In terms of racism, with its implications of discrimination and biological dif- ference,Anderson's position is appropriate to the discourse of non-European colonized and European colonizer. But his presentation of racism is an over- simplification of the term, one that deserves more complicated questioning. As Etienne Balibar has written in partial answer to Anderson, “There is not merely a single invariant racism but a number of racisms, forming a broad, open spectrum of situations.” Racism, then, can be as unique as any virus or, as Balibar puts it,“a determinate racist configuration has no fixed frontiers; it is a stage in a development which its own latent potentialities, as well as historical circumstances and the relations of force within the social forma- tion, will shunt around within the spectrum of possible racisms.”

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 97