The Rise of Race

The triumphalist narrative about modernity as a story of rational progress just glosses over the horrific and distinctly modern practice of racialized slavery. Secularist rational enlightenment in fact gave us racialized slavery, and it did so through the logic of the white man's burden. Race was, and is, a mythological category used to make sense of the unprecedented pluralism brought on by colonial encounters. That has everything to do with the various colonial ventures right that are happening around the globe.