White masculinity is constituted against and through desire for the racial other

Evidence

It is in the interest of confronting a ‘fascist poetics,’ and out of the need to move beyond the mythologies (of cultural difference) that so easily reconciles the West to the sexualized torture of Arabs and Muslims, that I have pursued an interlocking analysis of prisoner abuse. Drawing on scholarship on lynching, I have been advancing a theoretical framework that suggests how white masculinity is constituted simultaneously against warmth and sensuality as well as against desire for (oneness with) the racial other. … Culture has been the language of contemporary narratives of terror. Cultural difference, understood as their cannibalism, their treatment of women, and their homophobia, justifies the savagery that the West metes out. ‘The Christian in me says this is wrong,’ Charles Graner, one of the soldiers charged with abuse and the alleged ringleader, is reputed to have said, ‘but the corrections officer in me can’t help making a grown man piss himself.’ The West has appointed itself as the corrections officer to the non-West, and Charles Graner should not be understood as a man who has simply taken his duties too far. For what else is a civilized man to do in his encounter with savages but civilize them? — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 190

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fanon’s Manichean categories and Baldwin’s fiction, both cited in the passage — also resonates with the reader’s interest in how colonial self-justification operates. — connects to: Parochial racism can internationalize itself into a profitable transatlantic white-masculinity market — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 505
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘interlocking analysis’ framework where white masculinity is built simultaneously against and toward the racial other, tied to lynching scholarship.
• DEEPTHINKING: The Graner quote and ‘civilized man civilizing savages’ formulation condense an entire colonial epistemology into a single punitive stance — the boundary-marking-and-desire paradox is dense enough to sit with.