British anti-racism’s black-white frame marginalized Asian mobilization and identity

Evidence

Sociologist Tariq Modood has remarked on the damaging effects of this homogenization, which tended often to privilege African American models of identification and struggle over the Asian experience. He describes how “when this American anti-racist movement was pursued in Britain, it highlighted a problem, for in Britain there was also a second cleavage: a West Indian–Asian dualism. Despite the different political and cultural histories that this cleavage represented, British anti-racism, having accepted the opposition between black and white, continued to deny any political or anti-racist strategic significance to this internal division.” Modood argues that this denial had a negative effect on some Asians’ ability to mobilize as part of the antiracist struggle. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 152

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s analysis of Hamid and Naqvi — the West Indian-Asian dualism is the historical backdrop for the Pakistani-British subject positions both novelists write from.
• DEFINE: Establishes Modood’s critique of homogenization as a key term for distinguishing which anti-racist frameworks erode Asian agency.

Related

• Imposing an American black-white antiracism model on Britain obscured distinct Asian struggles. (similarity 0.93)
• Coalitional antiracist identity politics suppressed internal differences among the nonwhite (similarity 0.82)
• Race Relations Act 1976 drove the ‘black’ consensus that marginalized Asians (similarity 0.79)
• The term black once united nonwhite Britons across creed and culture (similarity 0.79)