Opinion | Where multiracial migration has taken hold, people can’t be easily pigeonholed

Excuse my focusing partly on a personal topic today, but I just became a grandfather for the first time. At a time when sociologists and politicians love racial silos, I need space for this child of the Eurasian land mass. My grandson is one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter English and two-quarters Kazakh.

Kazakhstan lies at the very heart of Eurasia, the meeting place of Turkic, Mongol and Iranian peoples, long ruled by Russia and with ethnic German and Korean minorities deported by Stalin. The absurdity of trying to pigeonhole should be obvious.

In reality, Asia is a concept created by Europeans to describe the land mass to the east of the Urals and south of the Caucasus. There is nothing otherwise defining peoples of this part of the world, from the Koryaks of Kamchatka to the Yemenis, those of Tokyo to the people of Anatolia and Istanbul.

So one must always be on guard against efforts to use “Asian” in ways which suit the user. The reported “anti-Asian” violence reported almost daily is, in reality, an issue of isolated anti-Chinese antipathy in the West, as often as not by blacks and Hispanics as by whites.

In the UK, “Asian” almost invariably refers to South Asian, not Chinese or Japanese. As for Hong Kong, discrimination against brown “Asians” (let alone Africans) is built into the system, as is the case in Korea, Japan and Singapore.

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Hong Kong’s ethnic minority groups struggle as city battles Covid-19 and recession

Hong Kong’s ethnic minority groups struggle as city battles Covid-19 and recession

In many countries with multi-ethnic populations such as the US, Australia and Britain, language has not caught up with the reality of mixtures. Hence the racist pigeonholes determine that F1 racing driver Lewis Hamilton and former US president Barack Obama are “black”, ignoring the reality of their “white” mothers.