The Process of Whitening

When I went for a seminar on multiculturalism and met a well-known (but alas name slips me now) professor in UCB she said that middle class minority or colonised cultures tend toward a process of "whitening" in which they, like Fanon says need to get kid of the "soul [in which] an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality" (Fanon, 18). While I found it intriging, taking on the behavior, attitudes and language of the coloniser to assimiliate the ranks of the colonised, my critical instinct was that this is similar to other systems of power/social relations.

Think of, for example, feminism and Marxism, in which being female and being poor (non-capitalist) puts one in the surbodinate position in relation to those in power. To be respected, the female must prove their capability to be equal that of the man while the proletariat must gather their forces to usurp the capitalists. Almost inevitably, they end up taking on elements of the "enemy" forces in a parodic way - the female becomes hyper-masculine while the proletariat end up perpetuating capitalist notions (Orwell's "Animal Farm", current Chinese Communist Party in China). What Fanon does is to give a postcolonial/racial slant to the notions of power and the disenfranchised, but it is something I think, which is more universal than simply want it means to be colonised; it extends into questions of what it means to be in a position of powerlessness.

p.s. sorry my hall internet was spoilt yesterday. urgh.