“I Wanted to See Traffic Lights”: Civilizational Whiteness and Isan People’s Proximity to Bangkok

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 4) From Settler Colonialism to the White Right: Neighborhoods, Schools, and Whiteness

Abstract

U.S. colorism scholars have largely concluded that colorism is a discriminatory phenomenon which affects people within so-called “races” born out of the historical context of European colonialism, such as White, Black, Asian, and more, rather than between them. In turn, colorism scholars examining geographic contexts in the Global South have largely distanced their scholarship from that of U.S. colorism scholars’, as they contend that the definition of racism that requires the U.S. classification system of “race” does not apply to how colorism operates within their respective geographic contexts of study. This paper posits that colorism beyond the U.S. context is not separate from racializing logics and the process of race-making, but rather, racism and colorism are inextricably intertwined. This paper uses the case of Isan (or Lao) people in Thailand, for whom whiteness is more closely aligned with perceptions of civility as well as physical and cultural proximity to Thailand’s colonial core, Bangkok. In this paper, I trace how the race-making and nation-making mechanisms so critical to the formation of the Thai nation-state included the subjugation of people now typically referred to as Isan (alongside other racialized groups of people). Historical documents demonstrate how the Thai elite considered themselves not only of a separate "race" to the Lao, but also a superior one. Significantly, the assignation of dark phenotypical skin tone played, and continues to play, a profound role in the racialization of Isan people and their ostensible inferiority to their Central Thai counterparts, who reside in or proximate to Bangkok.

Author

• Rachel Engel, University of Hawaii at Manoa