White Identity at Peril

A classic illustration of white supremacy in Burmese Days found me rather vexed when I got to the part where Maxwell had just been murdered. As the Club men began plotting their revenge, the native’s life is portrayed as cheaper than a white man’s, like in exchange rates: “two corpses against their one – best we can do” (219), as if life can be valued in the first place. The natives understand the double-standards of the colonial rule they are under: aware that the four boys, wrongly accused for attacking Ellis, were not likely to be given fair trial, they decide to take things into their own hands and stage a revolt at the Club. Stoler highlights a similar double-standard regarding inter-marriages, showing how European men who marry native women are merely seen as indulging in sexual excess, while the native women are always assumed to be either prostitutes or concubines.

These double-standards, instead of solidifying white supremacy, actually cast light on the frail justifications for white supremacy and the fragility of the “essence” (Stoler 516) of European-ness. For example, such métis’ (persons of mixed parentage) “ambiguous positioning and identifications” (516) were regarded as potentially disloyal threats to the colonial state. Further, that they can be classified as Europeans by association with their fathers does well to upset the “purity of the [colonial] community” (516), and race is no longer the stable or adequate marker of colonial difference. Fears then emerged that a European man might lose his “identity and would become degenerate and décivilisé” (534), and this leads me to conclude that the imposition of white supremacy by colonial rulers on colonised subjects was symptomatic of white identity at peril: colonisers were beginning to realise the fluidity of their white “essence”, which undermined the justification for colonialism – race as colonial difference.

(300 words)