Robert Young’s writing brings to light very disturbing historical realities about the commonly held understandings of racial difference within the 19th century. It is alarming to realize the obsessive interest that the colonizers took in calculating the “degrees of deviance” that mixed-race persons were from the white norm (:91). Further, the double standard that the colonizers held out about those of mixed-race is entirely without justification, for they simultaneously demonized those of mixed-race, while proliferating sexual and cultural diffusion by using the colonized as objects of their sexual desire. How is it possible that people lived with these delusions and obvious contradictions? What are we guilty of today that will cause those living 100 years from now to stand aghast?
