IBARW 3: International Racism

[keilexandra]

Thus far, what I've read of IBARW has been excellent but largely U.S.-centric. Of course, I live in the U.S. myself, but I want to point out racism all around the world. I don't feel knowledgeable enough to analyze or elaborate on the situations, but I can present them for your consideration.

• teagrl83 on the burakumin in Japanese society, who are not ethnically different but are marked by darker skin discriminated against based on occupation and place of residence (thanks kyuuketsukirui).


• oyceter on black people in China and Taiwan; I can certainly attest to yellow-black racism personally, and I'm not surprised (but sad) to see that the situation is worse in my birth country. And jadelennox provides an anecdote confirming this.


• forthwritten on tensions in the U.K. Indian community.


• tithenai with a quietly horrific anecdote about associating the Arabic word sirlankiyyi with "housemaid" when its literal meaning is "someone from Sri Lanka."


• emily_shore on the racism faced by the Roma (more popularly known as the Gypsies) in Italy.


• troubleinchina on, surprisingly, black racism in Canada, a country often considered to be happy and liberal. I identify as Chinese-Canadian and I experienced a subtle kind of racism as a child in Newfoundland; no one was more hurtful than usual, but I was one of three non-white kids in my entire school (a Chinese friend and a black girl), so of course I stood out. And I was guilty, too, of goggling at the African girl with black skin (because China is even more homogeneous).


• troubleinchina again, on violence against First Nations (the Canadian equivalent of Native American/Aboriginal) women in Canada.

Discuss: give me more examples! Enlighten me.

Comments

[beteio.livejournal.com]

I don't have any personal experiences of this, but I'm thinking about Han prejudice against other minority groups [in China, of course].

[keilexandra]

Yep, that's my tentative topic for today. ;)

[teagrl83.livejournal.com]

I wrote a little bit more at length on the burakumin in my LJ.

I'm versed in a lot of Ethnic Studies stuff (focusing on Japan and Latin America during the 1800s or so), another interesting topic would be race relations in South America. In Colombia, one of the ways that the Spanish kept control was to turn the indigenous populations against the African populations. I wonder if there's a parallel with what the US did, but if there were one, I imagine there'd be other stuff to consider, since they had a different view of how to "contain" race in the US during the 1800s.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Acutally burakumin do not have any physical difference from the rest of the Japanese population. They have been discriminated against because of their jobs, and the only way to tell that someone was burakumin was to do a background check and see what their relatives' jobs were, where they lived (burakumin lived in segregated areas), etc.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin) has a pretty thorough article. Here (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE5DE1F3BF935A2575BC0A963958260), here (http://forums.canadiancontent.net/news/35323-burakumin-japan.html), and here (http://blhrri.org/blhrri_e/news/new138/new138-3.htm) are some interesting articles on burakumin, confirming that they are not visually different than the rest of the Japanese population.

I think the confusion may arise from the fact that buraku sounds similar to the English word black (which would be pronounced burakku in Japanese), and thus people assume that it refers to skin color. Wikipedia gives this definition of buraku: The term 部落 (buraku) literally refers to a small, generally rural, commune or a hamlet. People from regions of Japan where "discriminated communities" do not exist any more (e.g., anywhere north of Tokyo) may normally refer to any hamlet as a buraku, indicating that the word's usage is not necessarily pejorative.

That's not to say it's not a problem! Obviously it is. But it's not one based on skin color.

[keilexandra]

Fixed, thanks!

[teagrl83.livejournal.com]

Hope no one minds my two cents here. I think the issue with race and the burakumin is a little bit more complicated than the similarity between the English word "black" and "buraku" considering that burakumin have been _viewed_ as a race apart (the argument I make in my contribution to IBARW3) as early as the Meiji period, before English gained as much currency as this idea would assume.

In my research I encountered youth groups from these neighborhoods who have picked up buraku and made the buraku/black connection, but I think that's another unrelated issue to the history of their discrimination and it's not particularly pervasive from what I have observed. I could be wrong, since it's been a while.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Oh, sorry, I meant the reason many non-Japanese jump to the conclusion that the reason for discrimination is skin color.

[teagrl83.livejournal.com]

Ah! Gotcha. Sorry about that.