Casteism & Anti-Blackness
For descendants of indentured labour/coolies, and south Asians, you need to understand the roots of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous violence in our various communities.
For non Black folks, any sort of actual solidarity and organizing work you want to engage with requires learning about casteism and working to actively dismantle all the ways it functions in everything. To break down all supremacies and power structures that allow non Black people to stay complicit and actively harm Black communities then you need a deep understanding of how caste violence is alive in all diasporas.
There is no monolithic coolie or monolithic south Asian identity where we are all oppressed in the same way, that logic is harmful and doesn't even make sense. Everyone holds a different position on varying hierarchies depending on our racial, ethnic, caste, class, gender, sexuality, religious id, citizenship etc and these impact how you treat other descendants.
Caste hierarchies and violence does exist in indentured communities and among descendants. This also definitely plays a role in our interactions, relationships and histories with Black communities and Indigenous communities in our different contexts. These facts don't take away from our various communities being in solidarity with another in our different indentured contexts, obviously. But to ignore or downplay or not hold yourself and your communities responsible for anti-Blackness and how it links to casteism and caste violence is fucked up, extremely violent and just not true. And people can't keep doing surface level unlearning.
Please follow the organizing, political education and community support by Equality Labs at https://www.equalitylabs.org/.
-Esha (2020)
Image credit: How are Casteism and Anti-Blackness related? Image via Equality Labs + South Asians for Black Lives