Welfare colonialism and anti-racist fear are blamed for harming immigrant women

Evidence

Women have paid the price for what Wikan terms the government’s ‘generous betrayal,’ a price that has often included violence against their persons. An anthropologist of Muslim societies, Wikan gained both fame and notoriety for her provocative contentions that culture has been misused in the service of men’s domination over women and that ‘the government was compromising the welfare of immigrants by practicing a policy of welfare colonialism that undermined people’s capacity for self-help.’ The Norway that so generously betrayed its immigrants, Wikan suggests, did so because it was ‘terrified of doing anything that might elicit accusations of racism.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes her own thesis in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ that morality discourse masks political projects — here the ‘saving brown women’ anxiety inverts into blaming state tolerance.