Colorblind Anti-Corporatism: Globalization Politics and the Consolidation of Colorblind Racial Regimes

• In Event: 2176 - Beyond the Civil Rights Paradigm: Inter-sectional Dynamics in Movements for Racial Justice (Cosponsored with Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities)

Abstract

The rise of Trumpism has visibilized the way the terms of national and global belonging are racially and ethnically coded, and “globalization” is once again a major topic in world politics. This paper utilizes a cross-national, intersectional, and historical method to examine the relationship between discourses of globalization, colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2003), and state-endorsed multicultural policy. To do so, it examines the last time globalization was a major world debate – during the 1990s and early 2000s, when national governments created an array of multi-national trade and investment agreements. The era featured explicitly racist, xenophobic anti-globalization views driven by white populism, but it also featured the presence of global justice social movements that promoted a subaltern “globalization from below” (Brecher, et al 2002) in the face of neoliberal structural reforms like the North American Free Trade Agreement. While the discourses and collective identity frames of cosmopolitan, transnational global justice movements challenged anti-globalization xenophobia, this paper suggests that they simultaneously fortified components of colorblind racism and U.S. empire. The paper takes from Third World feminist theory (Mohanty, 2003) to consider how counter-hegemonic global movements invisibilize non-white and Global South populations, and especially women, through political visions derived from Global North experiences. Using interview and documentary data, it focuses on two major international protests – the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” at the World Trade Organization meetings and the 2003 protests outside the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancún, Mexico. Despite the vast differences between the organizations who organized the U.S. and Mexico protests, the anti-corporate discourses of both movements minimized racism, obscured colonial and imperial relations between states, and promoted “abstract liberalism” (Bonilla-Silva, 2003) in ways that reflected state-endorsed forms of what I call “colorblind multiculturalism.”

Author

• Eric Larson