatening to revoke a nearby man's passport after overhearing him using a derogatory term to describe Africans. But of course, with the rise of a new public sphere online, and especially with the rise of Donald Trump in the United States, it is questionable whether "overt" racist discourse in the United States ever actually left. Comparing the racist things Americans say online with the racist things Chinese say online, for example, may be like comparing apples and oranges.
Ignorant Racism and Experienced Racism
And this brings me to my final point. If American expressions of racist discourse about "blacks" signify American histories of racism, what do Chinese expressions signify? A number of commentators have argued Chinese expressions are signifies of ignorance rather than racism. The leading scholar of African studies in China, Li Anshan has even published an editorial arguing "Chinese ignorance of race should not be confused with racism." As he writes, "China is still facing serious challenges in its dealings with the outside world. Ignorance is persistent, and some Chinese harbor prejudices toward not just Africans but people from other continents as well." He links this to a history of Chinese ethnocentrism before arguing that "Ethnocentrism is common among people who are isolated and incapable of achieving mutual understanding." In these cases, it is "understandable," but is a different case from "modern colonialism" in which ethnocentrism is converted into racism... to justify the military, political, and economic domination of foreign people." He then provides a list of individual stories where Chinese overcame ignorance and prejudice towards black-skinned foreigners. [A good response from Gregory Scott and Luyolo Sijakewhich has just been posted can be here.]

Castillo too has argued that one difference between the Chinese context and other contexts is that in the former, people's attitudes are much more flexible, they are willing to "learn." An event like Qiaobi thus affords positive effects. In European societies, however, racism is so "entrenched" that people are resistant to acknowledge it.

Although Castillo does express concern that the geopolitics may lead to an increase, rather than decrease, of Chinese ethno-nationalism, a number of commentators express a kind of "moral optimism" that with greater contact between Chinese and dark-skinned individuals, whether from Africa or elsewhere, racially enlightened attitudes will develop. The implication is that through increased contact and interactions, mutual understanding will increase, stereotypes will be challenged, and that the signs of "racism" which are observed are products of a "closed" past which is rapidly changing.

This is a problematic assumption. While ignorance is certainly an important contributor to racial ideologies, it should not be assumed that less ignorance would mean greater racial sensitivity. Or rather, there are different forms of ignorance. There are forms of ignorance which are based on inexperience, but there are other forms of ignorance which are themselves the product of experiences interpreted within problematic frameworks. An obvious example of this is the entire field of "scientific racism" in the West. At the same time scientific research has challenged the racial typologies of the past, there are still otherwise educated people in scientific circles who continue to problematically argue for the intelligibility of "race." This is just to say that the opposite of "ignorance" is not necessarily "enlightenment" about racial issues. The moral optimism that mutual contact will lead to mutual understanding echoes the assumptions of the early literature on Globalization. Missing from that literature of course were considerations of power, inequality and insecurity.

In talking about interactions between Chinese and Africans, for example, it is important to consider the structural features of the encounter. Take for instance the experience of Chinese who go to Africa to do business or to work. Among such individuals, there is an entire genre of everyday conversation and complaint about heirenthat I have already mentioned above, which is not simply about colorism, but about an entire package of "cultural" complaints which are full of stereotypes (i.e. punctuality, reliability, trustworthiness etc.). These stereotypes are regularly linked to individual experiences such that any particular difficulty is reflected upon as a product of something essential and internal to heiren. It is of course possible to attribute certain reactions as well to "ignorance" (as many Chinese I know do regarding their impatient compatriots), but these interactions and experiences themselves contribute to new forms of "knowledge" which produce new forms of prejudice and discrimination. In my experience, the most depressing instances are cases of what, borrowing from Michael Herzfeld, might be called a "wounded humanism," wherein an individual claims to have had positive views of "Africans" before coming to work in Africa, based on either state-sanctioned narratives of historical friendship, or personal beliefs in human equality, but whose individual bad luck in Africa has led them to believe in some version of human inequality. Needless to say, setting up businesses in a foreign country can be a risky endeavor, and it is on such frontiers of capitalism that stories of betrayal and "friction" abound. The creation of "culturally intimate" knowledge between people brought together in such circumstances is not necessarily liberal cosmopolitanism. Compare to the claims, "classic among ethnic groups that share common borders, to the effect that 'we know what they are like from our own close experience,' but with the added twist that it could not be directly attributed to racism." Herzfeld refers here to prejudices among 'culturally similar' Europeans, but there is something applicable to the case of any form of emerging cultural intimacy. Add to that situations of market competition, labor regimes, patron-clientage etc. Experience in and of itself does not produce tolerance. The mode of interaction is important. What kind of interactions produce racism, but also, what kind of interactions can deconstruct racism?

13. Of washing powder, Afrophobia and racism in China

By Roberto Castillo for The Conversation

Is Afrophobia really on the rise in China?

Across my social and academic networks, the ad caused a major storm. Everyone from traders to academics and advertisers weighed in. With tensions running high, African traders in Guangzhou were quick to point out that Chinese ignorance in race-related matters was probably behind the advert.

Racialism and a rising China

Despite the fact that " race " as a biological category was discredited long ago, racial thinking or "racialism" is still common in China. Racialism is the belief that humans are naturally divided into biological categories called "races". Sometimes, the term racialism is used interchangeably with "racism" to mean a race-based way of thinking through human differences.

Contemporary racial thinking in China is informed by historical ways of imagining "otherness". These ways centre around differences such as skin colour, class and "ethnicity". Contact with 19th-century European colonialism and racial theories was also influential. More recently, the " rise of China " within the context of global consumerist societies has stirred up ethno-nationalist sentiments that affect how Chinese people think about "race".

In China, like other places, racial thinking is often accompanied by stereotypes and prejudices. Dark skin, for instance, is often seen negatively. This is something many of us foreigners have to live with in China.

Within this context, the Qiaobi advert was seen by some as proof that there's racism in China, and as evidence that " Afrophobia" was on the rise. Those who "see" Afrophobia are quick to point to Chinese hiring practices, which prefer white foreigners to black ones.

Any non-white foreigner living in China knows that these practices do not only discriminate against black people. They extend to other dark-skinned people. So, while deplorable, it's not exactly Afrophobia.

Despite little concrete evidence supporting claims of Afrophobia or "Anti-African" campaigns, these claims are often picked up by Western media. Some journalists seem all too ready to cast China and the Chinese as "racist" and Africans as the poor victims with no agency. This pattern is replicated in coverage of China as a " neo-colonial " power in Africa.

To equate Chinese rac(ial)ism with racism in the West is intellectually and historically dishonest. Rac(ial)ism and racial prejudice in China are still far from producing the exploitation, oppression, discrimination and murder that racist worldviews continue to produce in the West.

In short, while there are deep-seated forms of rac(ial)ism in China, the rise of "Afrophobia" is difficult to prove. The issue is much more complex than that.

'Race' and racism in global media

In most of the articles and comments following the offensive Chinese advert, people from all over the world used the terms racism, stereotypes and racial prejudice interchangeably. It quickly became clear to me that we haven't figured out how to talk about "race" and racism in globally inclusive ways.

The conversation is usually dominated by the American ways of talking about "race" and racism. Needless to say, using the black/white binary paradigm of race as a measuring stick for racial issues in global and non-Western settings is problematic. If the many "racist" comments I've heard from African men about their Chinese counterparts is any guide, the problems highlighted by the Qiaobi advert are far more complex than what the American binary suggests.

Figuring out who's the racist, or if this or that is racist, or if the Chinese are racist, is a waste of time. Rather than being black or white, it's a complex matrix of practices that reproduce global systems of exploitation and oppression. Despite our skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, "race", nationality or faith, we are all, to different degrees, participants in these systems.

White supremacy the Chinese way?

As pointed out early on during the Qiaobi controversy, the advert is a revamped iteration of old Western racist tropes. To understand why such iterations emerge in China - and elsewhere in Asia - it's important to look at how contemporary global media imaginations are influenced by long-standing racial theories and ideas. Enter white supremacy.

As I write this piece, a tram covered in advertising stops in front of me on Shipyard Lane in Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. In the advert, a young, handsome, white guy in a suit is levitating in front of a building. The Chinese words next to him are about leadership and success.

On the next tram a blonde woman wearing a Swarovski ring is being admired by a young white man. Any survey of street advertising in this, or any other big Asian city, will show that white bodies are pervasively used as the markers of success, power, beauty and romance.

It is hardly news that global media are deeply shaped by a racial hierarchy that frames whiteness as a superior state of being. What I find fascinating is how these racially informed imaginations are negotiated by people in China when they imagine themselves and the world they live in.

These negotiations have to be factored in against the backdrop of the "rise of China" - a rise that has led many to believe that the country will take up the reins of the global capitalist system.

I believe that there are few indications that China would be willing (or able) to transform the (old imperial, capitalist, white supremacist and patriarchal) structures and practices that inform contemporary capitalism and that are, ultimately, behind the Qiaobi detergent advert.

For me, these reflections were the main takeaways amid the uproar that followed the advert controversy.

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Compilation] Opinion and analysis pieces about the notorious #RacistChineseAd The opinions and analysis below are chronologically organised 1. On why the racist Chinese ad MAY NOT be as racist as you think By Roberto Castillo for AfricansInChina.Net On May 26th, The Shanghaiist broke the (SinoAfrican) internet by bringing a Chinese ad to the attention of...

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Africans in Beijing - AfricansInChina.Net

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Posts about Africans in Beijing written by Roberto Castillo

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The China-Africa Summit of 4-5 November 2006 was the largest ever high-level conference on Africa held outside of the continent. In its relations with African countries, China has traditionally avoided presenting itself as a donor, preferring to see itself as a large developing country working alongside other developing countries. It pursued a gradualist and integrated approach towards cooperation that emphasised the mutuality and two-sidedness of the cooperation. However, the various pledges, promises and targets included in 'The Beijing Action Plan-2007-2009' that was unveiled at the Beijing Summit gave it more of an aid flavour. While this need not make China into a Western or Japanese style donor, it will certainly have a series of consequences for China's relations with Africa.

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The China-Africa Summit of 4-5 November 2006 was the largest ever high-level conference on Africa held outside of the continent. In its relations with African countries, China has traditionally avoided presenting itself as a donor, preferring to see itself as a large developing country working alongside other developing countries.

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Africans in China: A Sociocultural Study and Its Implications for Africa-China Relations By Adams Bodomo

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Cambria Press Professional and Scholarly Publisher of Academic Research

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GUANGZHOU (AFP) - The Ghanaian university student was roused after midnight by police shouting and pounding on his door in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, where a crackdown on illegal immigration has left many residents of its "Little Africa" neighbourhood feeling scared and angry.

After demanding to see his visa, the agents carefully checked his papers before leaving to knock on other doors.

The commercial hub has long been a magnet for fortune-seeking Africans, but traders and students say they face unfavourable visa rules and increasingly heavy policing.

"They do this because Africans live here," the Ghanaian student told AFP as he stood on a pedestrian bridge in the bustling city, still upset over last summer's after-dark visit.

"I was sick of being treated like a criminal. I had to move to another neighbourhood," he said, gesturing at a nearby police station and lamenting that the omnipresent security had made life more complicated.

Migration from Africa has risen in recent years as China has stepped up its diplomatic links and investments with the continent.

Guangzhou draws merchants who come to buy goods such as jewellery and electronics in bulk, which they ship back to their homelands.

But in January, the official Xinhua news agency reported that the African population in Guangzhou had decreased as "police have tightened enforcement on illegal immigration".

There are now 15,000 Africans living in the city compared to 20,000 in 2009, but "the real number, including illegal immigrants and overstayers, is believed to have been much higher," the report said.

Estimates from Chinese researchers have put the actual number of residents at over 150,000, making Guangzhou home to the largest African community in Asia.

'HARSH TREATMENT'

Police vans with flashing lights and officers astride motorcycles congregated after nightfall recently at a small public square in Xiaobei, a "Little Africa" neighbourhood with halal restaurants on narrow winding streets.

A Nigerian merchant was returning home from a meeting with wholesalers earlier this year when officers handcuffed him and hauled him to a police station because he was not carrying identification.

It was only after his Chinese landlord vouched for him over the phone that police allowed him to retrieve his passport in his apartment - under close watch.

The treatment seemed "wrong" for a routine document check, the merchant told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Residents who faced police checks asked not to be identified over fears of being deported.

Guangzhou's police and exit-entry bureau did not return requests for comment.

"Sure, there are some illegal activities like the drug trade and police should target this minority of people," said Ohene Opoku Agyemang, a doctoral student in international relations at Jinan University.

"But the harsh treatment of law-abiding people negatively affects Africans' view of China and hurts efforts to build friendly relations with African countries," he said.

- Too much red tape - .

Long-time African residents of Guangzhou say they see their compatriots lapse into "illegal" status after struggling with onerous visa renewal requirements.

Nigerians must submit criminal record checks for all work and student visas, and no African countries are eligible for 72-hour or 144-hour transit visa exemptions, unlike visitors from many other nations.

"My friend had to go home to give fingerprints for a criminal record check. A return flight cost $2,000. By the time he got all his documents in order, his visa expired," said Akubakarr Sajor Barrie, director of an import-export company.

"For a small business owner, this is really hard. People start to wonder if doing business in China is worth it and they go to countries like Turkey and Vietnam instead," Barrie said.

In 2013, China amended its legislation governing foreign residents, the Exit-Entry Administration Law, adding higher penalties for illegal workers and overstayers without streamlining visa requirements, which vary widely between jurisdictions.

While the rules are for all foreigners, Africans lack institutional support in China and face considerable bureaucratic hurdles from their own countries, such as lacking online services for criminal record checks.

"There is no chamber of commerce from the 55 African countries in Guangzhou to track what is really happening or advocate for African businesses as other chambers of commerce do," said Hannah Ryder, CEO of Development Reimagined, an international development consultancy specialising in Africa-China relations.

A severe lack of funds and information prevents African governments from working together to seek favourable visa policies, she added.

The decrease of African residents in Guangzhou has taken a toll on Chinese businesses catering to them.

"We do flight bookings for traders, so when they can't get visas to come and visit even for a short time, of course it affects our business," said Yoyo Chen of Yoyo Travel Services.

But traders say some business conditions have improved.

"The quality and variety of choice in products has improved dramatically in the seven years I've been coming to Guangzhou," said a shoe merchant from Lagos, while he examined a bejeweled black velvet loafer at a market.

"And more Chinese can speak English."

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Crackdown shakes 'Little Africa' community in Guangzhou

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GUANGZHOU (AFP) - The Ghanaian university student was roused after midnight by police shouting and pounding on his door in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, where a crackdown on illegal immigration has left many residents of its "Little Africa" neighbourhood feeling scared and angry.. Read more at straitstimes.com.

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A year after Rajasthan resident Shambhu Lal Regar triggered countrywide outrage by allegedly killing a Bengali Muslim labourer on camera, a far-right Hindu group from Bengal has come to the help of the accused's family with financial and legal support.

On December 6, 2017, Regar allegedly killed Afzarul Khan, a resident of Sayedpur village in Bengal's Malda district with sharp weapon and set ablaze his body at Rajsamand near Udaipur.

The murder was captured on video allegedly by Regar's nephew who was then around 15 years old. The teenager is currently lodged in a juvenile home in Udaipur and Regar is an undertrial prisoner in Jodhpur jail.

Earlier this month, Devdutta Maji, president of the Hindu group, Singha Bahini, visited Regar's family at Rajsamand and gave a cheque for Rs one lakh to Sita Regar, wife of Shambhu Lal Regar.

Singha Bahini has also offered to help Regar's nephew. On Friday, Maji wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chairpersons of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and National Commission for Scheduled Castes seeking the teenager's release. The Regars belong to the Scheduled Caste category.

"I apprehend that this little boy is a victim of dirty politics and/or callousness of a section of the administration," Maji wrote in his letters.

"We are allowed to see our son but we have no idea what the administration intends to do with him. He appeared for the class 10 board examination but till now the government has not released his result," Sonia Regar, the boy's mother, said from Rajmasand over phone on Saturday. "Our son is innocent," she claimed.

Sonia Regar and her husband Prakash Regar met Maji in Udaipur on January 3 and sought his help. Sita Regar did not want to talk to the media.

"As Hindus, it is our duty to stand by this family. Shambhu Lal Regar is facing trial according to law but why is the teenager locked up for one year?" said Maji.

Singha Bahini was formed last year by eight former leaders of Hindu Samhati, the far-right organization that defended the two teenagers whose social media post triggered communal riots in the North 24 Parganas district in 2017.

These eight people, along with Tapan Ghosh, the Hindu Samhati founder, who often challenged Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), left the organisation in July 2017.

Last year, Singha Bahini became the only organisation in the country to raise money through crowd funding for Bengali Hindus in Assam after the first draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) left out lakhs of them.

Interestingly, a lesser known political outfit, Uttar Pradesh Navnirman Sena, has said that it wants to field Shambhulal Regar as its candidate from Agra Lok Sabha seat this year. The Agra (reserved) Lok Sabha seat is presently represented by former union minister Ram Shankar Katheria who is also chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes.

After Afrazul was killed, Regar was seen in the video ranting that he did it to 'stop Love Jihad', a term coined by the far-right to describe Muslim men luring Hindu women into marriage and then allegedly converting them to Islam.

A woman in Rajmasand, who treated Regar as her brother, had eloped with a Muslim man from Sayedpur in Malda in 2010. Regar visited Sayedpur in 2012 to bring her back but the woman returned on her own after two weeks.

First Published: Jan 13, 2019 07:43 IST

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Right-wing group from Bengal offers help to family of Rajasthan man who allegedly killed migrant on camera

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A year after Rajasthan resident Shambhu Lal Regar triggered countrywide outrage by allegedly killing a Bengali Muslim labourer on camera, a far-right Hindu group from Bengal has come to the help of the accused's family with financial and legal support.

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Beijing police round up and beat African expats

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· Diplomat's son among victims at nightclub · Deep bias combines with crackdown on drugs

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[UPDATE 5/28]: Shanghai-based Leishang cosmetics has responded to the global backlash against their ad by calling foreign media "too sensitive."
As any foreigner who has ever lived in China can attest, attitudes regarding race and skin color are often quite different here from back home. Still even with prior experience, sometimes this country can leave you completely and utterly dumbfounded.
Such is the case with a recent incredibly racist advertisement for Qiaobi-brand laundry detergent that has been making the rounds on WeChat. According to one young lady on Weibo the ad appeared on television and before movies at Wanda Cinemas this month.

In the video, a paint-splattered black man confidently approaches a young Chinese woman, only to have detergent placed in his mouth and his body shoved into a washing machine for a thorough rinsing. Once the wash cycle is done, out pops a pristine young Chinese man, as clean as can be.
Enjoy:

And here on Youku:

Wow! Those spots on the shirt came right off!
It turns out that the video is actually a blatant ripoff (even using the exact same music and sound effects) of a series of Italian laundry detergent ads that were aired about 9 years ago. Containing similar racist overtones, the original ads argue that in fact "Coloured is better."

The Chinese ad would seem to disagree.
Thanks to traditional beauty standards valuing white skin, many Chinese people have a well-established phobia of dark skin which unfortunately also breeds racist attitudes towards people of African descent, who are viewed by some as "dirty" simply because of their skin tone.
This guy isn't the first victim of China's efforts at Hollywood-level whitewashing. Last year, a Chinese promotional poster for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" was widely criticized by fans as being "racist" with the character played by black actor John Boyega inexplicably being shrunken in size.

