ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the construction of an international anti-racist norm around moral outrage at the worst violators of that norm has had a mixed legacy, especially for domestic anti-racism campaigns in other English speaking, white-dominated societies. It shows how international campaigns of solidarity that shaped the racial equality norm ultimately served the self-image of Anglosphere countries, even as they delayed shedding their own structures of white supremacy, allowing them to construct newly anti-racist identities in contrast to the racist white 'others' of South Africa and US South. The chapter explores a relatively recent example of an expressive practice – blackface performance – that is a racist considered taboo in some white-dominated societies and harmless in others. Anti-Apartheid campaigners in Anglosphere had to overcome entrenched resistance from business and political elites who had financial interests in South Africa, as well as Cold War hawks who saw South Africa as an undesirable lesser of two evils in global struggle against communism.
