Proximity to Whiteness and distance from Blackness determine immigrant privilege

Evidence

Coloreds or “mulattos” serve as an intermediary racial and cultural bridge between the European and African poles in Caribbean Creole social construction. They are historical products of an imposed rationality of difference in colonial racial representation and practice. White males institutionalized this rationality through the exercise of gender and racial privilege over black female slaves. In turn, the offspring of these miscegenous unions were assigned positions of privilege over the black Creoles in the color/class hierarchy of colonial society. The allocation of Creole privilege was directly related to racial and cultural manifestations of the degree of separation from an African past. It was related, also, to the extent of demonstrated cultural and phenotypical similarity with the European. Creole privilege came with considerable access to cultural and economic capital. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3223 (#expands, via linked claim)

However, in developing this broadly critical response, multiculturalists have also more recently come to face another, perhaps more intractable problem - a problem brought on to some extent by this very process of accommodation with antiracist theory. For example, the privileging of racism over other forms of discrimination in early conceptions of antiracism resulted in an increasing preoccupation with “color racism” and the black-white dichotomy. This, in turn, led to a “grand theory” approach which, in attributing racism as the primary modality in intercultural relations, came to be seen as both reductive and essentialist (see Donald and Rattansi 1992; MacDonald et al., 1989; Modood, 1992, 1998a, 1998b). Such an approach subsumes other factors such as class, religion, and gender, and fails to address adequately postmodernist accounts of identity as multiple, contingent, and subject to rapid change. These emphases in antiracist theory also considerably understate both the multiplicity of racisms and their complex interconnections with other forms of inequality (Gilroy, 1992; Modood, 1998a, 1998b; Rattansi, 1992, 1999). As McLaren and Torres observe of this: “[the] conflation of racialized relations into solely a black-white paradigm has prevented scholars from engaging more fully the specificities of particular groups and from exploring more deeply comparative ethnic histories of racism and how these are linked to changing class relations in late capitalism” (1999:45-6). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 900 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Whiteness is a privilege gained by excluding blacks from one’s occupations — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1221; Nationality can offset racial disadvantage when abroad — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1168; White privilege manifests as invisible everyday advantages that sustain racial disparity — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 425 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial color hierarchies assigned privilege by proximity to European whiteness #expands (0.93) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3223
• A black-white paradigm in antiracism theory obscures other racisms and inequality forms #complicates (0.79) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 900