By Christopher Ivan

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WATCH: This completely racist ad for washing detergent just aired on Chinese TV and at cinemas

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UPDATE 5/28]: Shanghai-based Leishang cosmetics has responded to the global backlash against their ad by calling foreign media "too sensitive."As any foreigner who has ever lived in China can attest, attitudes regarding race and skin color are often quite different here from back home.

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Guangzhou's Canaan market and the rise of an African merchant class.

Joseph Nwaosu, a Nigerian exporter, has yet to acclimate to the winter damp of Guangzhou, on China's southern coast. Over a button-down shirt he usually adds a heavy brown turtleneck sweater and a rumpled tan parka; when necessary, he wears a wool hat. The layers help with his commute. From his apartment, which has a mattress on the floor and rents for forty dollars a month, it takes an hour by bus and a half hour on foot to reach his office, across the street from the Canaan Export Clothes Trading Center, a half-lit market painted a dusty shade of peach. Almost all its customers are merchants from Nigeria, Mali, Ghana, and other African countries. They are arriving in such large numbers that in November Kenya Airways inaugurated mainland China's first non-stop route from Africa, between Nairobi and Guangzhou. Since the Canaan market opened, six years ago, similar markets, filled with African buyers and Chinese sellers, have arisen along the same block. Taxi-drivers call the neighborhood Chocolate City.

The Canaan market opens onto Guangyuan West Road-eight roaring lanes of cars and trucks and scooters on the ground and four more lanes in the air, on concrete spans that block the rain and the sun. Every square foot has been claimed by commerce. Walking to and from work, Nwaosu (I have changed his name) traverses a sidewalk offering a sharpening stone for cleavers, a handheld sewing machine, a mobile-phone card for Africa, an hour of sex, a bundle of socks, an electronic songbird that sings, an eight ball of cocaine, a mold that makes the perfect dumpling. Lining the sidewalks are passport-photo booths, mobile-phone venders, and shops crammed with jeans and T-shirts, alligator-skin cap-toe shoes and made-to-measure suits, soccer jerseys and bulletproof vests (four hundred and ten dollars for blue nylon; five hundred and fifty-six dollars for camouflage). But the real business goes on inside, where merchants cut deals for bogus and factory-reject Prada and Lacoste and Polo. The Canaan economy is all cash and unhindered by borders: "one hundred per cent human hair" extensions are clipped from heads in India, braided by hand in China, and packed for sale in West Africa. The man selling them was, until recently, trading motorbike parts in Singapore, and if the hair business slows down he will move on again. All of Canaan seems determined to get somewhere else.

Nwaosu, at twenty-nine, is spindle thin, with a wary flicker in his eyes. He works out of a tiny, windowless office above a strip of clothing stalls a few hundred feet from the original market. "When I arrived in Guangzhou, this was the first place I came," he said one recent afternoon. Outside the open office door, a stereo was thumping, and someone was straining to seal an overstuffed container of clothes. Inside, ducts and wires slumped from an open ceiling. On one wall-a metal garage door-someone had scrawled a phone number for takeout. The other walls had been covered in leopard-print contact paper. The sole decoration was a large calendar featuring a smiling young Nigerian priest. It had a Scripture citation for every date and an exhortation across the top: " READ THE BIBLE IN ONE YEAR! "

Nwaosu's glasses, metal-framed and often askew, give him a professorial aspect that is rare in the world of the traders. He did not set out to be a businessman in Guangzhou. He had always planned to be a priest. His parents were teachers, with eight children. He studied philosophy at Imo State University, in the Igbo country of southeastern Nigeria. When he was twenty, he joined the seminary. But he developed kidney problems that left him tired and in pain. Because the work of a priest is physically demanding, the seminary asked him to withdraw. "I was devastated," he told me.

He had little confidence in Nigerian hospitals, and doctors told him that treatment would cost at least ten thousand dollars. "But my family couldn't pay that," he said. "I felt like I was going to die the next day. For a whole year, I had no money-I had no bills, no copper. I wrote to the Ford Foundation. But they said they only help groups, not individuals. So I decided I will help myself."

A friend lent Nwaosu cash to buy a mobile-phone card, and he and his sister began charging people to make calls. They moved up to selling the cards, and by the spring of 2006 he had saved enough to consider going abroad. "At first, I wanted to go to Germany," he said. "But the Embassy wouldn't give me an appointment. I tried Holland, but that didn't work." Getting a Chinese visa was far simpler. He paid more than eight hundred and fifty dollars to an agent in Lagos, and a month later he boarded an airplane for the first time in his life, bound for Beijing. When he landed, he hailed a taxi, but he did not know to ask for the meter to be turned on. "It should have been thirty yuan. He charged me four hundred and fifty," he said.

Medical care in China was inexpensive, and Nwaosu was successfully treated for his ailment, but when he was unable to make a living in Beijing he headed south to Guangzhou, the trading port formerly known as Canton. He had nothing but the scribbled number of a stranger-a soft-spoken Nigerian trader who had arrived four months earlier. "He taught me the nature of the place," Nwaosu said. "The most important thing he taught me was to believe in myself-and to believe in God, too."

For his first deal at Canaan, Nwaosu ordered two thousand dollars' worth of computer components to be delivered to his sister, who would sell them in Lagos. When the shipment was delivered, he learned why a trader should not pay for goods without examining them first. They were the wrong parts; he couldn't give them away. "I felt the whole world was collapsing," he said. "All my savings had vanished. How was I going to pay for food? I was stranded again. Some days I didn't eat anything."

He tried his luck in the DVD business, a popular niche around Canaan, where stalls have pirated-movie catalogues as thick as phone books. Traders can buy movies for thirty-four cents each. "With a thousand-dollar investment, we could get a return of threefold," he said. "It wasn't much, but it was enough to get started."

In the ecosystem of the market, Nwaosu is a hustler-a word with largely positive connotations in Canaan patois, a patchwork of English, French, Chinese, Igbo, and other African languages. He spends part of his time canvassing stalls for bargains and haggling with factories. His office is not strictly his; he borrows space in a small freight-forwarding company, taking turns with other traders at a single desk, sharing a computer, a calculator, and a Kleenex dispenser. In return for the use of the office, he pays the company to ship his freight, under a system of patronage with roots in Nigeria. On the day of my visit, Nwaosu fingered the keys of the calculator like worry beads. Around him lay great mounds of plastic bags, smothered in tape and scrawled with phone numbers. All day, men drifted in and out, adding more bundles to the pile. The freightforwarding company ships big or small, retail or wholesale, a single cell phone or a carpet-size roll of leather to be sliced into shoes and handbags. When I asked Nwaosu what he is allowed to ship from China to Africa, he said, "Anything-as long as it's not contraband."

Every Sunday afternoon, Nwaosu slips out of the market and takes the bus across town to the Sacred Heart Stone House Cathedral, a Gothic-style structure, for Mass. It has stained-glass Caucasian saints peering down on a Chinese priest and a polyglot flock. The three-thirty service is the only English Mass of the week, and in the past few years the crowd has become almost entirely African. Hundreds of people squeeze into the pews, hip to hip; others line the walls, crouching on plastic stools. Still more cram the back, and the last arrivals huddle outside the door, hearing snatches of the Gospel and glimpsing a distant altar, where a wooden crucifix is topped with a neon bulb as a halo. After Mass, hundreds of Nigerians repair to a rickety side building for a charismatic prayer service that thunders with drums and guitars. They throw their arms in the air, singing and swaying and speaking in tongues, until long after dark.

Nwaosu rarely ventures far from Canaan or the church. "I don't have much social life," he said. His peers are almost uniformly young, male, and ambitious-"bachelor sojourners," as immigration historians call them. At least nineteen countries are represented among the traders at Canaan, though Nigerians make up nearly half the total, according to surveys. African Muslims are as visible at the Huaisheng Mosque as Christians are at the Stone House Cathedral. The arrivals have established a web of committees on behalf of their home nations and states, to solve disputes and collect money for funerals and weddings. ("Wherever there are ten or twenty Nigerians, they will organize into a committee," a Nigerian businessman told me.) There are now so many committees that they spend part of their time squabbling over which organization is the most powerful. Some issue identification cards to keep track of their people. A summer soccer league helps blow off steam and awards a silver cup to the winning country's team. Some of the migrants have been in China long enough to cultivate the connections to obtain residency permits, and they have brought their families; some of their children have enrolled in Chinese colleges.

For decades, the Chinese courted Africans with Cold War alliances in the name of liberation, but it was capitalism that ultimately aligned their interests. Between 2002 and 2007, Chinese and African trade-mainly oil, timber, copper, and diamonds-increased by about seven hundred per cent, to seventy-three billion dollars, ranking China as Africa's second-largest trading partner, behind the United States. The African population in Guangzhou, the largest city in southern China, began to climb in 1998, when an Asian financial crisis drove African merchants from Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur in search of the next frontier. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of Africans arriving on tourist visas quintupled, to nearly thirty-two thousand. Today, the city is believed to have some twenty thousand African residents, more than the African populations of Beijing and Shanghai combined. They constitute the largest foreign enclave in Guangzhou.

Economic growth brought mounting pressure to accommodate migrants, and in 2004 Chinese authorities unveiled a Chinese green card, which entitled holders to stay for ten years without renewal. But on the day it was announced a spokesman for the ministry in charge made clear that this was no invitation to huddled masses: "China is not a migrationtargeted country, and the new regulations are aimed at attracting high-level foreign personnel." Today, China has all but stopped giving Nigerians visas for longer than three months. Most of them can't get residency, so they stay illegally.

The path to legalization remains obscure: Chinese employers and universities, and overseas companies, can sponsor foreigners for renewable residency permits. Independent merchants, such as Nwaosu, struggle to find sponsors. Like many in the African community, he has long overstayed his visa and become, in Chinese police terms, a Triple-Illegal Person-illegal to enter, illegal to reside, and illegal to work. (Last year, local newspapers reported, the number of TripleIllegal Persons reached ten thousand.)

Around the market, police and immigration raids have become a constant subject of discussion. In an Igbo-language pop song about life in China, a Nigerian singer named Oluaka described the mood: "They are chasing Africans like sheep without a shepherd." Nwaosu prefers to compare police pressure to the weather: "Sometimes it's very hot. Sometimes it's mild. Or it's cold." And yet he has no plans to leave. "When you go to the United States or Europe, there isn't much opportunity. You are going to get a menial job, with barely enough to send home," he said. "But here we don't have jobs. We set ourselves up."

Even so, for all the opportunities that China affords, Nwaosu and his friends nurse a wounded pride that so many men from the great nation of Nigeria should need to settle in China to make a living. "I am proud of my country," he said. "I am proud of my lineage. I want to see my country functioning."

Racism has a long history in China, and in Canaan the Chinese venders often complain that the Africans demand discounts that are too large to leave much profit. "Many of our friends won't do business with the Africans," a hatmaker who operates out of a stall in Canaan told me. "They say it's not worth it."

Apartment buildings have begun to discourage the ethnic "invasion," as one property agent called it, by raising rents and adopting restrictive covenants. (The mistrust is mutual: when a survey asked African traders if they wanted to share communities with the Chinese, more than two-thirds said no.)

Racial typologies in China are rooted in traditional Chinese thought. In the fourth century B.C., the Zuozhuan, a founding historical text, warned, "If he is not of our race, he is sure to have a different mind." Fair skin indicated intelligence and beauty: the princess in the Shijing, China's earliest collection of poems, had fingers "like the blades of the young white grass" and skin "like congealed ointment." Peasants who toiled in the sun were the "black-headed people." As Frank Dikötter writes in "The Discourse of Race in Modern China," dark skin came to signify inferiority. Chinese writers likened Africa to hundun, a folkloric primeval chaos. At the turn of the twentieth century, some of China's most reform-minded thinkers embraced scientific racism with the same enthusiasm with which Francis Galton and other Victorian scientists were promoting the new field of eugenics. Kang Youwei, one of China's leading philosophers, described a rigid hierarchy of races, with "white" and "yellow" at the top, and suggested that the "monstrously ugly black" be whitened by changes in diet, intermarriage, and sterilization.

Chairman Mao challenged feudalera racial stereotypes and applauded the American civil-rights movement as a struggle for liberation. But the change was short-lived; his reformist successors celebrated economic success, not egalitarianism. On Chinese campuses, African exchange students, once treated as comrades in revolution, became symbols of their ailing home countries, and they encountered animosity. Throughout the nineteen-eighties, Chinese and African students clashed on campuses across the country, often triggered by sensitivities over Chinese women dating African men. The tension culminated on Christmas Eve, 1988, at Nanjing's Hehai University, when guards required two black students to register their Chinese dates. It escalated into a riot that left eleven Chinese and two Africans wounded. The next day, Chinese students attacked the Africans' dorm, shouting, "Kill the black devils!" While the Africans fled, thousands of Chinese demonstrated in Nanjing's streets for five nights, chanting racial epithets and demanding retribution. Discrimination was commonplace. When Barry Sautman, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, surveyed Chinese students, intellectuals, and civil servants in 1992, he asked them to rank various foreign groups by intelligence, industriousness, and other virtues. Africans came out at the bottom of the rankings. Foreign reporters at the time quoted African diplomats and businessmen describing daily acts of discrimination.

Today, Chinese campuses aren't marked by racial tension, and in recent surveys Sautman has found substantial declines in incidents of discrimination. Many black expatriates credit the improved atmosphere to an influx of images of diversity. "The N.B.A. has been a de-facto P.R. campaign for black people-especially black Americans-in China," Ron Sims II, a thirty-year-old Web designer who is black and spent two and a half years teaching English in China, told me. "When I tried to explain where I was from in the U.S., no one ever knew Cleveland, but they knew LeBron James."

Still, there isn't much evidence of racial sophistication. In 2006, Sims conducted an informal sidewalk experiment in Fuzhou, a large southern city, in which he asked people to identify photographs of famous black Americans by race. Oprah was identified as Indian; Lena Horne didn't "have the lips of black people"; Beyoncé was white, as was Benjamin Davis, the commander of the Tuskegee Airmen. (The results, called "The Race Game," are on YouTube.) That unfamiliarity exists in China's most cosmopolitan cities, where migrant laborers have come in search of work. John Pollock, a twenty-three-year-old from Atlanta who is studying at Beijing Language and Culture University, said that new arrivals to the city have asked him, " 'Do you take showers?' 'Does the color of your skin rub off?' You know, 'Can I touch your hair?' "

As Mass let out at the Stone House Cathedral one Sunday in November, the Nigerians stayed for a while to say a prayer for a countryman, a businessman who had recently collapsed and died. They mounted a collection to fly his body home. The logistics fell to Ojukwu Emma, a man of medium build, with a heavy-lidded calmness to his face, who often wears a dark leather coat that belts in the back. He is married to a Chinese woman, drives a shiny black sedan, and enjoys the kind of settled life that new arrivals envy. He is the president of the Nigerian Community China, an organization based in Guangzhou. His role would be familiar to any immigrant community-the prominenti in Little Italy, the kiu ling in Chinatown-and he works long hours. One evening, he postponed a scheduled meeting with me until ten o'clock, so that he could escort the Nigerian Ambassador on a visit to their countrymen who were in jail awaiting deportation. He works a short drive from the Canaan market, in a dimly lit office with the Nigerian and Chinese flags standing in the corner, giving the room the air of a makeshift embassy. Once, when I asked him about the businessman whose body he was arranging to fly home, he paused and asked, "Which one?" He was handling six other corpses at the same time.

Emma is a shoe man by training. He first came to do business in China ten years ago, and had achieved modest success by 2004, when he placed a large order-ten shipping containers of shoes-only to discover, upon delivery, that his supplier had used cheap glue. En route from China to Nigeria, the shoes had disintegrated. "I couldn't even salvage one container," he said. He started over, by moving to China full time to oversee every detail of his trades. He was elected to head the Nigerian community, which he estimates at five thousand to seven thousand people, in Guangzhou. His first task was to defuse China's growing impatience with his people. "Five years ago," he said, "you would come in, drink tea, and then twenty minutes later they put the stamp in your passport."

In the African community, there is a thriving underground market in passports. Traders routinely accuse one another of turning people in to immigration authorities for money or favors. The fear and anonymity are atomizing. "I bought a passport in Malaysia, a look-alike, and I came here with that," a trader with bloodshot eyes who called himself Lucky Okeke told me. "On Thai Air, the flight was so low I thought we would have an accident. I was thinking, Nobody would know what happened to me, because it wasn't even my passport."

As Emma sees it, Guangzhou has become a victim of its own allure. In Lagos and Abuja, local visa agents prey on Nigerians who are desperate to believe in what China might offer them. "The agents, all they want is money. They say, 'You'll get to Guangzhou airport,' and they give you a bus number. And they tell you to go to the Igboezuo"-the Igbo district-"and then a man pays a big amount of money. And then he gets here and he has nothing."

Emma frequently visits hospitals to handle paperwork for Nigerians injured while fleeing immigration police. "We have so many cases of people jumping off the balconies, and they break their legs," he said. Another two hundred Nigerians are in jail awaiting deportation, he says. "They are sending them home every week. Ten or fifteen or twenty." I asked him why he thought his community had ended up in crisis. "Sometimes we look at ourselves and we say, 'The Chinese are racist because we are black.' And sure there are stupid people who might feel that way. But we are also doing things to make it worse," he said.

" GUANGZHOU'S FOREIGNERS' CRIME RATE RISES" was the headline not long ago in the Guangzhou Daily, a state-run paper that often chronicles the arrests of Africans on drug-trafficking, fraud, and immigration charges. Emma believes that his people have created their own image problem, and they need to fix it. "That is why we are fighting to unite ourselves and stop breaking the law," he said. "And then maybe it will go back to the old days." One night in September, he got a call telling him that a Nigerian trader had been hospitalized with head injuries after a run-in with Chinese security guards. As the Nigerian press later described it, the trader, Ojide Ekene, had been looking for a place to urinate at the entrance to a subway station when guards struck him with batons and he fell, hitting his head. After thirteen days in the hospital, Ekene died, on October 8th. That day, Nigerians protested outside the subway station and the hospital. News of the death and photographs of the body circulated online, with a bitter string of comments about China's treatment of immigrants. "Nigerian government please do something positive before it becomes uncontrollable," someone wrote, on a message board frequented by Nigerians. Emma urged calm, and, in the end, it held. "I thank God that we could control our people," he told me.

Emma is lobbying the Nigerian government to open a consulate in Guangzhou, to manage relations, and he wants to set up a system requiring Nigerians to have a specific business plan before getting to China. One day, he hopes, they will have African music concerts, a magazine, a Nigerian Day festival. "We want what they have in other countries. They always have a Chinatown," he said. "In Nigeria, they have seven Chinatowns. That is my dream. We want to have that in China."

