We Were Placed Next to Each Other
- Jonah Batambuze
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
On proximity, race, caste, and the conditions that shape how we meet
Before Conflict, There Were Categories
What would it mean to meet without race or caste already deciding the terms?
We don’t.
Before we even get to conflict, we inherit categories—systems that sort us into fixed groups, as if they are natural and separate. They aren’t. They’re made and enforced, built to rank human life, justify enslavement, and sustain systems like apartheid.
And in doing that, they don’t just separate us—they assign value. Ideas like purity and impurity, good and bad, aren’t neutral. They’re constructed, moralized, enforced—used to decide who can be exploited, who can belong, who gets pushed out, and whose lives are treated as expendable.
These aren’t abstract ideas. They shape how we’re seen, how we move, how we meet each other every day.
If you spend enough time trying to build solidarity between our communities, you start to notice how conflict is usually framed—as failure, misunderstanding, something inevitable. But that framing misses the structure underneath it.
Proximity Without Relationship
Because on the surface, it can look like connection. In places like Kampala, Durban, Port of Spain, Handsworth, and beyond, we live side by side. Run businesses next to each other. Share music, language, references.
A Black kid grows up buying patties from the same South Asian shop after school. Years later, he brings home a South Asian partner and suddenly the warmth changes shape.
There are real moments where it feels like overlap—even intimacy, even relationships that seem to cross boundaries.
But even at its closest, proximity isn’t the same as relationship.
What we’re actually moving through are conditions. Colonial economies didn’t just extract resources—they organized people. Decided who owns, who works, who profits. And in many of those systems, Black labor and South Asian labor were placed near each other, but never on equal footing.
Then those positions start carrying meaning. Racial hierarchies. Caste logics. Ideas about purity, status, proximity to power. Anti-Blackness within South Asian communities didn’t just appear—it was structured, reinforced, and often rewarded.
We Were Placed Next to Each Other
Then comes proximity.
Forced movement. Indenture routes. Migration shaped by empire. People brought into the same spaces not by choice, but by design—close enough to interact, not close enough to build anything stable.
We were placed next to each other, not built with each other.
What you get from that is fragile: proximity without relationship.
You see it in everyday moments. A Black hair shop in Peckham. Afrobeats playing through blown-out speakers, the owner is South Asian, people moving between both. There’s familiarity, heads nodding to the same rhythm—until something shifts. A comment lands wrong. The air tightens. A boundary shows up that no one quite knows how to cross.
And in that moment, it’s not just disagreement you’re seeing—it’s absence. No shared language for repair. No real acknowledgment of what’s shaping the interaction. Nothing holding it in place. Just contact.
Proximity creates contact. But without relationship, contact doesn’t hold when there’s pressure.
And when it breaks, we call it conflict.
But conflict isn’t where this starts. It’s where it shows up.
You can see that across places—Suriname and its diaspora in the Netherlands, Trinidad & Tobago—different histories, but the same kinds of tensions appearing in familiar ways. After a while, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore.
The conditions travel. The relationships don’t always follow.
So the question isn’t why this keeps happening.
It’s what we’ve actually built between us beyond proximity.
And maybe more importantly:
what kind of relationship can survive conditions designed to prevent one?
Author Bio
Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and cultural architect working at the intersection of Black and South Asian diasporas. Through film, installation, writing, and public humanities work, his practice explores how race, caste, memory, and colonialism shape the conditions of everyday life. He is the founder of the BlindianProject, a cultural and educational initiative examining how Black and South Asian communities inherit, negotiate, and reimagine proximity across diaspora.
Organizational Note
The BlindianProject is fiscally sponsored by the Dream Big Youth Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions in support of the project are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. EIN: 39-4945347.