Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

by Huw Lemmey

Shaped by her own sense of difference and outsider status as a queer woman, Mead focused her scientific research and advocacy on the description of cultural difference and the use of cultural relativism to combat the rigid hierarchies of scientific racism, and to question the sex-gender system that othered her in her home culture. Blind to the meaning of the enormous economic and racial privilege of her upbringing, she helped to construct post-war American racial liberalism: a political world-view that understands anti-racism in terms of ‘color-blindness’ rather than resistance to structural racial capitalism, is deeply invested in the exceptionalism of the United States, and collaborated with the US national security state’s destructions of and incursions into the self-determination and liberation struggles of colonized peoples.10 This racial liberalism was also, as Lee Baker and others have argued, a key part of ‘color-blind’ discourses in the United States that minimize racial inequality and disconnect understandings of capitalism from understandings of the origins of race and racism.