A couple of hours' drive southeast from Canaan lies the city of Shenzhen. In March, 2004, the Shenzhen Daily ran a short feature about a foreigner with an exotic name-Mark Ndesandjo-who had become a frequent volunteer at a local orphanage, teaching music and donating equipment. "The children here don't need food, but there is no art or music to appreciate," he told the paper, which ran a photograph of a tall black man seated at a piano in a crowd of kids. After Barack Obama began his Presidential campaign, Ndesandjo was back in the news. With Obama's face peering out from banners and tank tops in Canaan's shopwindows, and traders wearing Obama lapel pins, reporters discovered that the man at the Shenzhen orphanage was Obama's younger half brother-born in Nairobi to their shared father, Barack Obama, Sr., and his third wife, an American named Ruth Ndesandjo. While Barack was growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, Mark was growing up in Kenya. When Obama first glimpsed his half brother, during his 1988 visit to Kenya, it was "like looking into a foggy mirror"-"a black man of my height and complexion with a bushy Afro and horn-rimmed glasses," he wrote in "Dreams from My Father." Yet when the two men sat down to flip through a photo album of Ndesandjo's life in Kenya, Obama was unnerved: "They were happy scenes, all of them, and all strangely familiar, as if I were glimpsing some alternative universe that had played itself out behind my back." It was an uneasy meeting; Obama had returned to Africa in search of his roots, but Ndesandjo was uninterested in making his life in what he called "just another poor African country."

When I contacted Ndesandjo in Shenzhen, he was feeling bruised by the press-the Times of London had written, "Barack Obama's half-brother has been helping to promote cheap Chinese exports." He suggested that Sui Zhengjun, his friend and business partner, meet me instead. Sui was tall and stylish, with a trace of brawn from the days he spent as a security guard before he went into business. He said that he met Ndesandjo through friends six years ago and was impressed by his interest in the orphanage and his attempts to study Chinese and read the classic "Dream of the Red Chamber." Ndesandjo had come to Shenzhen on an exchange program in 2002, after attending Brown, Stanford, and business school at Emory, and decided to stay, Sui said. The next year, the two friends opened a small consulting company called World NEXUS, which helps Chinese companies market to foreign firms. They had invested in a chain of cafés called Cabin Barbecue, he said. Ndesandjo had recently married his longtime Chinese girlfriend, and showed no intention of leaving China.

Before meeting Ndesandjo, Sui had never had a black friend. He said, "I thought they were low-quality people, with little education. You could say my impression was only so-so." He went on, "Most Chinese think of black people this way, because it's a fact. Of course, some black people are well educated. They are talented in sports and music, but, generally, they are not as good in science and culture."

One night after the market closed, Joseph Nwaosu and I went to dinner at one of the small African places tucked among the market buildings. It had Chinese waitresses serving African standbys-jollof rice, fufu, fish stew, okra-and almost every table was taken by African men or mixed couples. Nwaosu was quiet until he brought up an issue that had been on his mind, recently, regarding his future.

"I'm four years out of seminary, and I still dream of being a priest," he said. "The urge to be a priest should have died now," he went on. "Physically I resolved it, but spiritually it's a dilemma."

For months, he had been struggling with whether to try to go back to the seminary. To help make the decision, he was waiting for a sign. He called it "the event." And until it came he was in China, pursuing his other, lesser faith-the market. "My first goal is to make money and wait for the event," he said. "The event will find me. I will not find the event."

After dinner, I dropped him off at his apartment, in a quiet fishing village far from the bustle around Canaan. He lived in a single room the size of his office, lit by a naked fluorescent bulb. The walls were bare, except for a three-inch pink paper palm tree slung from a string around the light switch. A small, squat electric space heater faced out from one corner. His treasured computer, a smudged gray secondhand NEC desktop with a Sony monitor, rested on a narrow table. I sat on his only chair.

The room felt cramped yet empty, and I could not help imagining how silent it would be after I left. But Nwaosu, swaddled in his sweater and parka and sitting on his mattress, seemed resolute. He had mastered the angles. "Sometimes we get cheated, sometimes we cheat others," he said matter-of-factly. Eight months after entering Canaan, he was no longer a rookie. ♦

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of "Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China."
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Joseph Nwaosu, a Nigerian exporter, has yet to acclimate to the winter damp of Guangzhou, on China's southern coast. Over a button-down shirt he usually adds a heavy brown turtleneck sweater and a rumpled tan parka; when necessary, he wears a wool hat. The layers help with his commute.

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In the 1996 China edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook, a text box aside comment from a street interview provided some interesting conversation fodder: "...there is no racism in China because there are no black people," a Chinese woman was reported to have said. This became a little running joke in my small study abroad circle, since I was the only black student in my program of fifty students. It was 1997, and I was in Beijing studying Chinese. "There is no way you could be experiencing any racism in China," one classmate sardonically told me, "because you are the only black person here." We all laughed.

While China is officially home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, the Middle Kingdom is far more ethnically homogeneous than the United States. Han Chinese make up 91.59% of the population, and the majority of the remaining 8.41% are visually indistinguishable from their Han counterparts. In part due to this difference, race and nationality are often conflated in China. A white foreigner is likely to be called laowai, or "old foreigner," while a black foreigner is more likely to be described as heiren, or "black person."

White Americans face no barriers to claiming their nationality, but blacks are often assumed to hail from Africa, a place thought more backwards and poorer than China, more than likely receiving Chinese government economic aid in the form of loans and infrastructure projects. This leads to either resentment or denigration on the part of some Chinese. The Chinese media tends to focus on the generosity of the Chinese government toward Africa-a sore point among Chinese who feel their government is not doing enough for the Chinese themselves-and not on the valuable natural resources gained or access to lucrative growth markets for cheap Chinese goods.

Traditional standards of beauty in China have also shaped perceptions of black foreigners in the country. In China, "whiteness" is seen as a highly desirable trait for women. Stores that sell beauty products without fail have a wide variety of whitening creams. The Chinese and Western models that fill the screen and print ads all fit one standard type of beauty-very white skin, tall, thin with jet-black hair. There is even a Chinese saying: "A girl can be ugly, as long as she has white skin" (一白遮百丑).

My Experience in China

Growing up in America, I looked at Chinese and other Asian people as persons of "color" who shared a similar experience with white racism. There was some sliver of solidarity in being a "band of minorities." For most black people or other people of color in the American cultural context there is some tacit understanding of the mutual experiences of white racism that binds seemingly disparate American ethnic groups together in solidarity. I naively took that assumption with me to China on my first visit. I did not expect that everyone would welcome me with open arms, but I did not expect what I did encounter.

My own experience in China began in the late '90s. While working for a major international language company, I taught English to Chinese from all socioeconomic backgrounds. By all accounts, my supervisors and other teachers respected my skills and knowledge in the classroom. Around 2003, however, I noticed a shift in the market and it became increasingly difficult for me to hold on to assigned classes. There were a number of complaints from students. My supervisor investigated. She clandestinely and randomly listened in on my classes via the company intercom system. After a couple of weeks she called me into her office. She told me I was an excellent teacher and could find little fault in my methods and teaching of the prescribed curriculum. Students just wanted a "different" teacher.

While on break, I overheard students speaking in Chinese about how they were paying so much money and wanted a white instructor. One student went so far as to say, "I don't want to look at his black face all night." There was nothing my supervisor could do. The market was demanding white teachers and the company was responding to that demand. Not only did they want white teachers, they wanted attractive ones. I overheard a number of students discussing and comparing the physical attractiveness of one teacher over another. Students were even willing to accept a white, non-native English speaker over a black, native English speaker. This was a far cry from my first days of teaching English in China in 1999, when students were just happy to have an English speaker in the room.

A Century of Black Experiences in China

In the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese and black American intellectuals collaborated. Langston Hughes, world-renowned black American writer and poet, met Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, in Shanghai in the 1930s to work on theories and language for a universal, pluralistic, transnational form of cooperative nationalism. Paul Robeson, professional actor/singer and social activist, was a staunch ally of China. He actively fundraised for the Chinese Defense League, the precursor of the China Welfare Institute founded by Soong Ching-ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen, a Chinese revolutionary considered to be the founder of the Republic of China (ROC). He also popularized the current Chinese National Anthem, March of the Volunteers, to a global audience by singing the song in Mandarin Chinese for audiences around the world. A number of other black scholars visited China during the first half of the twentieth century, including W.E.B. Dubois, one of the founders of the NAACP; and Rayford Logan, a Howard University history professor.

While in exile in Cuba in the early '60s, black internationalist Robert F. Williams corresponded with Mao Zedong to support the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Mao wrote his "Statement Supporting the Afro-American in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism" on August 8, 1963. He declared:

I call on the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals...whether white, black, yellow, or brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism and support the black people in their struggle against racial discrimination.

Mao issued another statement of support in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Despite these expressions of support, there is scant evidence to prove Mao or any other Chinese political leader at the time would have been willing to align themselves actively with the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Chinese foreign policy in the 1960s mirrored much of that of the West, due in part to the Sino-Soviet split and the coming détente with the U.S.

After the deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai, the era of alignment with the developing world and oppressed peoples gave way to Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic plan for economic development epitomized in his statement, "To get rich is glorious." From the '80s to the present, this new mantra has fueled a single-minded devotion to the pursuit of wealth, leaving little room for concern with past ideals. The isolation of China in the decades before its economic coming of age also limited the exposure most Chinese had to people of other ethnic origins, creating a vacuum of knowledge, drawing in stereotypes and prejudice.

Experiences to Come

Unlike their parents and grandparents, China's youth have grown up with access to information, entertainment, and art from all over the world. Many have consequently come to reconsider stereotypes of black people, and they are in turn influencing the opinions of their older, more "traditional" relatives. The popularity of American popular culture in China, particularly the NBA, which as of 2011 was made up of 78% black players, is an example of this. The NBA has over 41 million combined followers on Sina and Tencent micro-blogs, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The Chinese Basketball Association estimates that there are 300 million people in China who play basketball. NBA stars flock to China on multi-city tours every summer to greet crowds of adoring fans.

My wife recounted a story of her younger cousin, who became a huge Allen Iverson fan to the dismay of her mother. During every game, she would don a Sixer's jersey and plop down in front of the TV to cheer on her favorite basketball player. In order to spend more quality time with her daughter and understand her better, the girl's mother began watching games with her child, and in no time became an avid Sixer's fan as well.

Another friend related a story about his uncle in Beijing, who sent his high school daughter to America for a summer camp. At the end of the camp, during the parent pick-up, his daughter burst into tears as she said goodbye to her summer camp roommate, who just happened to be black. The Chinese father recalled thinking, as he surveyed the scene of his emotionally distraught daughter, "I never thought my daughter could have such an emotional connection with a black person. Maybe I need to rethink my biases."

Many black people from around the globe are living, working, and visiting in China now. Some of us are American, European, Latin American, and African with a wide range of cultures, languages, religions, and professions that defy neat categorization. While different histories have been a source of racist ideas and assumptions, perhaps our shared present and future will give Chinese a reason to reflect and reconsider.

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A Minority in the Middle Kingdom: My Experience Being Black in China

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In the 1996 China edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook, a text box aside comment from a street interview provided some interesting conversation fodder: "...there is no racism in China because there are no black people," a Chinese woman was reported to have said.

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Beijing police round up and beat African expats

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· Diplomat's son among victims at nightclub · Deep bias combines with crackdown on drugs

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China and India have a huge problem with racism toward black people

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Just minutes before his birthday, Masonda Ketanda Olivier was beaten to death. The Congolese national was confronted by a mob of men late at night last Friday in New Delhi and killed. Police said the incident was a dispute over the hiring of an autorickshaw; Olivier's friend, an Ivorian national, said it was a clear hate crime, with racial epithets repeatedly invoked.

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Mr. Yu, an award-winning photographer and vice chairman of the Hubei Photographers Association, has visited Africa more than 20 times. He did not return several calls seeking comment.

A curator at the exhibit, Wang Yuejun, said the decision to hang the photos of people and animals together was his own idea, and not that of Mr. Yu.

"The target of the exhibition is mainly a Chinese audience," Mr. Wang said in a statement, adding that comparisons between people and animals are common in China and often a compliment.

Mr. Wang said many Chinese people relate to their animal familiars assigned by the Chinese zodiac and "in Chinese proverbs, animals are always used for admiration and compliment."

Once it was brought to his attention, Mr. Wang said, that "putting the photos of African tribespeople and animals together hurt the feelings of the African tribespeople," and to "show respect for our African friends' opinions," the offending pictures were removed.

On social media, the exhibit received mixed reviews. Edward E. Duke, a Nigerian Instagram user, posted video of the exhibit, which was first published by the website Shanghaiist. The museum, he wrote in a post that was later removed, "put pictures of a particular race next to wild animals why?"

A Chinese user of Weibo, a popular blogging platform, said she was blown away by the photos in that section.

"When Yu Huiping's photos were projected on the big screen, I was shocked by the children's gaze and the primal state of the animals," wrote the user, identified as Ailuxixi, adding that she liked the section "very much."

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Chinese Museum Pulls Exhibit Comparing Animals to Black People

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Mr. Yu, an award-winning photographer and vice chairman of the Hubei Photographers Association, has visited Africa more than 20 times. He did not return several calls seeking comment. A curator at the exhibit, Wang Yuejun, said the decision to hang the photos of people and animals together was his own idea, and not that of Mr. Yu.

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Tweets by TalbertSwan

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At the September 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing, African Union Chairperson and Rwandan President source of Paul Kagame lauded the Chinese aid and investment strategy in Africa as a "deep transformation". Kagame argued that the cooperation between China and Africa is based on mutual respect and is for the benefit of both partners. This sentiment is perhaps shared by most African heads of states and governments if their attendance of the summit is anything to go by.

However, despite the African leadership's embrace of China as a valued partner, the view that Beijing is a "predatory" actor in Africa, attempting to recolonise the continent is also ubiquitous in foreign policy circles, media narratives and academia.

Africa sees China differently than the West

The China-Africa relationship is currently being interpreted through two diametrically opposed perceptions.

The first of the two is a Sino-phobic one, mostly adopted in the West. For instance, i China's actions in Africa and claimed the continent has fallen victim to Beijing's new colonialism. "China uses bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing's wishes and demands," Bolton said.

"Such predatory actions are sub-components of broader Chinese strategic initiatives, including 'One Belt, One Road' - a plan to develop a series of trade routes leading to and from China with the ultimate goal of advancing Chinese global dominance."

Just like the US, other western governments, such as the UK and France, also see China's engagement in Africa as a cause for concern. For them, China is a spoiler of peace in oil-rich countries such as South Sudan and Sudan, and a supporter of despots in African countries, such as Gabon. Moreover, they perceive China as a resource and energy-hungry giant, an exploiter of corrupt and incompetent governments, a trade opportunist, and a massive polluter of the African environment.

The second and opposing perception of the partnership between Beijing and Africa is a pro-China one. This view is adopted mostly in Africa.

According to the proponents of this narrative, China is a saviour - a trustworthy ally of Africa. They view China, a country that does not have a history of colonial aspirations in Africa, as a partner which could provide much-needed funding without any strings attached. They also believe Beijing understands and respects Africa's priorities.

Moreover, China has a reputation among African countries for being an actor that respects other cultures and states. This view is widely held by many African heads of state.

Much of the academic literature on the China-Africa partnership unjustifiably perpetuates the Sino-phobic narrative. The media also wrongly portrays China as a predatory actor in Africa. For instance, whileit is widely reported that China invests more in the extractive industry than in other sectors, the fact that the extractive industry amounts only to one-third of the total Chinese investment in Africa is barely mentioned.

The other two-thirds of China's investment in Africa is in infrastructure, construction, electricity production, manufacturing and finance. In fact, compared with the US and other developed countries, China's sharein extractive investments in Africa, in the form of mining, for example, is lower.

Africa is not a victim of Chinese 'colonisation'

The Sino-phobic narrative championed by the West portrays African nations as passive collaborators, as mere victims of a second "colonisation" wave. However, this is not the case.

Africans are well aware of the shortcomings of Chinese assistance and business in Africa - from an imbalance in trade to hefty debt, from poor quality goods to corrupt practices. Africans also know that many Chinese investors lack considerations of sustainability and that some business dealings are in some instances incompatible with the national interests of African countries. Furthermore, Africans recognise that Chinese businesses rarely fight corrupt practices and seek to avoid accountability.

Africans expect China to take some responsibility for some of these shortcomings, but also acknowledge that the weaknesses of African regulatory and enforcement mechanisms, as well as self-serving governments, are the main culprits. They know that Chinese companies, like many others, exploit the weaknesses of African states for their advantage. They believe it is their own governments, and not China, that need to make sure Africa is not exploited.

As a result, Africans see the Western criticisms of the China-Africa cooperation with serious reservations. At the FOCAC meeting in September, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa summarised the African position by saying that Africa " that a new colonialism is taking hold in Africa as our detractors would have us believe."

Why Africa loves China

The debt trap is not an inevitable outcome of loans: As President Kagame said, the outcome "depends on us Africans". The key factor that determines the success of Chinese loans to Africa is whether or not African governments use such loans for . For these investments to succeed, African governments need to be accountable to the people of Africa. This is not the responsibility of China or any other non-African country, for that matter; rather it is Africans who are responsible to ensure accountability.

There are some obvious reasons that make China a preferred partner for Africa. For Africans, China has four major attractions: Unconditional soft loans and access to capital; quick delivery of services and cheap goods; funding of peacekeeping; and an alternative development model.

First, China's unconditional cooperation has allowed African governments to enjoy access to finance, expertise and development aid. In 2016, the trade between China and Africa reached $128bn, a drastic surge from$1bn in 1980.

At FOCAC in Beijing this year, China offered $60bn until 2021. While the financial crises in the US and EU limited their investments in Africa, China in the continent.

Chinese soft loans have enabled many African governments to avoid pressure from global governance institutions such as IMF and World Bank to meet Western norms of accountability and conditionality related to political and economic reforms, such as the infamous structural adjustment that does not always serve the interest of Africans.

Second, China has aided African governments to meet their people's rapidly growing demands for services and infrastructure more quickly. Many people in Africa are now used to quick delivery of services - such as transportation, education, health and telecommunication - by Chinese companies. This has created, and will continue to create, more appetite for Chinese business in Africa.

Third, China is now also engaged in peace and security projects in Africa. Chinese troops participate in eight of which five are in Africa. Moreover, China is the second largest financial contributor to UN peacekeeping missions and it to the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and the IGAD South Sudan mediation.

Fourth, China's history of fast and successful economic growth is a model from which many lessons could be learned in Africa. China's capacity to ensure policy sovereignty remains relevant, and highly attractive to African leaders and scholars. According to the World Bank, in about 40 years, China has lifted about out of poverty through its untraditional path of development. Notably, it has achieved many of the Millennium Development Goals.

Africans should take a page from China's playbook on development and sovereignty. They can keep their home in order and also make the best out of the competition between great powers and regional players whether they are from the West, Far East or the Middle East.

As things stand, China is already winning the hearts and the minds of Africans. The West will have to either change tact or forever play catch up.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mehari Taddele Maru

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At the September 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing, African Union Chairperson and Rwandan President source of Paul Kagame lauded the Chinese aid and investment strategy in Africa as a "deep transformation". Kagame argued that the cooperation between China and Africa is based on mutual respect and is for the benefit of both partners.

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It took four years for Emile Wickham to get official confirmation of what he already knew: that the treatment he received on his birthday was racist.

Mr. Wickham is black, as are the friends he went to dinner with one night in May, 2014, at the Chinese restaurant Hong Shing in Toronto, just north of City Hall. There, they were asked to pay their bill in advance - a request that Mr. Wickham suspected hadn't been made of the non-black patrons around them.

