Still, the British far right will no doubt exploit his African heritage to give validation to the repulsive racism and xenophobia among its members.
The “us versus them” impulse is hard-wired into humanity. Violence against “them” is often fuelled by mistrust and rumours, which some political leaders use to tap into the baser human instincts of wanting to banish, maim or even kill those who are different from “us”.
In Asia, there have been multiple examples in the past.
An estimated 6,000 people, mostly ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and Japanese people mistaken for Koreans, were massacred in the immediate aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Japan. This was because of rumours that Korean malcontents were taking advantage of the chaos caused by the massive earthquake to murder and rape Japanese people in and around Tokyo, and poison the water supply.
Many Japanese today continue to deny that the massacre took place.
Violence against the ethnic Chinese community in Indonesia dates back to the Dutch colonial period, and continued with devastating consequences to as recent as the late 1990s.
The scapegoating of Indonesia’s Chinese community had a host of reasons, too many to articulate here. Despite attempts at reconciliation initiated by successive Indonesian governments in recent decades, the fear and siege mentality of many Chinese-Indonesians has never truly gone away.
The Mongol rulers of China during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) encouraged the immigration of Central Asians, Turks, Arabs and Persians into China, where they were referred to by the umbrella term “Semu”. The literal reading of the word semu is “coloured eyes”, but it could also mean “various categories”.
Many Semu became high-ranking civil and military officials, but most were engaged in trade. In some cities such as Guangzhou and Quanzhou, non-Han Chinese communities had existed long before the Yuan dynasty.
The Ispah rebellion (1357-1366) began as a conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims over their respective commercial interests in Quanzhou, but became a full-blown rebellion against the Yuan dynasty.
The decade-long rebellion, led by two Persian military commanders, Amir ad-Din and Sayf ad-Din, resulted in devastating losses of civilian lives and property.
It also triggered Han Chinese hatred against the Semu in their midst, many of whom had lived in China for generations. After government troops defeated the rebels and recaptured Quanzhou, they led a blood-soaked retaliation against the non-Han Chinese population.
In three terrifying days, all the Semu in Quanzhou – Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Zoroastrians – were systematically murdered. Even individuals who might not be Semu, but who had high-bridged noses, deep-set eyes or curly hair, were summarily executed.
Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Semu people were slaughtered.
The Ispah rebellion, and the indiscriminate and horrific violence that followed, stopped foreign merchants going to Quanzhou. The city’s non-Han Chinese communities, for generations a shining beacon of, and a major contributor to, Quanzhou’s wealth and cosmopolitan outlook, all but disappeared.
When disaster strikes – whether it is children murdered, or the destruction of lives and property by calamities both natural and man-made – the afflicted look desperately for answers.
It is both sad and frightening that many still find it in tribalism – that most natural, and yet most reprehensible and destructive, of human traits.