Beyond the Nation

When George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in May 2020, it tore open the racial fault lines that have run through the United States for centuries. The impact was felt elsewhere in the Anglosphere, particularly in Britain, stirring renewed debate about the nature and scale of white privilege. But to have honest and respectful conversations about white privilege, there is a need for everyone (white or otherwise) to recognize what it is, acknowledge how widespread it is, and reflect on the impacts it has had and continues to have across the world.

In particular, the discussion must be elevated from within national confines—white privilege in the US or UK, for example—to consider white privilege on a global scale, and just as importantly, from a non-Western perspective. This is what Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World aims to do.

White privilege is one of the best lenses to understand the power gradient that exists between the West and the Rest, and how this power differential has been perpetuated across the colonial and modern periods. The examination of global white privilege also reveals that due to centuries of subservience, non-white populations around the world pursue “whiteness” for social and economic betterment, discarding their local values and culture in favor of Western equivalents that are seen as somehow superior and holding more power. Thus, even though we are supposedly living in a post-colonial world, white privilege is fuelled by colonization of the mind.

Across nine spheres—geopolitics, business, the telling of history, media, entertainment, education, fashion, sport, and environment—one can identify how white privilege is woven into the very fabric of global structures and societies. Its objective remains the same in each: to maintain white Western economic superiority. In the following excerpt, I outline the central theory for change in the book and argue why the discussion on white privilege should be viewed from a global perspective.—Chandran Nair

* * *

Discussions of racism have shifted from treating it as a psychological problem regarding individual mindsets toward understanding it as a structural issue, where discrimination is born from social and legal structures. As early as the 1960s, the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) observed:

When a Black family moves into a home in a White neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which most people will condemn. But it is institutional racism that keeps Black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.

Frantz Fanon is one of the key non-American thinkers on this subject, whose works sparked much of postcolonial studies and critical theory. As early as 1952, Fanon argued that the colonial project left no part of the human person and the human experience untouched. His 1961 magnum opus, The Wretched of the Earth, is a full examination of how colonialism affected societies; he describes his taxonomy of the colonized, which includes the “worker,” the “colonized intellectual,” and the “lumpen proletariat.” The colonized intellectual is the middleman between the colonizer and the colonized, trading in the cultural capital of the colonial power without ever getting to be a part of it. An example is that of elites from Asia studying in Ivy League schools and then seeking jobs in the leading Western corporations, especially in investment banking or finance, which are made out to be the most sought-after careers.

Fanon’s work sparked further extensions of critical theory throughout the world, with one particular development being the creation of “critical race theory,” which applies critical theory to racial issues in the United States. First developed in the mid-1980s, the theory has two particular tenets:

1. Legal systems play a role in preserving and maintaining systems of racial supremacy.
2. The relationship between law and racial power needs to be transformed in order to achieve an antiracist agenda.

However, this is an understanding of race, racism, and structural discrimination that is born out of an American context and its particular history with race and race relations. It does not examine the use of White power on a global scale and over centuries to dehumanize and oppress other nations for economic gain.

Race as a concept generally does not feature in mainstream discussions of global governance and international relations. Some theorists try to apply racial dynamics seen on the domestic level to the international sphere—for example, how racial inequality and social unrest affect perceptions of countries overseas and thus impact a country’s “soft power.” Race is conveniently ignored in providing explanations as to why only an American or European can head up the World Bank or the IMF. That racism defines the way two of the world’s most important multilateral agencies are governed is rarely if ever discussed in the open.

Although few theorists use the explicit framing of race to understand how countries and societies interact with each other and how power is exercised, there is far more discussion of how we talk about and understand the way the world reinforces Western privilege. Within the realm of academia, there is some criticism that Western Europe and North America are portrayed as the places “where things happened,” whereas the rest of the world merely adopts Western innovations and reacts to developments happening elsewhere.

More broadly, much of postcolonial thought analyzes how colonial domination persists through current global institutions and the global security framework. Such aspects as the global network of American military bases and the global debt structures for developing countries are seen as continuations of colonial and imperial dominance rather than active preservation of Western dominance.

But why has the insight of critical race theory—that laws, social structures, and cultural norms perpetuate White privilege—not been applied on the global level?

One possibility is that global governance and social structures are evolving in the post-colonial era as differences between countries become more obvious and there is no clear consensus yet for a post-Western world. As I noted in my book The Sustainable State, global governance and international law often rely on states to do the work for them, meaning that when global and national interests collide, national interests usually win out. This means that the usual analytical focuses used to address structural racism—laws, regulations, and institutions—are less strong on the global level.

In addition, the traits and behaviors of different ethnic groups are often conflated with national governments, which can complicate the search for causal factors. For example: Are assumptions about ethnic Koreans based on assumptions about Koreans as an ethnic group, or motivated by actions of the South Korean national government? This brings in discussions of international relations and national security, which complicate (but do not preclude) any discussion of structural racism.