After confirming this, he confronted the server, who refunded the group's money. They walked out, no longer hungry or in the mood for celebration. The incident so bothered Mr. Wickham that he was still thinking of it a year later, when he filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

This week, the proprietors of Hong Shing were ordered to pay $10,000 to Mr. Wickham for violating section 1 of the province's human-rights code, which guarantees equal treatment when accessing goods, services and facilities. The tribunal's adjudicator said that Mr. Wickham was treated as "a potential thief in waiting." There are many unpleasant truths confirmed by this story, including that black people in Toronto face consistent prejudice when going about their daily lives. Another grim reality it proves is often hard to talk about: the persistent racism between groups of non-white people, especially that directed at black Canadians, and how it works to maintain white supremacy.

On Monday, a Globe and Mail tweet about Mr. Wickham's story attracted hundreds of comments, many of them racist. The vitriol was pointed at the group of black friends, but also against the restaurant: Toxic tropes about Chinese people's relationship to money, or the quality of their food, were common.

The owners and staff at Hong Shing have likely experienced anti-Asian racism personally, perhaps many times. This doesn't excuse them in any way from participating in anti-black racism - in fact, it might be the cause of it.

For centuries, pseudo-scientists have attempted to categorize human beings by race in a ploy to justify unjustifiable behaviour. Participants in this embarrassing game include philosophy celebrity Immanuel Kant and storied botanist Carl Linnaeus.

On the very worthwhile podcast Seeing White, American scholar Ibram Kendi dates the earliest attempts at racial categorization to the 1400s. That's when broad, global slavery practices - in which many cultures enslaved basically whoever they could get their hands on, including their own people - evolved into overwhelmingly European enslavement of predominantly African people.

Where previously the justifications for erasing other humans' basic rights were equally varied, those excuses began to narrow. Racial classifications denigrating dark skin tones and African origins became the dominant narrative.

That doesn't mean that those who were neither black nor white were given equal status to white Europeans. Instead, a divide-and-conquer hierarchy emerged, in which a chance at a marginally less subjugated life was offered to those who participated in black oppression.

This hierarchy existed in many forms, in many places; apartheid South Africa's "racial classification" was less harsh on those who were "coloured" than "native." Convincing those of mixed race or Asian ancestry to help police black people made the system stronger and took some of the work out of white hands.

Today, this often plays out as the "model minority" trope, in which particularly skilled or educated East and South Asian immigrants are granted visas and citizenship to Western countries, including Canada. Their successes (which, yes Uncle, still require hard work) are used against other racialized people who live in entrenched poverty, including the Indigenous.

This, too, is a weapon that non-black, non-white Canadians often carry of their own volition - the fear that it could be turned against them adds incentive to use it.

Records show that the current owner of Hong Shing is 25-year-old Colin Li, who took it over from his parents. He hasn't spoken with any media since the tribunal's ruling, nor offered Mr. Wickham a private apology − in fact, he's stated that he plans to appeal.

That's a shame. There are many bridges to be built over the gulfs created by this ancient tactic of division, and Mr. Li could help, if he has the courage.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story said proprietors of Hong Shing were ordered to pay a fine of $10,000. In fact they were ordered to pay $10,000 compensation to the customer, Emile Wickham

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Eating while black in a Chinese restaurant: a grim lesson in racist division

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It took four years for Emile Wickham to get official confirmation of what he already knew: that the treatment he received on his birthday was racist. Mr. Wickham is black, as are the friends he went to dinner with one night in May, 2014, at the Chinese restaurant Hong Shing in Toronto, just north of City Hall.

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First published in 1992, The Discourse of Race in Modern China rapidly became a classic, showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why racial categorisation became so widespread in China. After the country's devastating defeat against Japan in 1895, leading reformers like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei turned away from the Confucian classics to seek enlightenment abroad, hoping to find the keys to wealth and power on the distant shores of Europe. Instead, they discovered the notion of 'race', and used new evolutionary theories from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to present a universe red in tooth and claw in which 'yellows' competed with 'whites' in a deadly struggle for survival. After the fall of the empire in 1911, prominent politicians and writers in republican China continued to measure, classify and rank people from around the world according to their supposed biological features, all in the name of science. Racial thinking remains popular in the People's Republic of China, as serologists, geneticists and anthropometrists continue to interpret human variation in terms of 'race'. This new edition has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter taking the reader up to the twenty-first century.

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First published in 1992, The Discourse of Race in Modern China rapidly became a classic, showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why racial categorisation became so widespread in China.

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This book explicitly addresses racism in the paid workplace, showing how racism, and by corollary sexism, are systemic to society. Based on extensive research on workers in both the Health Care sector and in the Garment Manufacturing sector, the author succeeds in capturing the daily lived realities in the workplace.

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What is it like being black in India? BBC News

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Charlottesville's First Black Female Mayor Tackles Racism In Her Town (HBO)

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Expressions of anti-black sentiment by Chinese students have caught the world's attention periodically since the end of the 1970s. Demonstrations against African students in Nanjing and other cities between late 1988 and early 1989 received wide press coverage. Because the African population in China is small and transient, some observers saw these events as a manifestation of a vestigial xenophobia, not as part of a developing trend of thought within a key segment of Chinese society. Placed next to the brutal ethnic conflicts that plague much of the world, the episodic, non-lethal incidents in China seemed evanescent, with only fleeting implications for China's foreign policy.

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Anti-Black Racism in Post-Mao China* | The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core

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Expressions of anti-black sentiment by Chinese students have caught the world's attention periodically since the end of the 1970s. Demonstrations against African students in Nanjing and other cities between late 1988 and early 1989 received wide press coverage.

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Racism against Africans in India ; Anti-Black Racism in Contemporary China

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- Ph.D. candidate in Harvard's History Department - explains how Chinese depictions of African American internationalism and social movements help us better understand racial nationalism in the Cold War. Ruodi received

Fairbank Center funding for her research, and her essay was awarded an "honorable mention" in our 2016 Travel Essay Competition.

With funding from the Fairbank Center this past summer, I visited four archival and document centers in greater China: the Beijing and Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Guangdong Provincial Archives, and the University Services Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Through official state memos and event proceedings, my aim was to reach a more nuanced understanding of Third World internationalism as performed and construed in local, post-1949 Chinese contexts.

My earlier research of Chinese newspapers and other periodicals from the 1960s and early 1970s suggested that -  contrary to Frank Dikötter's argument  - racial difference in Maoist China did not merely become subsumed under class categorization: it crystallized and defined it. As my research develops, however, I am beginning to see a more complex reality of rhetoric and action during the era.

The archival sources I examined this summer, for example, indicate that even as the Chinese state - in print, culture, and through performed acts of solidarity - fleshed out the dynamics of racial hierarchy within the U.S. and presented itself as a champion of anti-imperialism and racial nationalism, it ultimately threw its weight behind a strategy of "race struggle is class struggle." In effect, the People's Republic publicly acknowledged and denunciated the salience of race to world politics while attempting to harness that insight to a broader campaign for global socialism. The achievement of global socialism would therefore be the sole and inevitable path towards dissolving racial inequities.

The annotated itinerary of African American leftist leader Robert F. Williams' 1964 trip to China most tellingly sheds light upon this dynamic; Chinese party officials kept detailed tabs on Williams' "ideological progress," remarking that a previous visit had first opened his mind to the correct notion that "[white] racial nationalism cannot be countered with [black] racial nationalism."

At the Shanghai archives, the 144 pages of microfilm on a 1964 all-city conference to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Chairman Mao's " Statement Supporting Black Americans in Their Just Struggle against Racial Discrimination "- featuring drafts of speeches from worker, student, and women leaders - also proved illuminating. This motley collection of speakers drew explicit parallels between Chinese historical experiences of semi-colonialism and contemporary black American movements; they decried race-based discrimination and lauded national liberation movements but nonetheless, frequently harkened back to Mao's dictum that "racial struggle is fundamentally a matter of class struggle."

This may not be as paradoxical as it might initially seem. Indeed, it was practical for China's internationalist strategy to espouse deeply sensitive readings of racism in world affairs and history while advocating non-racial solutions. The inferences to racial semi-colonialism in pre-revolutionary China as a condition comparable to contemporary black America only heightened the desirability and efficacy of a certain political trajectory: working-class revolution as the antidote to the abuses of racial capitalism. It is precisely the yoke of racial oppression that would spur African Americans to take dominant roles in the anti-capitalist, anti-American campaign. The success of such an effort would allow for race to disappear in the U.S., just as it purportedly had in China. In effect, black nationalism would be refashioned into a weapon of international class struggle.
is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard's History Department researching race and ethnic studies in the Cold War, with a focus on Chinese depictions of African American social movements. This article received an "honorable mention" in the Fairbank Centers 2016 Travel Essay Competition.
The Chinese endeavor to cultivate political alliance with the African American left was meticulous, targeted, and effective. In Inner Mongolia, Williams expressed his amazement as students and workers gathered to perform African American fight songs for him in factories and on the streets. At the National Minorities Institute in Beijing, he asked to be photographed with sacred Tibetan texts as testament that the Chinese way would continue to tolerate, if not honor, religious traditions. He and his wife made arrangements for their two children to study in China, and Robert carried on extensive political discussions with senior Chinese officials on the role of Cuba in the Sino-Soviet Split.

Moving forward, I plan to continue charting the depictions and functions of China in African American social movements for civil rights and Black Power, with sensitivity to the complexities and nuances within the Chinese receptions to black nationalism. This is a dynamic, ever-evolving story that roughly paralleled but did not absolutely correlate with either political currents within China (such as the Cultural Revolution) or African American civil movements. Teasing out these multi-faceted dimensions of black nationalism in China will expand our broader historical knowledge of racial nationalism as a force in the Cold War international arena, and especially of the civil rights movement as an event of truly global inspirations and consequences.

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Black Power in China: Mao's Support for African American "Racial Struggle as Class Struggle"

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Ph.D. candidate in Harvard's History Department - explains how Chinese depictions of African American internationalism and social movements help us better understand racial nationalism in the Cold War. Ruodi received Fairbank Center funding for her research, and her essay was awarded an "honorable mention" in our 2016 Travel Essay Competition.

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Enter your email address below. If your address has been previously registered, you will receive an email with instructions on how to reset your password. If you don't receive an email, you should register as a new user

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Abstract

This article looks at the role of Guangzhou's Public Security Bureau in constructing Africans in the city as "triple illegal," or sanfei 三非. The term refers to those who enter, stay, and work in China illegally. While many scholars have written about the racial profiling of Africans by the Chinese police, little is known about how police officers on the ground enforce the law and why they act the way they do. Failure to tackle these questions, combined with a more or less exclusive focus on Africans' strategies of survival, not only undermines the effectiveness of criticizing the emerging institutional racism in China but also risks reinforcing the negative image of Africans as lawbreakers. This article attempts to fill this gap by approaching the topic from the perspective of police officers. It argues that the way the police system is set up makes Africans vulnerable targets of police officers, who are under great pressure to improve performance statistics and are motivated by monetary incentives.

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Policing Blacks in Guangzhou: How Public Security Constructs Africans as Sanfei

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Abstract This article looks at the role of Guangzhou's Public Security Bureau in constructing Africans in the city as "triple illegal," or sanfei 三非. The term refers to those who enter, stay, and work in China illegally.

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Racism in former East Germany | DW Documentary

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The London club scene - Do racist door policies exist?

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Dstrkt club 'rejected' women who were 'too dark' or 'fat'

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Girls turned away from Dstrkt  for being 'too dark' and 'overweight' tell all [NFTR]

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That Black British Feeling | BBC Newsbeat

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Inside the mind of white America - BBC News

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On the night of the 26th of September, four women arrived at DSTRKT nightclub in London's West End. They had been invited by one of the promoters and had been assured space on the guestlist. West End clubs are dressy, and the group were ready for a night out-pre-drink selfies had been taken in tight polo-necks with clutch bags. However, when they got there, two of the women, Reshia McFarlane-Tapping, 27, and Tasha Campbell, 28, were asked to stand across the road so a manager could see them. According to the women, the manager told them they were "too dark" and "overweight" to be allowed into the club. None of the women went in.

In the following days, another member of the group, Lin Mei, posted screenshots of conversations she'd had with one of the club's promoters after they'd been refused entry. The promoter told her the club "only wanna let to mixed raced girls in they said [sic]." When questioned further, he said, "I really care about the white crowd," and "the black crowd is the concern." The screengrabs inspired outrage across social media, culminating on the night of the 29th of September with protesters gathered outside the nightclub. The protesters were a mixture of those in support of Lin Mei and her friends, and others who claimed to have experienced the same treatment at the club. The word had spread along with a simple question, "Do I look DSTRKT?"

In the days following the incident at DSTRKT, hoping to discover how typical this sort of racial profiling was of nightclubs in the area, I set about contacting both DSTRKT themselves who repeatedly declined opportunity for involvement as well as music industry and nightlife professionals who had experience with the club and the West End as a whole. What quickly became apparent was that what had happened to Lin Mei's friends that night was far from an isolated incident. Rather it was symptomatic of London's West End as a whole, an area of nightclubs known for their opulence, VIP areas, and bottle service, one where rising property values and a handful of oligarchs were giving rise to a new class of clubber. As the days turned into weeks, and I received more and more in the way of testimonies, many telling the same story: a culture of exclusivity was becoming a shortcut to exclusion. Judgements, ostensibly based on guestlists, were masking discriminatory motives.

"Funny thing is, you get this sense, straight away I know. It's this look that says "I hope you're not coming here cos you're not going to get in"." - DJ Fabio

One of the first people I spoke to, Jasmine Dotiwala-a producer, writer, and former head of hip-hop and R&B music channel MTV Base-stressed that the prejudices the incident exposed were consistent with a trend she'd noticed with increasing frequency while clubbing in London. "When I was a teenager it was hard to get into clubs if you didn't look cool and edgy, but never due to race," she said. "Nowadays black people just simply accept that if they don't personally know the staff at clubs, they won't get in."

As Dotiwala sees it, black clubbers are suffering the rise of a new breed of club on the West End. "The focus of clubs has stopped being music and dancing, and switched to high-rolling banker and city types with their champagne magnums and sparkler fireworks," she told me. This grab for cash has in turn left club owners attempting to target the audiences they perceive as more desirable. "They think that black guests 'scare and intimidate' their other more wealthy, white, city banker types," Dotiwala said.

It's a sentiment echoed across all the responses I received. The same themes returned time and time again, in every conversation I had: promoters, DJs, or clubbers-all assured of guestlist-suddenly being unable to gain entry, even if they were involved professionally in the event going on inside.

Many of the people who travel to West End on a regular basis do so for professional reasons, such as Fiona Ramsay, an artist manager and self-described "black female of dark skin", whose client list with both BMG Music group and in a freelance capacity has included the likes of Beyonce and Whitney Houston. Having spent years entertaining clients at the city's clubs, she said she was unsurprised by the events at DSTRKT. "I've actually done several events at DSTRKT, and without saying it they were always concerned about the type of guests, in other words, how many black people would turn up."

She said she's always known the West End to be something of a no-go zone for persons of colour. "Years ago, as a black person, you knew the clubs which would let you in, such as Corks Wine Bar or Moonlighting, but you stayed away from Chinawhite, for example," she said. "It was a running joke of frustration for us as a community because so many black people had experienced the frost of the door men when more than three black people approached a central London club."

Contrary to whatever perceptions we may have of social progress in Britain, Ramsay believes these racist practices are becoming more and more frequent. "Clubs that used to let us in have actually closed down, and the new clubs are owned by people who on a normal day would not mix with people of colour," she explained. "They want their clubs to reflect that. I can not name one club that I think will have a welcoming door policy if I was to turn up with two black females and three black males."

For Ramsey, managing artists has often meant bringing high-profile clients to bars and clubs in the area; when this has involved celebrities of colour, the hierarchical attitudes at core of these door policies are exposed further. Fiona told me, "Two months ago a group of us arrived at Mahiki with a well-known black actress from America. We were on the list, but the bouncer didn't know who the actress was, and turned us all away. Then, the club owner called me and asked where we were. I said, 'Your door man refused us entry,' and the club owner asked us to come back. I've never been there again."

Dotiwala had a similar story to share, this time at Jalouse, a member's club in the Mayfair area of the West End that has since closed. "I hosted a joint Halloween party at Jalouse nightclub in 2009 with Mariah Carey," she told me. "It was a private party with a VIP guest list. I had invited all my MTV BASE talent, which included names like Bashy, Kojo, Tinchy Stryder, and Tinie Tempah, amongst others. Strangely, on the night, I received numerous texts from guests saying that doormen told them they weren't on the guest list. I realised after a few of these texts that they all just happened to be black males."

Despite her guests being on the list and having every right to enter the club, the management kept them outside. The situation was eventually resolved when Dotiwala arrived and ensured their entry, but the damage had already been done. "When we arrived at the club an hour later, I will never forget the humiliated, haunted looks on the faces of my earlier rejected guests," Dotiwala told me. "They had achieved so much personally in their careers, but were still being discriminated against in this country due to the colour of their skin."

"I no longer do any business with central London clubs because this is not a problem with just DSTRKT, it's the vast majority of them." - Fiona, Events Organiser.

What these stories demonstrate are the confused and convoluted politics at play in the West End district. As property prices have risen, with the average rental price in London hitting £1500 PCM this year, the communities that called the area home for decades have been slowly pushed further and further out of central London. The wealthier class that have arrived in their place have naturally introduced a new focus for businesses in the area. Catering to the interests of the super-rich, practices that would be deemed reprehensible in other areas of society, continue under the guise of VIP culture.

One person I spoke to-who wished to remain anonymous, but who I will refer to as Daniel-has promoted parties and DJed in the West End for a number of years, and has experienced the worst of the area first hand. He recounts a time he arrived at a club with "box fresh Air Jordans and clean jeans," only to be told he couldn't come in because his trainers "weren't good enough." It was as these words were spoken that he describes how an unnamed ex-boyfriend of Kate Moss, who was white, "came out for a smoke with dirty jeans and dirty Converses on."

Frustratingly for many entertainment and events professionals like Daniel, these West End clubs are central to their work, meaning any strike against these establishments would be a blow against their own livelihoods. "I've had to fight against myself," he told me. "I'm not violent, but I believe in rights. Yet If I acted on those rights, I'd look like a bully. I can't afford to act on them."

A club and magazine photographer, who wanted to be known as Ally, has worked extensively photographing nights in the West End, and similarly wanted the names of clubs themselves to be left off his account, but was more than happy to detail some of the discrimination he's witnessed within many of these venues. "I've shot a wide range of clubs in London and internationally," he told me. "Only in London, in certain West End venues, have I had the unusual experience of being taken aside by the club manager and briefed, 'Make sure you keep group photos of black people to a minimum. Otherwise more turn up, and it becomes, you know, a black club.'"

Many other people I spoke to that wanted to remain anonymous despite having experienced numerous incidents of racism in West End clubs. But the pressure to stay silent is considerable: the fear for DJs and promoters is that speaking out could put their careers in jeopardy. The West End is still one the most profitable quarter of nightclubs in the country, so despite its apparent and infamous legacy of racism, many of those who resent it the most are dishearteningly reliant on it.

Following Lin Mei's accusations, DSTRKT released a statement on Facebook regarding the incident on October 1st. Not only did it refute the allegations by stating the club "condemns any type of racism," but it also claimed that language regarding race had never been used. The statement also included screen grabs from Lin Mei's personal social media accounts, proving she had been in the club on previous occasions, and a Facebook post in which she had used some racially charged language herself. As statements go, it was specific, personal, and bizarrely petty.

