The category ‘black’ historically privileged Afro-Caribbean experience and lost descriptive force for Asians.

Evidence

There seem to be three reasons for the current conceptual confusion. The first is empirical. Afro-Caribbean migrants—viewed largely in racialized terms—arrived in Britain earlier. Asians, characterized by religious and cultural difference, arrived and became visible as a so-called “problem” later. In the 1970s, antiracist struggles by both groups tended to cluster under the affirmative identity of “black,” defined by their shared racialized difference from white society. However, one unintended effect was to privilege the Afro-Caribbean experience over that experienced by Asians. As the salience of what Taylor (1994) has called “the politics of recognition” has grown, stressing the right to cultural difference, so the two trajectories have become more separate. “Black” has become descriptively normalized for people of African descent, and Asians have tended to revert to ethnically specific terms of identification. Hence the anomalous current description—“black and Asian”—which combines “race” and “ethnicity.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 343

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Islamophobia toolkit: explains the genealogy of ‘black and Asian’ as a category and why religion, not race, became the salient axis for Muslim communities — bridges to Modood et al. and the cultural-racism literature downstream.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the current empirical categories ‘black’ versus ‘Asian’ as distinct exclusionary trajectories, a vocabulary distinction the field depends on.