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<p>This article is a grounded inquiry into the possibility of a social justice movement that is unencumbered by the mystifying qualities of race as instrument of social organization. By way of colorism among privileged US blacks, the study departs from the premise that non-whiteness does not make privileged people of color exceptional subjects of the US elite and middle classes. I argue for an antiracist anthropology of social justice that wants to eliminate the prevailing <i>perception</i> of a social value in the phenotype of whiteness. In dominant US discourses, blackness stands in for poverty and oppression while class distinctions among blacks are silenced.&#xa0;The racism that takes the white body as reference would logically become inoperable if the white phenotype lost its sociopolitical significance and the “colored” body concomitantly lost its own. The resulting disarticulation of privilege with white complexion would facilitate a more efficient social justice movement by also making inoperable discourses that reduce social injustice to anti-black racism. The analysis becomes cross-disciplinary in delineating the historicity of the whiteness-blackness binary to make imaginable a recalibration of racial meanings in the politics of US social equity. It also remains a corollary indictment of the technique of a white liberal identity that is insistently class-blind in seeing blacks, while it as insistently conflates white racism and an imagined supremacy of whiteness that is forevermore impregnable by black agency. To conclude, I explore how the anthropological imagination and ethnographic theorization might help demystify the white phenotype in everyday thought and practice.</p>

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On the value of a phenotype: Colorism, black privilege, and social injustice in the USA

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月29日

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  • Philippe-Richard Marius

摘要

This article is a grounded inquiry into the possibility of a social justice movement that is unencumbered by the mystifying qualities of race as instrument of social organization. By way of colorism among privileged US blacks, the study departs from the premise that non-whiteness does not make privileged people of color exceptional subjects of the US elite and middle classes. I argue for an antiracist anthropology of social justice that wants to eliminate the prevailing perception of a social value in the phenotype of whiteness. In dominant US discourses, blackness stands in for poverty and oppression while class distinctions among blacks are silenced. The racism that takes the white body as reference would logically become inoperable if the white phenotype lost its sociopolitical significance and the “colored” body concomitantly lost its own. The resulting disarticulation of privilege with white complexion would facilitate a more efficient social justice movement by also making inoperable discourses that reduce social injustice to anti-black racism. The analysis becomes cross-disciplinary in delineating the historicity of the whiteness-blackness binary to make imaginable a recalibration of racial meanings in the politics of US social equity. It also remains a corollary indictment of the technique of a white liberal identity that is insistently class-blind in seeing blacks, while it as insistently conflates white racism and an imagined supremacy of whiteness that is forevermore impregnable by black agency. To conclude, I explore how the anthropological imagination and ethnographic theorization might help demystify the white phenotype in everyday thought and practice.