Doggone it, Cosmo, you and I are going around in circles.
Just whom do you mean by "we"? Americans? If so, then I would dispute your thesis that their notions of race are based on "historical, 19th-century imperialism." I would say, rather, that they are based on -- or better, still colored by -- the American slave-holding experience. (Slave-holding antedates imperialism by millenia.) My own impression is that the primary tensions in this country remain the black-white ones, fueled by overt or latent resentment on the one side, and by conscious or unconscious fear and/or guilt on the other.
These days, whites seem to me to be infinitely more relaxed about Asians than they were a century ago -- perhaps because they feel they bear no historical guilt towards them (aside from making it hard for them to immigrate). And frictions between other "races" (blacks and Korean Asians, say) have absolutely nothing to do with 19th century imperialism.
I find it interesting that the French and the Portuguese, who were no slouches as imperialists in Africa, are virtually color-blind at home. Yet Russians, who never held a single piece of territory inhabited by black-skinned people, seem to have a horror of Africans, or of anyone with a dark complexion, for that matter. |
