Racial others are recruited into whiteness while denied its inner rewards

Evidence

Those registered as racially different, as bruised, are lured into Euro-likeness while warned that its inner treasures are almost always beyond their reach. White-likeness is a liking of what’s white, socially induced, a drive to be white-like, but also a grasping in the dark about its idealized experience, for its treasury. That “playing in the dark,” to twist Toni Morrison’s title, and the more or less extreme ambivalence both about what one thus is missing and what it is about one that inevitably makes one miss, if only one could put one’s finger on it, is the sinking sand, the depressing frustrations, of fixating on the unreachable. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1136

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks on the colonial subject’s doomed aspiration to whiteness, and Homi Bhabha’s mimicry. — connects to: Pressure to pass into whiteness acted on all racialized groups; Whiteness means partaking in skin privileges above any excluded person — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 29
• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s term ‘Euro-mimesis’ as a socially induced drive to be white-like that structurally cannot fully succeed.