Blackness in Indonesia: Articulations of Colonial and Postcolonial Racial Epistemologies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a framework for understanding how the white supremacist colonial foundations and postcolonial racist formations combine to denigrate Black people in contemporary Indonesia. Situated within critical race theory, this study contributes to studies of Blackness and articulations of colonial and postcolonial forms of anti-Black racism. Drawing on ethnographic research and personal experiences, I depict the anti-Black racism rampant and systemic in Indonesia as well as the Papuan struggle for change. My personal stories from the field indicate the perpetuation of racist colonial legacies. Persistent white supremacist and postcolonial Malay and light-skinned Indigenous Indonesian cultural models relegate Black citizens to a condition I describe as compound racial subordination. Racist postcolonial cultural models produced out of European racial science and current racial structures of inequality perpetuate global white supremacy. [Blackness, racism, white supremacy, Malaysia, Indonesia]