ABSTRACT
Originating with moral panics about a non-existent “white slave trade,” the anti-sex trafficking lobby began as a xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and overtly racist social movement. This chapter examines the history of white supremacy that has undergirded the movement and traces connections between earlier notions of “noblesse oblige” and “the white man’s burden” that position white people, including early white feminists, as rescuers and caretakers of non-white women. The chapter also examines the evolution of spectacles of sex trafficking that put “third world prostitutes” on display for western tourist-volunteers who spend vast sums of money to travel with groups to look at, photograph, minister to, and “help” women in Thailand, Cambodia, India, Morocco, and elsewhere. It concludes that any attempt to understand the contemporary anti-sex trafficking movement must contend with its racist past, which has receded into the background yet still profoundly shapes the activities of the movement, its members, and their ideologies today.
