Racial world systems let tolerant nations displace blame onto extreme racists

Evidence

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the emergence of Afrikaner nationalism enabled the British to think themselves free of discriminatory spirit. We see here how the interconnectedness of what I have tentatively identified as a loosely ordered racial world systemic process has served not merely to mobilize racist structures, nor simply to sustain racial resistance movements. Relations between the Civil Rights Movement and the antiapartheid struggle, between Black Power and Black Consciousness, jump to mind. This racial world system equally shores up racially exclusionary conditions globally and locally. It has enabled denial of their own implication in racial state formation and conditions of those claiming greater racial tolerance, displacing their implication behind the veil of those more extreme expressions. The international antiapartheid campaign reproduced this logic: conservatives and liberals alike in Europe and the United States could declare themselves against apartheid and for color blindness, against racism and at least ambivalent about affirmative action, at once blind to the relation. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1748

Categorization

• XREF: Strong parallel to #builds-on patterns in this volume around how blaming extreme ‘others’ (like apartheid) lets Western states profess colorblind innocence while maintaining exclusionary domestic policies.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism described — a global racial system that lets the moderately racist disavow their implication by pointing at the extremely racist — is a structural insight with wide application.