Colonial race practices migrated from Africa to Asia where no excuse existed

Evidence

There were, however, real and immediate boomerang effects of South Africa’s race society on the behavior of European peoples: since cheap Indian and Chinese labor had been madly imported to South Africa whenever her interior supply was temporarily halted, a change of attitude toward colored people was felt immediately in Asia where, for the first time, people were treated in almost the same way as those African savages who had frightened Europeans literally out of their wits. The difference was only that there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensible reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a certain sense, it is only here that the real crime began, because here everyone ought to have known what he was doing. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 531

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s ‘boomerang effects’ prefigure the analysis of colonial techniques returning to the metropole and spreading to other colonies — central to the genealogy of racial exclusion.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that crime ‘begins’ only where perpetrators know what they are doing — knowledge and excuse as the moral hinge of racial atrocity — is a dense, paradigm-level thought about the epistemology of evil.