This online conversation continued, with grime MC Stormzy getting pulled into the controversy after tweeting in support of the ongoing protests against the club-tweets that devolved into a spat when one of the club's employees went on the defensive in a series of barbed, but now deleted, replies. When I spoke to Stormzy over the phone a day or two after all of this, he was frustrated that the focus of his support had been relegated to a heated Twitter exchange as opposed to the larger concerns at stake.

"It shouldn't be debated on Twitter," he said. "It's the same with the club's response. I felt they were trying to par [Lin Mei's allegations] off as tit for tat. It's not that." Stormzy felt this sort of petty, online interaction was unsurprising, particularly considering the way the club itself had approached their statement. "The least the club could have done was handle it delicately-even if they thought they weren't in the wrong, they shouldn't have been so inappropriate."

The aspect of the situation that left Stormzy equally frustrated was just how much clubs like DSTRKT rely on music of black origin and its surrounding culture. From hip-hop nights to appearances from R&B singers, the West End is an economy built on black artists, yet these are the very same clubs that most black people don't feel comfortable even trying to get into. "I find it so cheeky," Stormzy told me with clear and genuine anger. "It's such a disrespect. You won't embrace black people but you'll play our music." He's not alone in feeling this way. When we spoke on the phone, promoter and DJ Daniel even jokingly suggested a challenge to central London clubs: "If you don't want to let any black people in, fine, don't play any record that contains the n-word," he said. "Let's see how long you last."

Having begun to build a more solid picture of exactly how extreme the climate in the West End was, I received a call from drum & bass icon DJ Fabio, who'd heard I was writing a story about discrimination in clubs on the West End. Over the phone, he asked if we could meet to discuss a few things. A week later, when we sat down to talk, it was clear the topic was something he had been waiting to speak about for some time.

Fabio was keen to stress that while the West End is a particular focal point for this issue, he's been witnessing and experiencing discrimination in the British clubbing capital for decades. "I've been going out clubbing in London since I was 12, 13," he said. "Used to go to soul clubs back in the day, when I was really young, bunking off school, going to funk nights. And as far back as I can remember, way back into the late 1970s, it's been the same." Fabio said the colour of his skin has too often defined his experience in London's clubland. "I remember bouncers who used to make us wait until everyone had gone in the club, until the last ten minutes and then we could go in. If that was two white guys there is no way that would have happened, but we put up with it because we wanted to hear music. That's what makes it so sad: we are willing to put up with your racism because we want to hear tunes."

One evening, around a year and a half ago, Fabio went to DSTRKT to support his girlfriend, Charlotte, who was DJing and hosting an event there. He went with two friends-one of Asian descent and one black-both of whom had expressed concerns about the club as they had never been allowed in before. Taking no chances, the three of them dressed smartly in shoes and trousers. But when they arrived, the group were told by the door staff they weren't allowed to come in based on Fabio's Asian friend's clothing. "I said, "Well, he's got shoes and trousers on," and she said, "It's not about that; it's how you wear your clothes."

"They'll take the culture, but not the people." - Daniel, Promoter and DJ.

After calling Charlotte to negotiate his entry, Fabio alone was allowed inside. He headed down to the basement level main room, watched Charlotte's set, and then left to help his two friends get in. Yet before he could make it up the stairs, he found himself flanked by two of the nightclub's security, who asked him to follow them somewhere quieter in order to discuss something. "They didn't touch me, but they cornered me," he said. "I couldn't walk backwards or forwards. Really intimidating."

"I said, "Well, why can't we talk to her?" They said we couldn't and that they had seen something on CCTV. They wanted to talk about it upstairs. I thought, I know the deal here, I haven't done anything, I'll go upstairs and see what you've got to say. They said, "Can we talk outside?" Alright then, I thought, my friends are outside anyway and I really want to hear what you've got to say. I walked outside, and they closed the door. Properly closed the door. I thought, "Oh my God-what are they doing?" I called Charlotte and said, You won't believe what's just happened; I've been thrown out"."

Once stood outside, questioning the door staff on their decision, Fabio witnessed a man, claiming to be the owner of DSTRKT, approach the security guards who had thrown him out and whisper something to them. "That's when they turned and said, 'You've been selling drugs'." The nightclub had fabricated allegations right in front of him. At this point, the club owner and the door staff ended the conversation definitively and closed the door. "I was staggered," said Fabio. "Closing the door on me like an animal. It was the most disgraceful act of racism I've ever seen in a nightclub."

This episode is extreme, but it points to a common thread in many of the stories of racism I encountered in my research. The agenda of these clubs is exercised through subtle, manipulative devices. Nobody is ever touched, inflammatory words are never used, but enough of a case is mounted to justify action. Clothes are worn in "the wrong way"; somebody is suddenly "suspected of selling drugs."

For Fabio, the next step has to be an organised campaign, something to draw vocal attention to the constant and unending frustration the area creates. "I'm glad the DSTRKT story broke, but something bigger has to be done," he said. "There is much more to this than meets the eye." Throughout our conversation, he drew an interesting parallel with the Kick Racism Out of Football campaign that since being established in the UK in 1993 has, while not eradicating racism in the country's football community, stigmatised it to the point it has become publicly unacceptable.

"I used to watch games on TV with the sound turned down because I could hear the black players getting booed or getting monkey chants, but they did something," he explained, "and I think that's what this needs. It's a problem that's been buried, but clubland needs this."

Where can we go from here? Once racism in clubland is recognised, how do we go about challenging not only door policies, but the regressive attitudes that motivate them? For an authoritative opinion on what real progress-if any-can be made, I turned to Kate Osamor. As Labour MP for Edmonton, East London, she maintains an open dialogue with residents and businesses in her constituency, so understands better than most the experiences of Londoners today, and as far as the situation on the West End is concerned, she's also grown up experiencing nightlife in the capital as a person of colour.

"For me growing up, listening to acid and jungle, we used to go to warehouses because that was the only way we could get in," she tells me, referring to her early days in the London club scene during the late 1980s. "The crowd was completely mixed together, because we were allowed; it was encouraged. You'd have more fun that way, and you'd learn from each other." Based on the egalitarian spirit of these early clubbing experiences, Osamor believes that for the situation to change, the culture of the entire area has to change. "The West End isn't about that," she said, referring to the principles that guided her experiences of clubland. "It's about the elite, it's about class."

What much of this comes down to, of course, is the increasing structural inequality in the city, along with a lack of black-owned clubs. With the rising rents and growing income inequality across central London, the playing field for fledgling business is more competitive than ever. "If you are a young black guy coming up and trying to open a club, you are going to be blocked from competing alongside the big hitters," Osamor told me. Still, facilitating support for black-owned businesses, she believes, has to start with licensing board's attitudes towards black culture and new ventures. "It's up to whoever is licensing clubs to offer spots to new businesses to allow competition. That way the rules can change. What's happened in the West End is that a monopolising set of clubs have evolved and small club owners haven't got a way in."

Yet for black-owned and black-friendly spaces to succeed, Kate also feels a shift has to occur within black communities, namely in what she feels is a hypocritical failing to "support our own." With reference to the DSTRKT incident specifically, she felt it was important to question why the conversation was taking place there in the first place. "If a black club opened up in Tottenham or Peckham, those girls wouldn't go there, and that's part of the problem," she said. "We are drawn to places where we're not welcome. We feel that it's going to elevate our status."

"Those girls, had they got in, would they have said, "What about the other black girls in the queue?" I don't know: I don't know them. But that is part of the problem: if we get in, we don't look back. We don't question our own motives."

For Kate, the issue with clubs in central London is one small component in a larger conversation that Britain still needs to face up to with regards to its relationship with minority groups. Additionally, while the episode at DSTRKT focused on the plight of four black females, it is important to recognise the struggles of black males, a group Osamor feels face as many, if not more, barriers to success. "It is so much harder for black guys to get on in society," she said. "Your stature is so low that if you see a black guy is in a club, then he must be a drug dealer. Then, for black men, if they do well, it's never reported in the way it should be. People need to see that a black guy isn't just a footballer or an athlete."

"Clubland needs to address this, the West End needs to fucking wake up." - DJ Fabio

To move forward, we have to challenge the way our society understands blackness. "We need to celebrate black success and we don't do that enough," Osamor says. "I think if we did that would help combat some of these stereotypes that have created this situation in the first place."

Mounting a response, however big or small, certainly seems like the next logical step. While the conversation around it may have died down, the incident at DSTRKT did prove that if discrimination is responded to vocally, then people will listen. It's something that Stormzy certainly feels is the way forward. "What happened at DSTRKT should be a scare for other clubs who do the same thing," he said, "These clubs should be so embarrassed that they can't afford to do it. We should speak out every time it happens, speak out, and expose."

As previously mentioned, when I reached out to the nightclubs themselves for response the reaction was largely muted, with most venues-including DSTRKT-declining the opportunity to comment. One club, however, Libertine, did respond with regards to their door policy. Despite the overwhelming collected sentiment about central London nightclubs, they confidently stated the following: "We have an ID scanner and as everybody comes in they have to scan a passport or a driving license. We can categorically state that we do not have a door policy that is based on the colour of people's skin. If you went through the records on our scanner, you would see just how varied our demographic is. We cannot comment on other central London clubs, but we have a fluid door policy that is based mainly on attitude, attire, and an even mix of men and women. If people write in and claim that they feel they were turned away on the basis of their skin colour, we have invited them to the club to peruse our records and see the evidence themselves."

Libertine's comment was given to us in good faith, and we have no reason to doubt the club's intentions, but sadly, this isn't an issue that can necessarily be disproven with data. Libertine's assertion that "if people write in" they will be invited to the club suggests accusations of this sort have levelled before, whether or not the club was aware of, or endorsed, the behaviour. The situation presented by everyone who contributed a comment for this article is one of implied-not explicit-discrimination. While a club may appear to have a varied demographic, terms such as "attitude" or "attire" are malleable and easily abused.

"We don't have power in clubs. That's when you need to question where this is coming from, and why you are happy to stand around, be judged. We need to know our history. Don't separate yourself from who you are. You say, no." - Kate Osamor MP.

This vagueness is not lost on Mark Field, Conservative MP for Westminster, the constituency in which many of the West End nightclubs mentioned fall. When I presented him with the findings of this article, and asked what, if anything, he felt could be done, he replied: "Unfortunately, however, in spite of MPs legislating against discrimination, it is not an easy task to destroy personal racist attitudes. I hope that no club in my constituency is acting unlawfully and that no customers and visitors to my constituency are made to feel unwelcome or uneasy here." He added: "If any club is discriminating against people on the basis of ethnicity, there is the legal framework in place to challenge that."

Grounding a discussion of racism in a discussion of the law, however, can mean trying to parse and quantify something that escapes definition and sometimes, even, observation. Progressive shifts in awareness over the years including what some have termed the discourse of "political correctness" have helped, but these shifts have also allowed systems of discrimination to learn the language of racism, and as such, how best to mask racist behaviour. The racism that occurs in the clubs on the West End falls into this grey area; never obvious or in your face, the discrimination is instead implied, tacit, and out of sight.

While the DSTRKT incident was now a few of months ago, as recently as a couple of weeks ago another nightclub in the UK was hit with a similar claim, after a group of black males paid upfront for a table in Bournemouth nightclub Cameo, only to be denied entry as they watched groups of white males enter. As it currently stands, central London is a pocket of the United Kingdom where people of colour feel they are at best unwelcome, and at worst completely ostracised. Beginning a dialogue that promotes alienated voices, and offers them the opportunity to vocalise what this part of London, and what this part of British nightlife, has come to represent, is crucial. Perhaps then, under the spotlight, change can begin.

One response to these allegations could be to write off the West End altogether, declare it shallow, seal it up as a lost cause and walk away. Yet this is a symbolic conflict as much as it is a physical one. These clubs are premium spaces in the middle of one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities where, despite all of that, racial identity dictates whether or not you are welcome. A bizarre contradiction continuing in the heart of 21st century Britain.

This article originally appeared on THUMP.

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London Nightlife's Racism Problem is Bigger Than You Think

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On the night of the 26th of September, four women arrived at DSTRKT nightclub in London's West End. They had been invited by one of the promoters and had been assured space on the guestlist. West End clubs are dressy, and the group were ready for a night out-pre-drink selfies had been taken in tight polo-necks with clutch bags.

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The good news, such as it is, is that the mainstream, nonpartisan political press has been willing to call out these specific campaigns as racist, with no weasel words or qualifiers. CBS News called the pro-Kemp robocall racist . CNN called the caravan ad racist . Even The New York Times was willing to go as far as to say there were well-founded "suspicions" that the anti-Delgado campaign was " motivated by racial bias ," which is about as plain-spoken as its news desk gets.

Last Friday's print edition of The New York Times , "Trump Favorite Struggles to Rise in Florida After Racial Stumbles." What a "racial stumble" might actually consist of is left to the reader to decode - I imagine the opening of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," except Rob Petrie trips over a stack of Home Owners' Loan Corporation redlining maps of Westchester County - though the web version helpfully updated the phrase to read " racial flare-ups ," as if racism were conjunctivitis. In the story itself, we're told Republican gubernatorial nominee Ron DeSantis has spoken at events organized and attended by "far-right extremists," with a link to a September Washington Post story that tells us DeSantis "spoke at racially charged events."

I do not believe, like Republicans who accused Barack Obama of being too soft on terror to say "radical Islam" or whatever, that speaking the correct words will magically make the enemy easier to defeat. But to beat back the rising tide of far-right ethnonationalism require some sort of collective action on the part of people who are professionally unwilling to "take sides." Fox News addicts are unreachable, but NPR listeners and local newspaper subscribers should be told an accurate version of the story of the moment.

This is that story: The only appeal the conservative movement has left is white panic. And they ― not just the demagogues like Donald Trump, but also the supposedly responsible wonks like Paul Ryan, and every shade of Republican in between ― are shameless and irresponsible enough to go to that well again and again, if it helps them maintain power. The caravan ad is the entire Republican midterm message, and they are actively restricting the electorate to exclude the people who wouldn't fall for it. An entire political party stands united in its defense of the prevailing racial order, and its politicians are more than happy to say so in their campaigns. The racism isn't some oafish slip-up; it's the point.

What makes that story so difficult for the mainstream press to tell?

Another reason is the special place accusations of "racism" hold in our elite discourse. In an industry still dominated by white men over 50, to be accused of racism is an injury on par with ― or perhaps worse than ― being actually targeted by racism. The stunted, elementary school-level way our old white editors and pundits think of race means that nothing can be described as "racist" without special knowledge of the inner mind of the person whose actions are clearly racist. It is a variation on the "we can't call it a lie if we don't know whether the liar knows he's lying" rule, but even stupider. While the objective journalist can always reasonably fall back on calling things untrue without attributing motive, it requires a frontal lobotomy to render in the passive voice a mercenary campaign to make white Americans scared of a group of Central American refugees for political gain.

But another, possibly overlooked explanation for the utter inability of the press to describe the current moment is simply denial.

There are certain myths that are central to the ideology ― one that defines itself as a total lack of ideology ― of the nonpartisan journalist class. Some of those myths fall under a category that we could broadly call "American Exceptionalism." It is, basically, a child's faith that we live in the best of all possible countries.

One of those myths, universally believed by the Sunday-show types, is that America and its people are essentially Good. A corollary to this belief is that white rural Americans are the Realest Americans, and hence, the Goodest. This is not an original observation, but the Trump era, with the mask fully ripped off, has introduced a new wrinkle. This impoverished, limited worldview is now forced to grapple with these inescapable facts: One political party is running nakedly racist appeals to a solely white base ― with essentially no exculpatory side issues or cover story anymore ― and they are doing so because At least, it works well enough to motivate a sufficient segment of the white population to show up for the Republicans to win power, so long as they currently have the power to suppress the votes of the demographic groups less amenable to far-right ethnonationalism.

So now the class that couldn't fathom how anyone's pastor could ever say the words "God damn America" attempts to explain a world whose rules violate that class' core beliefs about the character of the American people, in the extremely limited way it has traditionally defined them. Pundit Americana requires the Realest Americans to be a people of rough-hewn racial innocence, perhaps reflecting the pundits' own blamelessness.

These journalists have no choice but to make the campaign of hate and fear sound like an accident (who among us hasn't suffered a "racial stumble"?), or a mistake, or something not so much willful as chemical ("racially charged," they say). Partly it's because they're scared of cynical operators calling them unfair, but mostly it's because they are, themselves, afraid of being fair.

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In Journalism About Race, A Tinge Of Denial

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The good news, such as it is, is that the mainstream, nonpartisan political press has been willing to call out these specific campaigns as racist, with no weasel words or qualifiers. CBS News called the pro-Kemp robocall racist . CNN called the caravan ad racist .

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What does it mean to be judged before you walk through the door? What are the consequences? This week, TED speakers delve into the ways racism impacts our lives, from education, to health, to safety.

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Opinion: the prevalence of hate speech on social media comes down to how the historical aspects that shape us as a society have been replaced online by single voices
Let's start with The Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein's film from 1925. The Odessa Staircase scene opens with people waving at the stairs before the gathering is interrupted by the arrival of the Cossacks. The army goes down the stairs and opens fire on the crowd. Both the Cossacks and the people on the stairs are homogeneous. Only one figure stands out, a mother carrying her wounded son up the stairs. She is muted and anonymous, but she also represents the many.

The scene reminds us of a time in history where narratives materialized with the group and the priority was to articulate the voices of the masses rather than the individual hero and villain. However, the individual now rejects anonymity and social media platforms are a perfect modern example of this. Instagram is a space of constant self-narration and daily biographies, while Facebook operates as a manifestation of the self among many other selves.

Individualism has delivered positive outcomes for human self-esteem, differentiation, equality and self-value, but it seems that individualisation is taking a step further with social media. Last year, my supervisor Eugenia Siapera and I had spent a day interviewing technology workers. "They are stretching the limits of liberalism", she casually said.

And they certainly are. Social media promotes a kind of individualism whose outcome has a direct impact on how racism and hate speech is articulated online. It is also affecting how we understand hate speech.

Every single individual, independent of any historical context, can claim to be a victim of a racist attack

Every aspect of social media, from its values ( see Article 4 and Article 10 of Facebook's principles) to its design, is intended to build up the voice of all individuals, but not to construct a group consensus. The historical aspects that shape us as society have been replaced by single voices, voices boxed in a network that defends universal, unconditional equality among all its users. In this setting, all terms are debatable. Indeed, racism is debatable as Gavan Titley has put it.

But it goes beyond this. In social media, a racist comment does not define the individual. Following a racist comment, the user will not necessarily see his or her account closed, but their comment will be blocked, muted, silenced or deleted. In digital environments, we are connected individuals but we're isolated in a constant present.

There is nothing more threatening for racism and justice today than ignoring the history on which it has been built. History and our places within the group are crucial to delivering justice and equality. To understand hate speech, we need history and the sound of the choir.

What happens when it is the comment of the user and not the user which social media is focusing on?

The first mention of hate speech came in the discussions prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947. The historical context of the declaration was a clear reaction against the barbarism of the Nazis, the Second World War and the ideas that led to fascism. It was interesting to note the contribution by the Eastern Bloc countries during these discussions. They advocated a letter guaranteeing non-discrimination and non-discrimination was applied in terms of the group. The discussion maintained that equality will never happen if we do not facilitate measures that lead to the emancipation of oppressed groups.

