When solidarity stops at the border: Lessons from ‘political blackness’

What Southasian spaces lose when anti-Blackness goes unspoken and what past movements can teach us about widening the circle again

The Zoom room filled slowly, a grid of Southasian faces popping into view as people adjusted headsets and settled into their squares. The event — a virtual Southasian political organizing meeting — was framed as a space for “learning, community, and action.” 

Sessions at the event, held in August 2024 ahead of the U.S. elections, addressed gender justice, Islamophobia, Hindu supremacy, economic inequality, and Gaza. 

I’d been invited because of my work as the founder of the BlindianProject, a community rooted in Black and Southasian cultural exchange. The event’s digital flyer piqued my interest. Curious to see what conversations were unfolding, I joined the gathering as the only Black person there. When the breakout-room topics appeared on screen, anti-Blackness was nowhere to be found.

A central question posed in the flyer had been: “What are the key issues for Southasians and our allies?” 

In practice, the issues that surfaced centred on gender justice, Islamophobia, Hindu supremacy, and racial and economic justice, among others — all discussed primarily through a Southasian lens.

But when anti-Blackness is absent from the agenda, it’s unclear whether Black communities are actually being imagined as part of that alliance at all.

In the breakout room I participated in — one of three, with roughly 30 people spanning multiple generations —  a few participants mentioned the importance of working with communities beyond Southasians. It wasn’t a dominant theme, but the fact that it surfaced at all mattered. Still, when we turned back to the Miro board, the priorities were framed almost entirely as Southasian concerns, echoing how the flyer itself had set the terms of the meeting.

Even issues with clear cross-racial implications — such as Islamophobia or economic justice — were discussed as if separate from the wider systems shaping all our communities. Anti-Blackness was nowhere on the Miro board. The intention to look outward existed, but the structure of the meeting narrowed the frame.

Political Blackness was never a loose identity or symbolic alliance; it was a historical strategy, articulated differently across contexts, forged under specific conditions in places like the U.K. and South Africa, where non-white communities were positioned together by the state and compelled to confront shared systems of violence, hierarchy, and exclusion.

Southasian political life in the U.S. still sits inside a racial architecture shaped by anti-Blackness, even when the harm appears to fall elsewhere. During election years especially, this structure becomes visible: Campaigns mobilize voters by stoking fears about immigration, crime and borders, all drawn from a well-worn anti-Black script.

Anti-Blackness isn’t a side issue in election-year organizing – it’s the structure that determines which coalitions form, whose voices matter and what justice is allowed to look like.

When solidarity stops at the border, power doesn’t retreat — it reorganizes.

As the Black American feminist writer and activist bell hooks reminds us, “Solidarity is not the same as support. Solidarity requires sustained, accountable engagement.”

“Solidarity is not the same as support. Solidarity requires sustained, accountable engagement” – bell hooks

What’s missing in discussions like the one I attended isn’t good intention — it’s structure.

The deeper issue isn’t just what gets said, but what remains unspoken. In my work, I map how caste prejudice and anti-Blackness operate as parallel systems: Different in form, but rooted in the same logics of purity, hierarchy, and exclusion.

This is the terrain BlindianProject works in, not as an abstract idea of solidarity, but as a lived, contested practice, bringing Black and Southasian communities into conversation around unresolved faultlines. Many earlier movements did not fully work through these issues, such as resentments around proximity to capital and forms of “middleman” positioning rooted in colonial history. In these arrangements, certain Southasian communities were historically positioned as intermediaries between colonial power and Black or Indigenous populations. 

The BlindianProject also confronts a second set of fractures within Southasian political spaces: The refusal to acknowledge or sustain reckoning with anti-Blackness, caste hierarchy, and proximity to power. The challenge now isn’t only how we confront white supremacy; it’s how we live together afterwards, without reproducing the same hierarchies in new forms.

The challenge now isn’t only how we confront white supremacy; it’s how we live together afterwards, without reproducing the same hierarchies in new forms.

At their strongest, these conversations also reveal points of convergence: Shared experiences of state surveillance, labor exploitation, racialized suspicion, and traditions of cross-racial solidarity, that make coalition not just possible, but necessary.

“The call is coming from inside the house,” commented Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an editorial manager and analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, commenting in a CNN report examining anti-Indian hate speech and the far right. 

While the CNN report focuses on Indian Americans, the racialization is far broader: In practice, those targeted are read simply as Southasian — regardless of whether they are Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepali, or Pakistani. 

Southasian Americans are now being targeted by the very political spaces many imagined themselves aligned with.

And while Southasians online have been naming this for years, even mainstream coverage now acknowledges that Southasian Americans are being openly targeted. I’ve seen this for a long time, but hearing it said out loud in national media tells you something has shifted.

This isn’t the whole story. History offers a counterpoint, moments when Southasians didn’t turn inward, but aligned their struggles with others facing state violence. In South Africa, this logic took shape through Black Consciousness, which understood Blackness as a shared condition of oppression rather than a fixed identity.

That widening of the circle wasn’t an anomaly; it was ordinary. Across South Africa, Southasian and Black activists stood together in the anti-apartheid struggle, recognizing that liberation required crossing the lines the state tried to enforce. These histories show what becomes possible when communities refuse to organize in isolation. But they also highlight how far today’s conversations often sit from that wider vision.

When Southasian organizing focuses only inward, the fight narrows to one axis of oppression and misses the wider structure shaping all our lives. My diagram is a reminder of this: you can dismantle one system and still leave the other fully intact.

The effects aren’t limited to organizing spaces. They spill out into the public conversation too. Return to today’s comment sections, on immigration, racism, or solidarity, and you see the consequences of this narrowing. Fear and frustration are real. 

Southasians in the diaspora are facing heightened racism, from online hate to detentions and deportations. But too often, the instinct is to treat these crises as uniquely Southasian, disconnected from the very systems that have long harmed Black communities. A few people will gesture toward broader solidarity, but the structural analysis stops at the border of identity.

Not to romanticize the past, but to remember its lessons: Inward-facing solidarity has limits; anti-Blackness must be named directly; and coalitions are strongest when they refuse to stop at the edges of community.

The original U.S.-based Rainbow Coalition made this plain. In 1969, Fred Hampton, a Chicago-based Black Panther leader, built an alliance that brought together Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Indigenous, and white working-class organizers. They understood that liberation required confronting the system together. It’s no accident the state saw that coalition as a threat.

The work ahead isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about recovering the clarity these movements held. Imagine a future shaped by the joy we claim, not only the pain we carry. Coalition has never been a given; it’s always been a choice.

And in moments like this, the choice to widen the circle matters more than ever.

Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist and the founder of the BlindianProject. His work spans film, installation, and cultural analysis tracing historical moments of Black–Southasian solidarity and examining how race, caste, and anti-Blackness shape political life across diasporas. His recent short film ‘Not a Rumor’ examines Afro–Asian encounters and the politics of rumor across diasporas.

Lead Image: Black and Southasian organizers marched together in East London in the late 1970s, during the anti-fascist mobilizations that united communities against the National Front. Photo: Bengali Photo Archive, London.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit http://www.sapannews.com.

Note on Southasia as one word: We use ‘Southasia’ as one word, “seeking to restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing any violence on the existing nation states” – Himal Southasian

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