Finally, another potential reason why critical race theory has not been applied as much outside the West, at least in domestic contexts, is that non-Western countries have often dealt with race and ethnicity more explicitly in legislation, in both positive and negative ways. For example, Malaysia practices affirmative action for the Malay majority, providing privileged access to positions in all areas of the economy as well as in both the civil service and state-run enterprises. There is much analysis about racial politics and racial discrimination in Malaysia, but the explicit use of racial and ethnic categories in legislation means that there is little “need” to uncover more structural and implicit discrimination.

Yet the application of contemporary critical race theory and other insights from the academic discussion of structural discrimination would help to reveal much about how privilege operates on the global level. Why do Western governments and institutions who represent a small minority of the global population have so much say in what happens around the world? Why do those who lead them assume automatically that they have a right to get involved, have a role to play in solutions, and have all the answers? And why are their solutions automatically assumed to be the best?

This book’s analysis of global White privilege helps close the gap between critical race theory and postcolonial discussions in a manner suitable to the average reader.

My theory of race starts from economic dominance: whether due to environmental factors or access to resources or technological change, some communities seek to have military and economic power over others. While some, including academics, have argued that this is simply the nature of how human societies have interacted throughout history, European expansion across the world beginning in the sixteenth century was unparalleled in terms of its scale, its plunder and dominance, and its persistence over five centuries. This economic dominance and resulting sense of superiority is now hardwired into the structures and institutions of globalization and thus even part of the ideological basis of the Western alliance. This ideology has to be exposed and dismantled by raising awareness through new narratives. This book is a first step in this direction.

Ideas are created to justify these patterns of domination. These ideas help normalize and institutionalize these power differences, among both the dominators and the dominated. These norms and values are then turned into institutions, regulations, and laws, which reinforce this inequality. One example from international history: the nineteenth-century idea of “civilization,” which Western states used to determine the rules of international relations. Civilized states—almost entirely Western—would deal with each other on an equal basis. The more a society diverged from the Western norm, the less “civilized” it was, and thus the more unequal relations would be allowed to be. The common reference to the US as the only country with a continuous democracy more than two hundred years old is normalizing a lie: the whole country is built on land expropriated from indigenous populations, and Black people were denied their human and civil rights, including the right to vote, until at least 1963, which is still under threat today.

This ideology and the institutions which back them up allows these structures of privilege and an aura of superiority to persist even as the economic foundations they are built upon change. Even as obvious power differentials disappear, the structure preserves the privileges afforded to those in a superior situation. In addition, the structures can even close off potential avenues through which less privileged communities can escape from these structures and become upwardly mobile.

Figure I.2 shows how to think about the pursuit of economic power and its reliance on the creation of structural discrimination, which in turn is key to maintaining global White privilege. White privilege is primarily sustained by subverting minds even via liberal narratives and the so-called soft power of the West.

Figure I.2 demonstrates that the starting point is in creating a dominant belief across the world—installed by historical and contemporary White Western economic power—reinforcing the view that people, knowledge, products, and services associated with Whiteness are superior in all aspects of human existence. This results in the widespread desire to ape Western culture, which in turn ensures economic and cultural domination by White people.

Therefore, Western White leaders, organizations, and ideas have the legitimacy and moral authority to set and enforce rules and standards, which are also set up in ways to benefit White Western economic dominance and culture. From rules on international finance to the governance of the internet and which vaccine can be trusted, the West seeks to have control.

The inherently rigged outcomes of this setting and the active enforcing of the rules and standards works to reinforce the dominant belief that Whiteness is superior. It also colonizes the minds of non-Whites, who now seek to emulate Whiteness for its economic and cultural benefits. Ultimately, this creates global White privilege and cultural imperialism, which aid Western economic power. Thus begins another iteration of this White privilege cycle, further entrenching its dominance.

For example, a Western country that has established economic dominance and has the intention to pursue and preserve that dominance starts to subvert local culture and traditions, trying to replace them with Western-based and Western-derived institutions. The initial push may be to build a local society more suitable to Western economic, political, and military interests, such as revamping the local economy to make it more suitable for an imperialist economic model.

In building these institutions, White societies capture both moral authority through the imposition of a new value system and epistemological authority by promoting Western narratives and controlling the space for education and discourse.

Over time, this capture of authority builds up the perception that Western and Western-derived ways of managing society are superior. Those in non-Western countries try to emulate what they believe is the right and successful way of doing things, resulting in the maintenance of global White privilege.

Finally, global White privilege creates an international structure of institutions, rules, and norms that institutionalize these ideas of global White privilege across the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these rules tend to benefit those at the top of the global pecking order: White and Western countries, who see their economic power increase as a result.