Race’s weight is differentially distributed across socially layered strata

Evidence

These tensions between cutting and biting back, alterity and counter, distantiation and embrace – existential as much as analytic, perhaps analytic because existential – reveal what I want to characterize as the weight of race. Race is heavy. But the heaviness is layered, volume piled upon mass, the layers or strata composed of varying substances and differentially born. “White man’s burden” was the racially historicist rationalization common in the nineteenth century for both the effort and profit of colonial rule. European settlers and colonial rulers were exhorted to sacrifice in the name of empire, just as they were encouraged to educate the less civilized and immature with the view to eventual self-rule (once the cost-benefit calculus of colonial rule tipped precariously away from metropolitan advantage). The weight here was taken to be borne exclusively upon those sagging shoulders of Charles Atlas. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 77

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the chapter’s operative metaphor ‘the weight of race’ with its layered, differential-distribution meaning — context for the contact/institution gap readings.
• XREF: connects to: Race’s weight is layered and unequally borne across differently constituted strata

Broader Connections

• Race’s weight is layered and unequally borne across differently constituted strata #corroborates (0.95)