"'The police? I hate that race': Cross-Cultural Variation in the Construction of Race"
Abstract:
The US, the UK, Latin America, West Africa, the Arab world, and China host divergent classifications of human phenotypical variation and attach to them different moral characteristics and social rankings. Yet all have been influenced by the light-dark hierarchy of human worth that Europe spread across the planet as it sought to reconcile the Enlightenment notions of freedom and equality before the law with colonialism and racialized slavery. A common response among the middle ranks in this global hierarchy is what Matory calls “ethnological Schadenfreude.” One of the responses at the top of the racial hierarchy has been BDSM—the ecstatic mimesis of the Black slave in pursuit of relief from the irresolvable demands of constant competition for equality with other white people.