Back then, hate speech, like the scene by Eisenstein, was thought of in terms of the mass. So what happens when the idea of the mass is replaced by the idea of the atomic individual? What happens when it is the comment of the user and not the user which social media is focusing on? What happens when there are not priority groups, when there's not oppression, when there's not history?

On social media platforms now, there are simply groups of individuals who can self-determine their identity. They can identify as white and freely enjoy many bad days. It occurs that every single individual, independent of any historical context, can claim to be a victim of a racist attack. Every single individual can access the social media tools that are designed to control the flow of hate. The same tool that is available for a single mother at the end of the stairs is now available for a Cossack at the top of the stairs.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

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How social media impacts on online racism and hate speech

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Opinion: the prevalence of hate speech on social media comes down to how the historical aspects that shape us as a society have been replaced online by single voices Let's start with The Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein's film from 1925. The Odessa Staircase scene opens with people waving at the stairs before the gathering is interrupted by the arrival of the Cossacks.

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2017 charlottesville white nationalist rally

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Blacks and whites see racism in the United States very, very differently | CNN Politics

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How you see race in the United States can depend a lot on your own background.

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A few weeks ago, we asked The story below comes to us from Baker C. Blanding, 31, a marketing manager who lives in Philadelphia. Mr. Blanding said he subscribed to Race/Related for "its coverage of topics relevant to me as a black man," and for insight into the struggles of other marginalized groups. His story has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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Credit Charlotte Edey

Race/Related readers to share their stories about the first time they encountered racism or a racist belief. We were overwhelmed by the responses, and would like to share some of them with you.
This isn't the worst kind of story about racism, but I remember it vividly as it shows how foreign the idea of racism was to me as child.

I'm black and I grew up in Georgia, where I started kindergarten in 1992. I remember we sat in groups of four and I was one of a few black children in the class.

One day, a classmate's father came to pick her up. To our surprise, he was black. We had all assumed that this particular student was white. I remember the puzzled looks on all of our faces.

Sometime later, we were working on an art project and in my group of four I asked to use a classmate's crayons from their 64-piece set. I had the 8- or 16-piece set at best. They said "no."

I asked why not since we were learning about sharing at that time. I remember the answer being "because you're black."

That made no sense to me. I didn't think of it as racist; it was just a bad reason in my five-year-old mind. Something like "because you're a stinky face" would have been more acceptable.

I tried to reason with my classmate: "But her father is black, too, and you're sharing with her!"

No dice.

I reported all of this to the teacher, but she was of no help. I felt like I was in "The Twilight Zone," and everyone else was in on this stupid joke but me.
- Baker C. Blanding
I told my parents about what happened and I have no idea exactly what came of the situation. The teacher wasn't fired, but I also never experienced something like that at the school ever again.

The whole episode feels like an isolated incident in my childhood.

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A Reader's First Memory of Racism: 'Because You're Black'

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A few weeks ago, we asked The story below comes to us from Baker C. Blanding, 31, a marketing manager who lives in Philadelphia. Mr. Blanding said he subscribed to Race/Related for "its coverage of topics relevant to me as a black man," and for insight into the struggles of other marginalized groups.

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A group of drag performers in Atlanta have ignited a movement to confront what they say is racism and unfair pay in the gay nightclub industry.

Alissah Brooks, Destiny Brooks and Shavonna Brooks are three members of the newly formed #Queensunited movement. The performers, who are all transgender women of color and belong to the same "chosen family," say after years of performing, they've finally reached their breaking point.

"For a long time, I think we have settled for less, and I think this movement will make other entertainers realize their worth," Alissah, 33, told NBC News. "We as #Queensunited can bring the art form to a more legitimate business and not just [be] looked at as a bunch of drag queens that just want to twirl around and play dress up."

The movement is being spearheaded by the Brooks sisters and other performers who collectively quit their jobs at Burkhart's, a popular gay venue in Atlanta. Their decision came in January after racist Facebook posts made by the club's owner, Palmer Marsh, circulated on social media.

One of Marsh's comments, posted in 2015 and since deleted, referred to then-President Barack Obama as the N-word. In another comment, which referenced the Civil War, Marsh said, "If the South had won, we would be a hell of a lot better off."

Marsh, who has since apologized for the offensive posts, did not respond to NBC News' requests for comment.

THE RESIGNATION

Atlanta's gay community erupted in outrage after Marsh's comments surfaced, and several performers at Burkhart's said their social media accounts were bombarded with messages demanding they quit.

"The community started to question why we were still there," Alissah said. "The community started to point the finger at us saying, 'You are not acting in this situation.'"

On Jan. 25, several performers got together to draft a joint resignation letter, according Alissah, and they emailed the letter to the bar's management that same day.

"Nobody showed up to the show that evening, and they closed the next day," Alissah said.

Burkhart's has since reopened, but the club's general manager, Steve Tallas, told NBC News the business is dwindling.

"Right now, I just got to looking at the sales this week; they're more than three quarters off," Tallas said. "We cannot operate any longer with these numbers." He said the owner is currently trying to sell the bar.

Tallas called Marsh's Facebook posts "disparaging," but he insisted his boss is not a racist.

"A RACIAL PROBLEM"

Alissah, Destiny and Shavonna said Marsh's comments came as no surprise to them, and they alleged that racism at Burkhart's ran deeper than its owner's social media rantings.

The women said the bar's all-white management initiated a $5 cover charge and requested that performers not perform certain rap or hip-hop music during their shows. They alleged the policies were ploys to make the bar less attractive to low-income people of color. They also alleged that management frequently used disparaging language in reference to non-white customers, referring to them as "riff raff," "ghetto" and "EBT people," a reference to people who use food stamps.

Tallas said accusations that he and other managers at Burkhart's are racist are "absolutely untrue," and he said he was "shocked" to see those allegations on social media.

Tallas insisted the bar's $5 cover fee was not meant to keep anyone out: He said it was needed to counter the cost of hiring stars from "RuPaul's Drag Race" to perform at the venue. And he said rap and hip-hop performances were never banned, only that entertainers were asked not to perform songs - in any genre - that were labeled "explicit." He also insisted management did not use or tolerate racial slurs or disparaging language to describe non-white customers.

Tallas said Burkhart's did not have a specific policy in place to protect against racism, adding, "We never knew that there was a racial problem here."

Destiny, 42, performed at Burkhart's for nine years. She said even though she thought the establishment had a racism problem, she remained employed there because she needed the money.

"You just tuck your tail and go out there and put a smile on in front of all the people and get your money and go home, and that's what a lot of us was doing," she explained.

Shavonna, 34, performed at the club since 2006. Quitting her highest paying gig was hard, she said, but also liberating. "There comes a time where you have to do what's right," she added.

Shavonna said the racial insensitivity she and other performers experienced at Burkhart's is not isolated. "It's really an issue that needs to be addressed across the country," she said.

Similar complaints of racism were raised against nightclubs and bars in Philadelphia's "gayborhood," and a 2017 report issued by the city's Commission on Human Rights found women, minorities and transgender people have felt unwelcome and unsafe in Philadelphia's gay neighborhood for decades. In its report, the commission recommended "gayborhood" establishments and organizations undergo training for racial bias and hire more diverse staff.

BEYOND THE "GLITZ" AND "GLAM"

The Brooks sisters said their movement is about more than combating racism - it's also about fighting for better pay in an industry that profits off their art.

"People only see the glitz and the glam, which is the finished product from when we step out of the stage," Destiny said. "They're not realizing what all went into giving you the look that you are seeing in front of you."

Destiny said Burkhart's paid her $75-$150, depending on the night. But some clubs, she said, pay performers as little as $25 a night, while they make big profits off the crowds that come to see their shows.

"Nobody wants to pay the drag queens, because they look at us as just men playing in makeup having a good time, and it's way, way deeper than that," Destiny added.

She said costumes, jewelry, wigs, makeup and other accessories cost thousands of dollars. "It gets very expensive."

The women all said they make the bulk of their income in tips. That requires a lot of hustle, Destiny explained. If a performance lasts for four minutes, she said, that means she only has a few minutes to get as many tips as she can.

"I got to go out here and kick, split, twirl, do everything I can to get money off these people just so I can at least walk out this club with a living," she said.

The women said they lost their main source of income after quitting Burkhart's.

"I'm really not worried about the future, because I know I'm a talented individual, and I will get through this," Shavonna said. "My heart goes out to anyone who depended on [Burkhart's] to make a living. Right now they're suffering."

Shavonna said abuses are widespread throughout the nightclub industry.

"There are girls across the country that go through this that really don't have the means to stand up," she said. "Some of them really need that job."

THE NEXT CHAPTER

#Queensunited held its first group meeting last Tuesday, and since then, about 30 drag queens from the Atlanta area have joined the movement, according to Alissah.

She said the group is currently raising money to help former Burkhart's performers and staff. Eventually, however, she said the plan is to create a national advocacy organization for the drag community.

"For the long term, it's a way for a lot of entertainers to come together and realize what we're worth," Alissah said.

Shavonna and Destiny are also hopeful the movement will take off and empower generations of drag performers to come.

"For every queen that's ever felt they weren't appreciated at their job or taken advantage of, felt like they didn't have any other alternative, this is for them," Shavonna said.

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Drag performers take on alleged racism in gay nightclubs

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A group of drag performers in Atlanta have ignited a movement to confront what they say is racism and unfair pay in the gay nightclub industry. Alissah Brooks, Destiny Brooks and Shavonna Brooks are three members of the newly formed #Queensunited movement.

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There's driving while Black, but one man had a recent "clubbing while Black" experience at a Texas nightclub.

Sam Sayed, a Philadelphia student, visited Varsity Tavern with some friends during a trip to Fort Worth last month. His friend, who is Black and from Bronx in New York City, was denied entry because his Air Jordan sneakers were supposedly in violation of the bar's dress code. Sayed believed that his friend was really kept out of the club because of his skin color.

The friends decided to conduct an experiment to test their discrimination theory, Sayed revealed in a Facebook post.

Sayed's friend swapped sneakers with a second friend, who is White, in their group. When the friend, who was White and wearing the Jordans, tried to get into the club, the bouncer let him in. Sayed's African-American friend, who had Sperry's on his feet, was also allowed in after security triple-checked his shoes.

The nightmarish experience ended with a bouncer kicking out Sayed's African-American friend, identified as Stephen, after he switched back shoes with the second friend, identified as Sean Gallagher to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The whole ordeal was a blatant example of racism, Sayed said.

"So let me clarify Varsity's Jordan rule. It's not that they don't allow Jordan's in their establishment, they don't allow BLACK PEOPLE with Jordan's in their establishment," the man wrote. "Thanks Varsity for bringing my worst nightmare to fruition. We are stereotyped as racist people here in Texas and you guys validated that notion."

Both Sayed and Stephen had visited Varsity before the sneakers incident, with Stephen having been denied entrance after wearing black jogging pants, Stephen told the Star-Telegram.

The Star-Telegram spoke to five people who said they were turned away from Varsity Tavern on Norwood and West 7th streets for violating the dress code. All but one were black men. https://t.co/qNOmmimijP

- Star-Telegram (@startelegram) April 16, 2018

Stephen is not alone in being targeted by discrimination at Varsity, with other customers having reported unfair treatment on Yelp.

The company released a weak statement on the matter Tuesday afternoon. "We were saddened to learn that there were people who felt discriminated against when they were turned away based on our dress code," the statement read, adding in the standard routine promise to work with staff on not discriminating against folks.

Of course, people were not buying the statement, which came off as weak and insincere, they said.

"Wow, what an 'apology,'" one Facebook user wrote.
SEE ALSO: Unarmed Black Harvard Student Screams For Help While Being Viciously Attacked By Police Watch: Thug Granny Attacks A Black Woman Who Is A Solider And Pregnant

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This Reportedly Racist Club Is Using Air Jordans To Throw Out Black People

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There's driving while Black, but one man had a recent "clubbing while Black" experience at a Texas nightclub. Sam Sayed, a Philadelphia student, visited Varsity Tavern with some friends during a trip to Fort Worth last month.

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The poolside confrontations keep coming.

This summer, a black boy was harassed by a white woman in South Carolina; a black woman was asked to provide identification by a white man in North Carolina; and a black man wearing socks in the water had the police called on him by a white manager of an apartment complex in Tennessee.

The encounters, some captured on video, have prompted widespread anger and resulted in consequences for white people involved. But they are hardly new: The United States has a long history of people of color facing harassment and racism at swimming pools.

Pools are supposed to be places to relax, but ever since they exploded in popularity about a century ago, they have served as flash points for racial conflict - vulnerable spaces where prejudices have intensified and violence has often broken out.

"That's the most intimate thing," said Greg Carr, chairman of Howard University's Afro-American studies department. "I'm in this water, you're in this water, it's in me, on me."

Here's a look at the resistance black Americans have faced in trying to access pools.

Mixing the sexes and separating by race

In the 1920s and 1930s, pool construction accelerated as cities built lavish public facilities, Jeff Wiltse, a University of Montana history professor and author of "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America," said in an interview.

In many cities, white and black people historically swam together, separated by sex. But norms began to shift as pools multiplied, with men and women increasingly swimming together, eliciting racist anxieties.

In 1931, Pittsburgh debuted a new facility at the popular Highland Park, featuring a sandy beach with two large pools, according to the book. But, unlike the city's other pools, men and women could swim together there.

On opening day, thousands showed up, including many black residents who were asked by pool attendants to provide "health certificates" proving they were disease-free. Several later complained to an official, who assured them access going forward.

When about 50 young black men arrived the next day, attendants let them in, but a larger crowd of white poolgoers jeered and attacked them, according to a newspaper report.

That white resistance to integrated swimming was rooted in a fear of interracial contact between men and women, Dr. Wiltse said. The violent opposition continued for weeks, peaking when several hundred white youths severely beat about 40 black swimmers, The New York Times reported.

The opposition persisted for a few summers, spreading even to single-sex facilities, according to the book.

Image

The New York Times, Aug. 21, 1931.

___

Fighting for the right to swim

In 1949, a St. Louis official determined the city could no longer segregate pools, concluding that, like other citizens, black residents "have a right to use public property," according to a Times report.

The next day, about 50 black swimmers showed up at a luxurious facility at Fairgrounds Park and were attacked by almost 200 white teenagers carrying baseball bats and heavy sticks, the report said.

The clashes spread, and Mayor Joseph Darst ordered pools to be resegregated the next day.

The following year, a local N.A.A.C.P. chapter successfully sued the city over the policy, according to reports, previewing the broader civil rights movement.

Mayor Darst, who was white, agreed to comply with a judge's order to integrate pools, according to "Contested Waters," but he also decided to resegregate them by sex.

The fight was not limited to pools, either.

In the 1960s, black protesters organized " wade-ins" to demand equal access to the beach in Biloxi, Miss. Fierce resistance led to what an Associated Press article published in April 1960 by The Times described as "the worst racial riot in Mississippi history," involving "gunfire, stonings and street clashes." By 1968, though, a federal court would rule the beach must be open to all.
[Sign up for our Race/Related newsletter to join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with Times journalists.]
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Images that captured the nation's attention

In 1964, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference started a campaign in St. Augustine, Fla., to support local protests against discrimination and raise awareness of the civil rights movement.

It included sit-ins, marches and what The Times described as a "dive-in" at the Monson Motor Lodge, where several white and black protesters jumped into a pool, a moment memorialized in famous photographs.

One image, published on The Times's front page, showed a white police officer jumping into the pool to arrest protesters. Another showed the white motel manager, James Brock, dumping muriatic acid, a cleaning agent, into the water near visibly distressed swimmers.

In 1964, several white and black protesters jumped into a pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Fla. The white motel manager, James Brock, dumped muriatic acid, a cleaning agent, into the water near visibly distressed swimmers. Credit Bettmann, via Getty Images

The images took on near-instant significance. President Lyndon B. Johnson mentioned them in a phone call the following day, according to a recording of the call. The outrage, he said, underscored the need for civil rights action.

"Our whole foreign policy and everything else could go to hell over this," he said.

The day of the call, the Senate passed a compromise bill prohibiting discrimination in the workplace, at public facilities and polling places, and elsewhere. Within weeks, Mr. Johnson signed the bill into law, enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
[Catch up on a discussion on Facebook about pools and racial tensions with a Times journalist and experts.]
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Mr. Rogers encourages shifting attitudes

Five years later, the television personality Fred Rogers weighed in, in his understated way.

In a 1969 episode of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," he invited Officer Clemmons, a recurring character played by the black actor François Clemmons, to join him in soaking his feet in a wading pool.

"They didn't want black people to come and swim in their swimming pools," Mr. Clemmons said in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?," a 2018 documentary about Mr. Rogers. "My being on the program was a statement for Fred."

The two recreated the scene when Mr. Clemmons returned to the show in 1993. In that episode, Mr. Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, helped Mr. Clemmons dry off his feet, evoking a biblical gesture.

___

Taking the fight to the Supreme Court

As segregationist policies unraveled, many white Americans in cities retreated to suburbs with private or community-managed pools. But prejudices persisted.

In 1962, T. R. Freeman Jr., a black economist for the Agriculture Department, rented a home in Fairfax County, Va., which included swimming club access. After Mr. Freeman's membership application was denied, the white man who rented him the home, Paul E. Sullivan, protested on Mr. Freeman's behalf, and had his own membership revoked, according toThe Times.

Both men sued and the matter reached the Supreme Court, which found in 1969 that pool access was a property right that could not be limited by race.

From the 1970s to 1990s, cities faced with shrinking populations and rising budget deficits stopped building new pools or maintaining existing ones, Dr. Wiltse said. Public pool attendance dropped, and private pool construction increased drastically.

___

Protesters outside a swimming club in a mostly white suburb of Philadelphia in 2009. Credit Mark Stehle/Associated Press

A city camp's thwarted summer plans

In 2009, a northeast Philadelphia youth camp struck an agreement to bring a group of predominantly black and Hispanic children to a swimming club pool in a mostly white suburb.

On their first visit, several children and the camp's director reported hearing "disparaging" remarks, according to a lawsuit filed at the time, including from a white woman who said: "What are all these black kids doing here? They might do something to my child." Before a return trip, the camp's contract was revoked, according to The Times.

The club said the pool had become unsafe with so many children in it, but the camp argued racism was to blame.

Simone Manuel with her Olympic gold medal at the Rio Games in 2016. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Simone Manuel wins the gold in 2016

When Simone Manuel, at 20, became the first African-American woman to win an individual event in Olympic swimming, the significance was not lost on her.

"I'm super glad with the fact I can be an inspiration to others and hopefully diversify the sport," she said then. But "I would like there to be a day where there are more of us and it's not Simone, the black swimmer."

Last year, U.S.A. Swimming, the sport's national governing body, found that 64 percent of African-American children have no or low swimming ability, compared with 45 percent of Hispanic children and 40 percent of Caucasian children.

"Just imagine all the untapped potential," Lia Neal, an American swimmer of African and Chinese descent who has won bronze and silver Olympic medals, said in an interview.

"It's great that we can use our platform and inspire kids who look up to us because they see themselves in us," she said. "But we're also not an easy fix for racism."

