World Politics in Colour
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | L. H. M. Ling |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829817703192 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817703192
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2017, Vol. 45(3) 473 –491
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829817703192
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World Politics in Colour
L. H. M. Ling
The New School, USA
Abstract
Racism reflects how we think and act as much as what. It manifests in terms of biology, geography,
and culture but reflects an episteme that normalises Self and Other into a bordered binary. Here,
a trialectical epistemology can help. It dissolves racialised realities by showing how opposites
exist in each other, thereby constituting a three-ness – e.g. self-in-other and other-in-self – that
links Self and Other despite mutual antagonisms. From such trialectics, epistemic compassion
can arise. It enables learning from the Other through what Buddhists call ‘interbeing’ or the
recognition that ‘you are in me, and I in you’. Reciprocity thus becomes key. The Self cannot
violate the Other without also violating itself; likewise, loving the Other effectively loves the
Self. Flat, monochromatic binaries like ‘black’ versus ‘white’ cannot continue and colour revivifies
world politics, both literally and figuratively. I apply trialectics to the ‘border problem’ between
India and China as an analogy.
Keywords
racism, trialectics, yin/yang
Introduction
Let us get rid of ‘race’ as a concept.1 You may ask: Why? Doesn’t the concept of ‘race’
make possible analyses of ‘racialised realities in world politics’, the theme of this special
issue? Aren’t these, along with interventions on gender, the central contribution of post-
colonial studies in International Relations (IR)?2 And, in this way, don’t we de-racialise
1. This proposition differs radically from liberal claims of ‘colour-blindness’ to address indi-
vidual racism and/or its institutional and structural manifestations. Whereas the former may
posture themselves free of racism by eliminating ‘colour’, I want to centre the concept but
understood within its own context rather than the racist’s.
2. For a limited sample, see Randolph B. Persaud, Counter-Hegemony and Foreign Policy: The
Dialectics of Marginalized and Global Forces in Jamaica (Albany: State University of New
Corresponding author:
L. H. M. Ling, The New School, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011, USA.
Email: lingl@newschool.edu
703192MIL0010.1177/0305829817703192Millennium: Journal of International StudiesLing
research-article2017
Conference Article
474 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(3)
IR – especially its Western-led, Westphalian version – by hearing the voices and seeing
the perspectives of the formerly colonised, the subaltern, the global South?
Yes and no. Postcolonial achievements in IR notwithstanding, using ‘race’ even as a
description perpetuates the episteme that produces racism in the first place.3 It borders
the world into binaries like ‘black’ versus ‘white’. They divide and conquer with a sin-
gularity that also ranks hierarchically: that is, ‘white’ always surpasses ‘black’.4 From
this basis, ‘race’ as a category obscures the hybridities that impregnate all societies across
time and space.5 And with this move come racist policies and strategies. These permit the
‘white’ Self to subordinate the ‘non-white’ Other6 with rubrics like ‘modernisation’
(development), ‘education’ (science), and/or ‘salvation’ (Christianity), even while
exploiting their labour and resources, cultures, and legacies. Epistemicide, charges
Boaventura de Sousa Santos.7 The global North has been eradicating the global South’s
York Press, 2001); L.H.M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire
between Asia and the West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); S. Charusheela and Eiman
Zein-Elabdin, eds., Postcolonialism Meets Economics (London: Routledge, 2004); Phillip
Darby, ed., Postcolonizing the International: Working to Change the Way We Are (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2006); Karena Shaw, Indigeneity and Political Theory:
Sovereignty and the Limits of the Political (New York: Routledge, 2008); Robbie Shilliam,
ed., International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and
Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2011); Sanjay Seth, ed., Postcolonial
Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2013).
3. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2007).
4. Recent critiques of this racially-based, global hierarchy in IR include John M. Hobson, The
Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Relations Theory, 1760–
2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Robert Vitalis, White World
Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2015).
5. DNA studies show greater variation within a population than across racial or ethnic catego-
ries. See, Michael Yudell, Dorothy Roberts, Rob DeSalle, and Sarah Tishkoff, ‘Taking Race
Out of Human Genetics’, Science 351, no. 6273 (2016): 564–5. Available at: http://science.
sciencemag.org/content/351/6273/564. For a general discussion of this article, particularly
for social science, see Jacqueline Howard, ‘What Scientists Mean When They Say “Race” Is
Not Genetic’, The Huffington Post, 9 February 2016. Available at:www.huffingtonpost.com/
entry/race-is-not-biological_us_56b8db83e4b04f9b57da89ed
6. I put these terms (‘white’, ‘non-white’) in quotes to indicate their contingent and fabricated
nature. A man from Brazil, for example, may consider himself ‘white’ and ‘patriarchal’ among
his peers, given his predominantly European lineage, but subalternised and feminised as ‘a per-
son of color’ by the larger, colonial society due to a fraction of his parentage from indigenous or
African ancestry. For a literary depiction of this colonial complex, see W. Somerset Maugham’s
short story, ‘The Yellow Streak’, in his Collected Short Stories, Volume I (New York: Penguin
Books, 1977 [1929]). For a contemporary telling of how society categorises individuals accord-
ing to the shading of their skin – how some can pass as ‘white’ while others cannot even when
they look ‘white’ – see, for example, Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the Color Line: The
True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black (New York: Plume, 1996).
7. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide
(London: Routledge, 2016).
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