ABSTRACT
Formulations of research questions, policy and strategies implicitly assumed racial and cultural difference, in the formulation of the meaning and direction for the development project, as its fulfilment required both structural and cultural change in the ‘Third World’ to make it more like the ‘First’. Nevertheless, scholars in the field agree that silence dominates the theme of race and development but they do not provide a definite explanation as to why this is the case (White 2002; Kothari 2006b; Power 2006). Engaging this problematic, this chapter takes steps to delineate a possible reason for this silencing. First, it reviews critiques of development that expose the discontinuities and continuities between development and colonialism. Second, it traces the relationship between race, as a socially and historically constructed category (Omi and Winant 1994), and development back to the Enlightenment moral lexicon. What these steps show is how breaking the silence requires tracing the operations of racial power within the development project.