In an interview, Ms. Manuel said she experienced prejudice when she was 6 years old and a swimming teammate told her that he would not play with her on the playground after practice because she was black. Years passed before she told her parents.

"I think I was protecting them from any negativity about their raising an accomplished black swimmer," she said. "I guess for me, I didn't really think I was different. It's just a very innocent age. To think that someone that age could think like that is very disturbing to me now."

___

Poolside confrontations continue

In 2015, Dajerria Becton, a 15-year-old black girl, was at a pool party in McKinney, Tex., when a white police officer responded to a fight and disturbance. The officer grabbed her by the hair, pointed his gun at others in attendance and shoved her to the ground as she called for her mother.

The episode, captured on video, drew national attention and sparked protests and a lawsuit. The officer resigned and the city paid Dajerria and her family nearly $185,000.

This summer, in South Carolina, a white woman, 38, was charged with assaulting a black boy, 15, at a neighborhood pool, telling him and his friends to "get out." In North Carolina, a white man lost his job after calling the police on a black woman who refused to show him identification at a private pool where she had an access card.

And white female managers at apartment complexes in Memphis and Indianapolis were disciplined after they confronted black male poolgoers. In one incident, the poolgoer was wearing socks and dipped his feet in the pool. In the other, he refused to provide his address to prove his residency, though he displayed a pool access key.
[Read more about other recent, high-profile incidents where black people engaging in everyday activities have had the police called on them for the thinnest of suspicions.]

Karen Crouse contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SP2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Place to Relax, With a Long History of Racism. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Racism at American Pools Isn't New: A Look at a Long History

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The poolside confrontations keep coming. This summer, a black boy was harassed by a white woman in South Carolina; a black woman was asked to provide identification by a white man in North Carolina; and a black man wearing socks in the water had the police called on him by a white manager of an apartment complex in Tennessee.

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Why are black people desirable as entertainment in clubs but not as clientele? | Kimberly McIntosh

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Claims that Drama, which has previously hosted Rihanna and Drake, charged black women double to get in are being investigated, says Race on the Agenda policy officer Kimberly McIntosh

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It took four years for Emile Wickham to get official confirmation of what he already knew: that the treatment he received on his birthday was racist.

Mr. Wickham is black, as are the friends he went to dinner with one night in May, 2014, at the Chinese restaurant Hong Shing in Toronto, just north of City Hall. There, they were asked to pay their bill in advance - a request that Mr. Wickham suspected hadn't been made of the non-black patrons around them.

After confirming this, he confronted the server, who refunded the group's money. They walked out, no longer hungry or in the mood for celebration. The incident so bothered Mr. Wickham that he was still thinking of it a year later, when he filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

This week, the proprietors of Hong Shing were ordered to pay $10,000 to Mr. Wickham for violating section 1 of the province's human-rights code, which guarantees equal treatment when accessing goods, services and facilities. The tribunal's adjudicator said that Mr. Wickham was treated as "a potential thief in waiting." There are many unpleasant truths confirmed by this story, including that black people in Toronto face consistent prejudice when going about their daily lives. Another grim reality it proves is often hard to talk about: the persistent racism between groups of non-white people, especially that directed at black Canadians, and how it works to maintain white supremacy.

On Monday, a Globe and Mail tweet about Mr. Wickham's story attracted hundreds of comments, many of them racist. The vitriol was pointed at the group of black friends, but also against the restaurant: Toxic tropes about Chinese people's relationship to money, or the quality of their food, were common.

The owners and staff at Hong Shing have likely experienced anti-Asian racism personally, perhaps many times. This doesn't excuse them in any way from participating in anti-black racism - in fact, it might be the cause of it.

For centuries, pseudo-scientists have attempted to categorize human beings by race in a ploy to justify unjustifiable behaviour. Participants in this embarrassing game include philosophy celebrity Immanuel Kant and storied botanist Carl Linnaeus.

On the very worthwhile podcast Seeing White, American scholar Ibram Kendi dates the earliest attempts at racial categorization to the 1400s. That's when broad, global slavery practices - in which many cultures enslaved basically whoever they could get their hands on, including their own people - evolved into overwhelmingly European enslavement of predominantly African people.

Where previously the justifications for erasing other humans' basic rights were equally varied, those excuses began to narrow. Racial classifications denigrating dark skin tones and African origins became the dominant narrative.

That doesn't mean that those who were neither black nor white were given equal status to white Europeans. Instead, a divide-and-conquer hierarchy emerged, in which a chance at a marginally less subjugated life was offered to those who participated in black oppression.

This hierarchy existed in many forms, in many places; apartheid South Africa's "racial classification" was less harsh on those who were "coloured" than "native." Convincing those of mixed race or Asian ancestry to help police black people made the system stronger and took some of the work out of white hands.

Today, this often plays out as the "model minority" trope, in which particularly skilled or educated East and South Asian immigrants are granted visas and citizenship to Western countries, including Canada. Their successes (which, yes Uncle, still require hard work) are used against other racialized people who live in entrenched poverty, including the Indigenous.

This, too, is a weapon that non-black, non-white Canadians often carry of their own volition - the fear that it could be turned against them adds incentive to use it.

Records show that the current owner of Hong Shing is 25-year-old Colin Li, who took it over from his parents. He hasn't spoken with any media since the tribunal's ruling, nor offered Mr. Wickham a private apology − in fact, he's stated that he plans to appeal.

That's a shame. There are many bridges to be built over the gulfs created by this ancient tactic of division, and Mr. Li could help, if he has the courage.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story said proprietors of Hong Shing were ordered to pay a fine of $10,000. In fact they were ordered to pay $10,000 compensation to the customer, Emile Wickham

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Eating while black in a Chinese restaurant: a grim lesson in racist division

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It took four years for Emile Wickham to get official confirmation of what he already knew: that the treatment he received on his birthday was racist. Mr. Wickham is black, as are the friends he went to dinner with one night in May, 2014, at the Chinese restaurant Hong Shing in Toronto, just north of City Hall.

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Literature or modern fiction can be a great way to understand more about a country's culture, history, or society, as it describes events, feelings, atmospheres, and personal stories in a way that history books or more scholarly accounts could never do. This is a top 25 modern fiction works on China compiled by What's on Weibo as recommended reading to get a better understanding of present-day China.

After doing a Top 30 on Best (Non-Fiction) Books to Better Understand China, we felt it was high time to give you a list of recommendations of modern literary fiction works focusing on the People's Republic of China (PRC) that also help to better understand the past and present of this rapidly changing society.

There are hundreds of novels and literary works out there on modern China, and a lot of them are written in Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, Dutch, and many other languages - but for the scope of this particular list, we have chosen just to focus on the modern fiction books that have come out in the English language. We leave out fictional works focused on specifically Hong Kong and/or Taiwan here, because a top 25 just would not be enough.

Also, due to the scope of this list, we have selected those works that have come out after 1978, the year of the 'Reform and Opening Up' of China, mainly because this period marks a new era in Chinese literature and literature on China. Note that this list does not necessarily focus on 'Chinese literature' but on 'literary works on China' in general.

The earlier years of modern China have seen so many great literary works that are absolutely pivotal for anyone studying China, Chinese literature, or wanting to understand its past century, from the works of Lu Xun to gems such as Miss Sophie's Diary (1928) by Ding Ling, a Fortress Besieged (1947) by Qian Zhongshu, the works by Eileen Chang or Louis Cha (Jin Yong), that they deserve a list of their own.

These are the 25 books we have selected based on your recommendations and our own. The list is numbered based on the original year of publication. Note that we have provided Amazon links with these books, and most will be available for sale in the US/Europe and elsewhere, but we would also recommend checking out your local thrift stores, Oxfam stores, garage sales etc. because you might unexpectedly find some of these gems there (we sure did!).
Year first published: 1986/1987 (红高粱家族), English translation 1992 by Howard Goldblatt
Red Sorghum by Mo Yan (莫言, real name Guan Moye, 1955) is a novel that has become very famous both in- and outside of China, one of the reasons being that the renowned director Zhang Yimou turned the novel into a movie in 1988. The novel tells the story of a family's struggles spanning three generations in Shandong from the 1920s to the 1970s, through the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution. The sorghum fields are constantly present throughout the book - it is the heart of the home, the provider of food and wine, and the battleground of war.

When Mo Yan became the winner of the 2012 Nobel prize in literature, some controversy erupted: Mo Yan is one of China's most famous writers, but he is not a "social activist" or dissident, as many other internationally acclaimed Chinese artists and writers are. "Do cultural figures in China have a responsibility to be dissidents?" the Atlantic wrote in 2013. Perhaps the criticism was somewhat unfounded; after all, Mo Yan never asked to win the Nobel Prize. He said: " I hate partisan politics and how people gang up on opponents based on ideology. I like to come and go on my own, which allows me to look on from the sidelines with a clear mind and gain insight about the world and the human condition. I don't have the capability or interest of becoming a politician. I just want to write, quietly, and do some charity work in secret. " Mo Yan is also active on Weibo, where he sporadically shares his calligraphy.
Get on Amazon: Red Sorghum
Also worth reading by the same author:
First published in 1987 (亮出你的舌苔或空空荡荡), English translation by Flora Drew
This book by the exiled author Ma Jian (马建, 1953) definitely deserves a place on this list, even if it was just for the controversy it triggered once it was published. The publication of Stick Out Your Tongue sparked off the notorious "Ma Jian Affair," which has since been called one of the biggest scandals in modern Chinese literature; it led to an immediate ban on the book within mainland China. Stick Out Your Tongue was targeted as an anti-nationalistic book for being "vulgar, obscene," and for "defaming the image of [our] Tibetan compatriots" (Koetse 2009).

Stick Out Your Tongue (SOYT) resumes where Ma Jian's first book, left off, for which the author traveled to Tibet and wrote a book about his experiences. SOYT is almost a dream-like novel. Short stories sketch a dark image of remote grasslands and dilapidated temples; a secretive, haunted place. The book tells about how an aging pilgrim reveals why he gave everything away in a Buddhist penance before walking into the mountains to die. Other stories tell about incest and rape. Although SOYT enraged both Han Chinese and Tibetans, Ma Jian said about the book: " The need to believe in an earthly paradise, a hidden utopia where men live in peace and harmony, seems to run deep in among those who are discontented with the modern world. Westerners idealize Tibetans as gentle, godly people untainted by base desires and greed. But in my experience, Tibetans can be as corrupt and brutal as the rest of us. To idealize them is to deny them their humanity " (89).
Get on Amazon: Stick Out Your Tongue First published 1989 (千万别把我当人), English translation 2000 by Howard Goldblatt
Wang Shuo (王朔, 1958) is one of China's most popular and controversial authors, and is known as "the idol of rebellion for the youth" and a 'celebrity writer': most of his works have been turned into movies or TV series (Yao 2004, 432). Because of his cynism and bashing of literature elite, he became known as a "hooligan" writer who is quoted as saying things as: " The key is to make sure you f*ck literature and don't let literature f*ck you."

Please Don't Call Me Human is a satirical and surreal novel on "the worthlessness of the individual in the eyes of the totalitarian state" (Abrahamsen 2011) as the author writes about an Olympic-like Wrestling Competition where China is determined to win at any cost and where the so-called National Mobilization Committee strives to find a man to reclaim China's honour and defeat the big western wrestler.

Also recommended by this author:
First published: 1990 (灵山), English translation 2001 by Mabel Lee
Gao Xingjian (高行健, 1940), who is best known for his Soul Mountain, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000. Unlike his fellow Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, Gao already left China in 1987, and later became a French citizen (He 2016).

Soul Mountain is largely autobiographical, based on the author's 1983 remote travels to remote areas along the Yangtze river. The protagonist of the narrative is on a journey to find the fabled mountain Lingshan (Soul Mountain), and along the way, he collects stories, lovers, and spiritual wisdom. The characters in the book are unnamed; instead, they go by pronouns such as "I", "you" or "she," detaching them from their personal names, harboring bigger stories about the origins of humankind and Chinese culture.
Get on Amazon: Soul Mountain
Also recommended by the same author:
Year first published: 1991
Practically every garage sale or thrift shop nowadays has a copy of Wild Swans lying around since its immense success in the 1990s. The book is often categorized as non-fiction, but reads like a literary novel, and cannot not be on this list; it is an account of the tumultuous Chinese 20th century from the perspective of three generations of women.

Wild Swans is sometimes called an example of 'scar literature' (伤痕文学), a genre that came up after the end of the Cultural Revolution in which authors shared the pain suffered by people during the 1960s, and which basically started with the publication of Lu Xinhua's 1978 story "Scar." Whether or not Wild Swans belongs in this category is up to debate, but what is undeniable is that this book offers a glimpse into an incredible time in the history of China in a personal and captivating way that formal history books could never do. An absolute recommendation for anyone who wants to know more about how the Cultural Revolution and the period before and after affected Chinese women, families, and society at large.
Get on Amazon: Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China Year first published: 1993 (活着), English translation 2003 by Michael Berry
To Live by Yu Hua (余华, 1960) is the novel that was most recommended to What's on Weibo by readers upon asking for people's favorite China books. The book has become an absolute classic, and follows the life of Fugui, a spoiled son of a wealthy landlord, who is changed forever after witnessing and experiencing the hardships of the Civil War and Cultural Revolution.

In 1994, this novel was used for the screenplay of the film by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li, which was later denied a theatrical release in mainland China due to its critical portrayal of various policies and campaigns of the Communist government.

Other recommend works by the same author:

First published in 1995 (长恨歌), English translation 2008 by Michael Berry & Susan Chan Egan

Wang Anyi (王安忆, 1954) is one of China's most popular female authors, and The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is among her most famous works. The book traces the life story of the young Shanghainese girl Wang Qiyao from the 1940s, when Gone with the Wind played in Shanghai theatres, until her tragic death after the Cultural Revolution, in the 1980s.

The city of Shanghai is at the heart of this book - its rooftops, its skyline, its birds, moonlight, sunsets its girls, and its gossip.
Year first published 1996 (马桥词典), English translation 2003 by Julia Lovell
Han Shaogong (韓少功, 1953) is a celebrated Chinese author who is also known as the leading figure within the 1980s 'Xungen movement' (寻根文学: literally 'Finding Roots Literature'), a cultural and literary movement in mainland China in which writers started to focus on local and minority cultures as a new source of inspiration.

The narrative of A Dictionary of Maqiao takes places in an imaginary village in Southern China called 'Maqiao.' It is written as a dictionary, in which the author explains the words of the local language, and in doing so, tells the stories of rural China during the Cultural Revolution.
First published in 1996
This collection by Ha Jin (哈金, 1956, real name Jin Xuefei) won the 1997 PEN/Hemingway Award for best first work of fiction. Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China, but emigrated to the US after studying in Massachusetts during the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Ha Jin is now an American national who writes in English.

Ocean of Words is a collection of short stories that all take place at the border between China and Russia during the early 1970s, after a series of border clashes, and focus on the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Not coincidentally, Ha Jin also served the PLA himself from the age of 14, and spent a year at the Russian border.

Get on Amazon: Ocean of Words

Also recommended by the same author:
Years published: Falling Leaves in 1997 and Once Upon a Time in the East 2017
These are two books under one number, since we did not want to choose one over the other; these female authors have a lot in common despite their different ages and backgrounds, and this also shows in their books.

Adeline Yen Mah (马严君玲, 1937) and Xiaolu Guo (郭小橹, 1973) are two female authors of a very different generation, but in these works, they both very much focus on their family stories and their struggle to find their own independence and voice. Although these works do give a peek into some parts of Chinese history, they are more about Chinese family dynamics and culture.

Adeline Yen Mah is a Chinese-American author who was born in Tianjin. Her mother died of childbed fever soon after giving birth to her, which was to be the start of a difficult and abusive childhood for Yen Mah, who grew up with her sisters, her fathers, and her cruel Eurasian stepmother. It is Yen Mah's own story that is the focus of Falling Leaves.

Xiaolu Guo is a British-Chinese author who was born in 1973 and then handed over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains by her parents. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition, Xiaolu is left with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea, and does not meet her own parents until she is almost seven years old. Once Upon a Time in the East is written from the perspective of a forty-year-old Xiaolu, who lives in London and is now becoming a mother herself, and has the urge to revisit her past memories and roots of the past, that now seems like a "foreign country" to her.

Get: Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Daughter
Get: Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up
Year first published: 1999 (上海宝贝), English translation 2001 by Bruce Humes
This is arguably one of the more controversial novels on this list, since it has sparked many discussions since its publication in the early years of the millennium, with many deeming it a "disgrace to Chinese culture" and a "shame to Chinese men."

One of the reasons this book by Wei Hui (周卫慧, 1973) deserves attention is because it represents a genre of literature written by young female authors, known as 'Beauty Writers' (美女作家) who focused on topics generally deemed taboo in China around 2000. This book touches upon topics such as female orgasm, menstruation, oral sex, and other things that were somewhat rare to read about in modern Chinese novels before this time.

The novel revolves around the everyday life of the 25-year-old aspiring writer Coco, who works as a waitress in downtown Shanghai. The book, that is written as if it were the protagonist's own diary, focuses on Coco's life, her ambitions, (foreign) boyfriends, erotic encounters, and most importantly, on the city itself and the sexual awakening of a young Chinese writer on her way to success.
Buy via Amazon: Shanghai Baby a Novel Originally published in 2000 (Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise), English translation by Ina Rilke
Dai Sijie (戴思杰, 1954) is a Chinese-French author and filmmaker who, as several authors on this list, was sent down to a 're-education camp' in rural Sichuan during the Cultural Revolution. Much of his experience there was used in his book.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a captivating account that tells the story of two young men who become good friends with a local seamstress while spending time in a countryside village where they have been sent for "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of a passion for Mao, they discover their love for (western) literature.

Recommended by the same author:
Year first published: 2000 (糖), English translation 2003 by Andrea Lingenfelter
Just as the author of Shanghai Baby, Mian Mian (棉棉, 1970) is also one of China's so-called 'Beauty Writers' (美女作家), whose works are characterized by its focus on the stories of a young urban female generation, leading a wild and extravagant lifestyle. For Shanghai Baby, Candy, but also for works such as Beijing Doll (2002, Chun Sue), it meant that their boldness soon also resulted in banishment within the PRC.

Candy tells the story of a young female high-school dropout who runs away to Shenzhen, where her new life is clouded by alcohol and drugs. About the book, the author writes: " This book exists because one morning as the sun was coming up I told myself that I had to swallow up all of the fear and garbage around me, and once it was inside me I had to transform it all into candy."

Although it has been somewhat quiet around the author since her smashing debut and her lawsuit against Google, Mian Mian is still active on Weibo.

Year first published 2000

Anchee Min (閔安琪, 1957) is a Chinese-American author who is known for her works in which she focuses on strong female characters. Becoming Madame Mao is a historical novel, that uses letters, poems, and quotations from original documents, detailing the life of Jiang Qing.

Jiang Qing, who is known as one of China's most 'evil women', became 'Madame Mao' after her marriage to Mao Zedong. In this novel, Min shows another side of one of the most controversial political figures in the People's Republic of China.
Get online: Becoming Madame Mao
Recommended by the same author:
First published 2003
Just as a few other books on this list, such as Jung Chang's Wild Swans, this book officially is not 'fiction,' since it is an autobiography - but it still reads like a novel. Li Cunxin (李存信, 1961) is a Chinese-Australian former ballet dancer whose intriguing life story is what this book is about. Li is selected to be trained as a ballet dancer at Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy when he is just a young boy, and later gets the chance to travel to America as a visiting student, where he begins to question the Chinese Communist doctrines which he has been raised with.

