The decision of US President Biden to announce that he would replace the outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer by a black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson may seem like a positive step in a country wracked by explicit and systemic racism.
However, it is actually indicative of how the root causes of American racism, and its global manifestations, are obscured by tokenism and cosmetic efforts that appeal to liberal sentiments. This has become a political tool that can be best described as appealing to populism without affecting real change.
The decision of the US President highlights two issues in this regard.
First, it reveals how white liberals in the US use race to whitewash a political and economic system that is stubbornly self-serving – both within its borders and globally – to maintain its economic hegemony, without ever needing to address its inherent injustice to other nations and people.
By not questioning the hegemonic nature of America, liberal African Americans in the seats of power and elsewhere have embraced it and thus are even complicit in serving the needs of white America’s global agenda – to be number one and not ever consider the possibility of sharing power with other nations. White America has covertly blinded people who are subject to harsh racism at home to the racial injustice of their nation’s global agenda of dominance.
Second, the world at large should not be seduced by similar superficial positions and actions taking place in the US and the West, despite the fact they are bestowed with such global prominence. Apart from this latest act of political gymnastics in the US, there are many other areas where tokenism is prevalent, as a means to deliberately avoid confronting the true nature of a system of white privilege that has now been globalised. These areas include sports, entertainment and in the telling of history.
Discussion about race in sports etc is important, but they are an easy “go-to” given they do not confront the drivers of white power and privilege: global systems of economic and cultural dominance. These must be tackled to expose the entrenched global power of white privilege, which needs dismantling to create equity for a post-Western world. In fact, white privilege is the best way to understand how oppression and dominance by Western cultures operate and are perpetuated globally, within countries and between them, with the key objective of sustaining economic superiority.son with a desire to become an ambassador will be deprived of the opportunity to study liberal arts and win a government scholarship.
Three areas that exemplify this are geopolitics, international business, and the export of Western cultural norms.
In geopolitics, one need look no further than the multilateral institutions that shape global affairs. The most important of these have been set up by Western nations, see the world through the Western lens, and are led by Westerners – so one should not be surprised if their actions, advice, and prescriptions follow Western framings as well. One should also not be surprised that those who then appear to be the “most qualified” are white Westerners, establishing a permanent “ruling class” when it comes to global and elite institutions.
Examples of this institutional form of discrimination are the World Bank and the IMF. These institutions were set up to manage the global economy, especially in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, yet have respectively been led by an American and European since their inception.
Controlling multilaterals has serious implications, the dirtiest of which is being able to direct how sanctions – or worse, military intervention – are deployed. For example, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, Western governments went ahead to oust regimes they felt were threatening to the international order. In all these cases, interventions served to make matters worse, causing instability, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and violence that persists today.
The latest example of this is the decision by the US president on February 11th to split Afghanistan’s US$7 billion of frozen assets between selective aid efforts and the victims associated with 9/11. It did not grab international headlines but has outraged many globally. That outrage is growing internationally as the news spread, especially in the Muslim world. Yet US Western allies have not registered any protest. The global western media has also been largely silent on it illegality and immorality.