Many people might know this book because of the film based on this work, directed by Bruce Beresford, that came out in 2009.

Buy online: Mao's Last Dancer
First published in: 2004 (北妹), English translation 2012 by Shelly Bryant
Sheng Keyi (盛可以, 1973) is among one of China's newer generations of writers who focus on modern China. Like protagonist Qian Xiaohong in her book, Sheng was also born in a village in Hunan province and then worked and lived in Shenzhen. Staying close to her own experiences, this coming-of-age novel is about a community of fellow rural 'northern girls' in a search of a better life in the bustling city.
First published in 2004 (狼图腾), English translation 2008 by Howard Goldblatt
Wolf Totem is an award-winning semi-autobiographical novel about the experiences of a young student from Beijing who is sent to the countryside of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. He lives with nomadic Mongols and learns from them, but also finds himself fascinated with the wolfs of the grasslands; their survival is threatened when are attacked by the government as 'class enemies.' The book became highly popular in China shortly after it was published, and more than a decade later, it still is very popular, especially since a film based on the novel came out in 2015.

Author Jiang Rong (姜戎 1946, real name Lü Jiamin) is very familiar with Inner Mongolia, as he went there at the age of 21 as "sent down youth," and stayed there for eleven years. Wolf Totem is not just partly based on his experiences there, it is also a social commentary on the dangers of China's economic growth and the destruction of culture, spirituality, and ecology.

To buy: Wolf Totem - a Novel
First published in 2005 (丁庄梦), English translation 2009 by Cindy Carter
Yan Lianke (阎连科, 1958) is a leading author of modern Chinese literature; he is also called the Chinese author (inside of China) who has come closest to winning the Nobel Prize after Mo Yan. Dream of Ding Village was originally published in China, but then got banned. The narrative is about a place where poverty-stricken villagers are coerced into selling their blood and are subsequently infected with HIV by contaminated plasma injections. Although the book is fiction, these kinds of scandals, unfortunately, have taken place. Noteworthy enough, a Chinese film based on Yan's (banned) book was made in 2011, called Love for Life (最爱).

About his work, Yan said in 2018: " China's reality is complex and irrational. The people are always under the nation, their existence burdened by its great weight (..) I have been writing about people living under these circumstances, and believe my overseas readers can learn something universal from my stories about China."
Buy: Dream of Ding Village

● #19 Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu (Murong Xuecun)
First published in 2006 (成都，今夜请将我遗忘), English translation 2013 by Harvey Thomlinson
Murong Xuecun (慕容雪村, 1974, real name Hao Qun) is one of the younger authors in this list, whose debut Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu instantly made him famous and was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008. The contemporary novel is focused on the lives of three young men who struggle to make their way in the dynamic city of Chengdu where gambling, womanizing, corruption, and cheating have become part of their everyday lives.

Murong Xuecun is known as an anti-censorship activist who reportedly had 8.5 million followers on his Weibo microblog accounts before they were forcibly closed. For an excerpt of the book see The New York Times here.
Buy online: Leave Me Alone
Year published: 2006 (金陵十三钗), English translation 2012 by Nicky Harman

Many people might have heard of The Flowers of War because of the film by Zhang Yimou, who has often made films based on Chinese literary works by authors such as Mo Yan, Yu Hua, or Su Tong. This novella by Geling Yan (严歌苓, 1958), inspired by the diaries of Minnie Vautrin, is set in Nanjing during the gruesome history of the 1937 Japanese invasion, also known as the 'Rape of Nanjing.' This story focuses on an American church compound in the 'safety zone' where a group of escapees tries to survive the violent invasion of the city.

The Nanjing massacre is deeply engraved into China's collective memory, and stills plays a major role in Chinese art, literature, popular culture, and politics.

Geling Yan is one of the few authors in this list that is also active on Weibo.

Buy via Amazon: here

Other recommended works by the same author:
First published in 2007 (高兴), English translation 2017 by Nicky Harman
Jia Pingwa (贾平凹, 1952) is one of China's most prominent authors, and this imaginative work, that came out in English in 2017, focuses on the tough lives of China's migrant workers. The story is set in Xi'an and focuses on trash picker Hawa "Happy" Liu, a rural laborer who has arrived in the city in search of work, and his friend and fellow villager Wufu.

Also recommended by the same author:
Year Published: 2008, translated by Flora Drew
Beijing Coma tells the compelling story of Dai Wei, who lies in a coma in his mother's flat in Beijing, whose memories "flash by like the lighted windows of a passing train" as we as readers are sucked into the pages - going back to those dorms days and discussions that eventually led to the massive Tiananmen student protests of 1989.
Buy via Amazon here: Beijing Coma
Also must-read by the same author (who also just released his new book China Dream (2018)!):
First published 2009
This is the debut of the award-winning Chinese American author Yiyun Li (李翊雲, 1972), which takes place the late 1970s China in an impoverished rural town named Muddy River, where two parents wake up the day their daughter Gu Shan gets executed as a 'counterrevolutionary.' The book is dark and gripping, focusing on a world of oppression and pain, as it tells the stories of a group of very different characters who are all connected to each other.

About her writing style, Li told an interviewer: " People would say I portray the world in a bleak way. It's not bleak to me. I think what is bleak is when you create a veil to make the world feel better. Literature is one place we should be able to experience bleakness and brightness and anything in between. Literature should not make people feel comfortable, it should challenge the readers."
Get on Amazon: The Vagrants: A Novel First published in: 2009 (盛世--中国，2013年), English translation 2011 by Michael S. Duke
The Fat Years is a science fiction book that tells of a dystopian future of China and its political landscape by Chinese author Chan Koonchung (陈冠中, 1952), and for many people, it's one of the more important China fiction books that have come out the past decade. "After the world's second financial crisis in 2013, the government clings to power only after it sends troops into the streets for a month of bloody killing. Finally, the government laces the water with a chemical that makes people feel happy and eager to spend money" (Johnson 2011). The book has never come out in mainland China.

China columnist Didi Kirsten Tatlow said about The Fat Years: "Rarely does a novel tell the truth about a society in a way that has the power to shift our perceptions about that place in a certain way, but 'The Fat Years' does exactly that."

Get via Amazon: The Fat Years
First published in 2017
Lijia Zhang (张丽佳, 1964) is an internationally acclaimed author and public speaker. Inspired by the secret life of the author's grandmother, who was sold to a brothel at age 14, Lotus follows the life of a young prostitute in an urban China that is rapidly changing.

Zhang has called the subject of prostitution "an interesting window to observe/explore social tensions" in China. Recommended by the same author is her memoir Socialism Is Great!: A Worker's Memoir of the New China. Also check out this interview with Lijia Zhang on the WAGIC website.
Some bonus recommendations: Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen (徐则臣, 1978)
(First published 2008, 跑步穿过中关村, 2014 transl. Eric Abrahamsen)
Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation
(By Ken Liu 2016)
A Private Life by Chen Ran (陈染, 1962)
(First published 1996, 2004 transl. John Howard-Gibbon)
Raise the Red Lantern / Wives and Concubines by Su Tong (苏童, 1963)
(First published 1990 妻妾成群, 2004 transl. Michael S. Duke)

Beijing Doll - A Novel by Chun Sue (春树)

(First published 2002 北京娃娃, 2004 transl. Howard Goldblatt)

Don't forget to check out our top 30 of best non-fiction books on China.

Note that due to the scope of this list we've applied several criteria. Books selected in this list are:

..translated into English or written in English.

..literary fiction works that take place in the People's Republic of China, or in which Chinese modern history and/or society is an important theme, and that are relevant for people in getting a better grasp of Chinese history, society, urbanization, gender, literature, family relations etc.

..not necessarily written by mainland Chinese authors, not necessarily originally written in Chinese.

..published after 1978.

This list was compiled based on own preferences and that of many readers whom we asked about their favorite books within this category. If you think certain books are not here that should be here, please let us know and we might compile a second list in the future.
References
Abrahamsen, Eric. 2011. "Irony Is Good! - How Mao killed Chinese humor ... and how the Internet is slowly bringing it back again." Foreign Policy, January 12 https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/12/irony-is-good/ [24.12.18].

He Chengzhou. 2016. "Gao Xingjian's Individualistic Revolt: Fiction, Biography, and Event." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 62, no. 4: 627-643. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed December 23, 2018).

Johnson, Ian. 2011. "On the Party Circuit, and Upsetting the Party." New York Times, July 29 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/world/asia/30chan.html [27.12.18].

Koetse, Manya. 2009. "'Stick Out Your Tongue': A Banned Book on the Health of a Nation." Essay [Universiteit Leiden], published online December 2012: https://www.manyakoetse.com/stick-out-your-tongue-a-banned-book-on-the-health-of-a-nation/.

Yang, Lan. 1998. Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Yao, Yusheng. 2004. "The Elite Class Background of Wang Shuo and His Hooligan Characters." Modern China 30, no. 4 (2004): 431-69.
Spotted a mistake or want to add something? Please let us know in comments below or email us.
©2018 Whatsonweibo. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce our content without permission - you can contact us at info@whatsonweibo.com

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Anti-Black Racism Dominates Online Discussions over 'Privileged' Exchange Students in China

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Literature or modern fiction can be a great way to understand more about a country's culture, history, or society, as it describes events, feelings, atmospheres, and personal stories in a way that history books or more scholarly accounts could never do.

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Richard Ochieng', 26, at his home in Nairobi, Kenya. His Chinese boss called him and other Kenyans monkeys. Credit Credit Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times

RUIRU, Kenya - Before last year, Richard Ochieng', 26, could not recall experiencing racism firsthand.

Not while growing up as an orphan in his village near Lake Victoria where everybody was, like him, black. Not while studying at a university in another part of Kenya. Not until his job search led him to Ruiru, a fast-growing settlement at the edge of the capital, Nairobi, where Mr. Ochieng' found work at a Chinese motorcycle company that had just expanded to Kenya.

But then his new boss, a Chinese man his own age, started calling him a monkey.

It happened when the two were on a sales trip and spotted a troop of baboons on the roadside, he said.

"'Your brothers,'" he said his boss exclaimed, urging Mr. Ochieng' to share some bananas with the primates.

And it happened again, he said, with his boss referring to all Kenyans as primates.

Humiliated and outraged, Mr. Ochieng' decided to record one of his boss's rants, catching him declaring that Kenyans were "like a monkey people."

Richard Ochieng' recorded video of racist remarks made by his employer last month. The footage, excerpts of which can be seen here, went viral. Published On Credit Credit Image by Courtesy of Richard Ochieng

After his cellphone video circulated widely last month, the Kenyan authorities swiftly deported the boss back to China. Instead of a tidy resolution, however, the episode has resonated with a growing anxiety in Kenya and set off a broader debate.

As the country embraces China's expanding presence in the region, many Kenyans wonder whether the nation has unwittingly welcomed an influx of powerful foreigners who are shaping the country's future - while also bringing racist attitudes with them.

It is a wrenching question for the nation, and one that many Kenyans, especially younger ones, did not expect to be confronting in the 21st century.

Kenya may have been a British colony, where white supremacy reigned and black people were forced to wear identification documents around their necks. But it has been an independent nation since 1963, with a sense of pride that it is among the region's most stable democracies.

Today, many younger Kenyans say that racism is a phenomenon they largely know indirectly, through history lessons and foreign news. But episodes involving discriminatory behavior by the region's growing Chinese work force have unsettled many Kenyans, particularly at a time when their government seeks closer ties with China.

Image

An unfinished stretch of the Standard Gauge Railway, a 300-mile Chinese-built railroad between Nairobi and Mombasa. Credit Andrew Renneisen for The New York Times

"They are the ones with the capital, but as much as we want their money, we don't want them to treat us like we are not human in our own country," said David Kinyua, 30, who manages an industrial park in Ruiru that is home to several Chinese companies, including the motorcycle company where Mr. Ochieng' works.

Over the last decade, China has lent money and erected infrastructure on a sweeping scale across Africa. To pay for such projects, many African nations have borrowed from China or relied on natural resources like oil reserves. And when tallying the cost, African nations have generally focused on their rising debts, or occasionally on the exploitative labor practices of some Chinese firms.

But here in Nairobi, concerns about racism and discrimination are a growing part of the conversation about China's expanding presence.

In Nairobi, workers in their 20s and 30s swap stories of racism or discrimination they have witnessed. One described watching a Chinese manager slap her Kenyan colleague, who was also a woman, for a minor mistake.

Other Kenyan workers explained how their office bathrooms were separated by race: one for Chinese employees, the other for Kenyans. Yet another Kenyan worker described how a Chinese manager directed his Kenyan employees to unclog a urinal of cigarette butts, even though only Chinese employees dared smoke inside.

The Chinese population in Kenya is difficult to count accurately, although one research group put the figure at around 40,000. Many are here for just a few years, to work for one of hundreds of Chinese companies. Many of the employees live together in large housing developments and are bussed back and forth from work, leaving little social interaction with Kenyans.

"Because of the isolation and lack of integration, usually they are not very aware of the local situation," said Hongxiang Huang, a Chinese conservationist and former journalist who has lived in Nairobi. "They do not know very well how to interact with the outside world."

And many arrive with hierarchical views of culture and race that tend to place Africans at the bottom, said Howard French, a former New York Times correspondent who wrote the 2014 book "China's Second Continent," which chronicles the lives of Chinese settlers in Africa.

Accusations of discrimination have even emerged on a major state-sponsored project: a 300-mile Chinese-built railroad between Nairobi and Mombasa. The train has become a national symbol of both progress and Chinese-Kenyan cooperation, though positive reviews have at times been overshadowed by concern over its $4 billion price tag.

But in July, The Standard, a Kenyan newspaper, published a report describing an atmosphere of "neocolonialism" for Kenyan railway workers under Chinese management. Some have been subjected to demeaning punishment, it said, while Kenyan engineers have been prevented from driving the train, except when journalists are present.

It was a particularly explosive claim because during the train's maiden voyage, with President Uhuru Kenyatta on board, two Kenyan women drove the train to much fanfare.

In interviews with The New York Times, several current and former locomotive drivers agreed that only Chinese drivers got to operate the train, describing a range of racist behavior.

"'With uniforms on, you won't look like monkeys anymore,'" Fred Ndubi, 24, recalled his Chinese supervisors saying. Two other workers with him offered the same account.

Mr. Ndubi, who has since left the railroad, said his family had sold about a quarter of its land so he could afford the training needed to become a train operator.

"We just stood there and asked him, 'How can you call us monkeys?'" Mr. Ndubi recalled.

Sometimes, the racial controversies have unfolded in full public view. Two years ago, a laundry detergent company in China ran a television commercial in which the detergent's effectiveness was demonstrated by transforming a black man into a light-skinned Asian man. Last year, WeChat, the country's popular messaging app, apologized after its software was found to translate the Chinese words for "black foreigner" into a racial slur in English.

This year, China's televised Lunar New Year gala, estimated to reach 800 million viewers, included caricatures of Africans, with blackface and men in animal suits.

When asked about the controversy, China's foreign ministry spokesman suggested that Western news organizations had blown the matter out of proportion in an effort to "sow discord in China's relations with African countries."

Mr. French, the author of "China's Second Continent," said that when it comes to Africa, China has had a tendency to dismiss criticism of its conduct by noting that the West, not China, fueled the slave trade and colonized the continent.

But that misses the point, Mr. French said, by ignoring the treatment of Africans today.

"Their experience is that they are being treated in flagrantly disgusting, racialized ways," Mr. French said.

Kenya, home to more than 40 officially recognized ethnic groups, has long had its own problems with prejudice and ethnic tensions. A disputed election in 2007 led to several weeks of mass violence, much of it along ethnic lines. And Kenyans of Indian and Pakistani descent have long felt secluded from mainstream Kenyan life, although the government has granted them greater official recognition.

But the Chinese presence has added a volatile new element and, at times, the Kenyan government has seemed divided over how to respond. When allegations of discrimination by Chinese employers emerged over the summer, a Kenyan government spokesman suggested that part of the problem lay instead with Kenya's national work ethic, which he said might need to change.

There are signs that elements within the government may be pushing back. Last month, the Kenyan police raided the Nairobi headquarters of a Chinese state-run television channel, briefly detaining several journalists. The timing struck many as curious: It was the same week that President Kenyatta was in Beijing, raising the question of whether someone inside the Kenyan government wanted to create a diplomatic row.

The experience of Mr. Ochieng' and other workers speaks to the future of relations between the two countries. He took a job as a salesman, thinking it would secure a prosperous future, but when he showed up to work he found a different reality. The pay was a fraction of what he was initially offered, he said, and it was subject to deduction for a long list of infractions.

"No laughing," was one of the injunctions printed in the company rules. Each minute of lateness - sometimes unavoidable given Nairobi's notorious traffic - came with a steep fine. An employee who was 15 minutes late might be docked five or six hours' pay, he said.

One Chinese manager, Liu Jiaqi, 26, loomed particularly large. At times, he was smiling and good-natured, Mr. Ochieng' said, but whenever the question of pay came up or something went wrong, Mr. Liu turned on his subordinates.

When Mr. Ochieng' left a sales brochure behind in the car during a sales visit and had to excuse himself to retrieve it, he said Mr. Liu began crowing, "This African is very foolish."

But the most painful, he said, were the monkey insults - the kind of dehumanization used to justify slavery and colonization.

Mr. Ochieng' said he protested several times, but the monkey comments did not stop.

"It was too much," he said. "I decided, 'Let me record it.'"

The rant that Mr. Ochieng' recorded came after a sales trip had gone awry. Mr. Ochieng' asked his boss why he was taking out his anger on him.

"Because you are Kenyan," Mr. Liu explained, saying that all Kenyans, even the president, are "like a monkey."

Mr. Ochieng' continued that Kenyans may have once been oppressed, but that they have been a free people since 1963.

"Like a monkey," Mr. Liu responded. "Monkey is also free."

The day after the video began to circulate widely, Mr. Liu, who could not be reached for comment, was deported. It was an especially stark illustration of the clash between the two cultures, with many adding that it produced a noticeable chill in relations between Kenyans and Chinese people in the capital.

"That video had a big effect," said Victor Qi, the Chinese manager of a noodle restaurant in Nairobi, adding that business from black customers seemed to fall off after that.

After the video emerged, an official with the motorcycle company called Mr. Liu's behavior an "unfortunate transgression," while a Chinese Embassy spokesman said, " The personal talk and personal feeling of this young man does not represent the views of the vast majority of Chinese people."

Mr. Ochieng' says he has heard stories of colonialism - "what our forefathers went through" - and worries that the Chinese will take Kenya backward, not forward as the nation's leaders have assured.

"These guys are trying to take us back to those days," he said in the tiny room he shares with his wife and 2-year-old son. On the wall hung a poster with a verse from Ephesians. Nearby, on a little desk rested two Bibles, both equally dog-eared with use.

"Someday I will tell my son that when you were young, I was despised because I was black," he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Chinese Bring Jobs, and Bias, Kenyans Find. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination

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RUIRU, Kenya - Before last year, Richard Ochieng', 26, could not recall experiencing racism firsthand. Not while growing up as an orphan in his village near Lake Victoria where everybody was, like him, black. Not while studying at a university in another part of Kenya.