Essentially, you create a hierarchized racial division that puts you at an advantage, deny that it exists, but call yourself a victim of it. Part of it is what those students said, “to be a legitimate white Latin Americans you must pass yourself through Blackness.” Oswald joked that Brazilians were cannibalizing Western Civilization but it’s the opposite, they ate Africa and the Tupi-Guarani. That is, the Brazilian now eating Western Civilization ate Africa and Native America first.
Snyder emphasizes that Ukraine is Russia’s constitutive other. Much of what is Russian has Ukrainian origins, the Kievan Rus is its earlier origin. Russia says Ukraine is its origin but Russia is Ukraine’s destiny. That is, Ukraine’s history culminates in Russia, so they are less than Russia and it cannot be fully real except as a subordinated part of Russia. That’s why they cannot survive on their own, and must not.
This is not a very good/complete summary but I’m interested in this idea of a constitutive other and the need to establish an origin but then deny/hide it, or eat it. It’s a move related to what Spain, Portugal and their colonial elites do to indigenous identities in Lat Am and the elite Latin Americans are proud of it. Look! they say. The US just killed off the indigenous people and subordinated the post-Africans, but the descendants of Spain and Portugal ate [comeu] them and the culmination of all that is me, a cosmopolitan Weltgeist!
What I didn’t understand in Latin America was the denial of difference, we all had to say we were the same race to deserve equality, whereas Civil Rights discourse in the US was about equality across differences; Black culture could exist as such. In Europe I did not understand the penchant for assimilation to a monoculture.
But the thing about colonialism is that it DOES depend upon othering. Then Russia says to Ukraine no you are not other, you are us, but you are an inferior version of us and need to be part of us. There is something similar that happens in Latin America, the other is other and to be ERADICATED (Ferreira da Silva). Mostly it will be disappeared but we will eat a small amount of it to symbolize our difference from Europe, and we will be able to say we are VICTIMS of Europe (by supplanting that other).
And of course, Cajun discourse does some of this as well. I just have to write a little bit every day, that’s the answer on all of this.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Also: See Arendt’s concept of the school of character. Just living in imperialism teaches the whole country to be a certain way.
In the US, civil rights was countered by not only gerrymandering but mass incarceration. Also, this was when it became overt that Black people were the enemy (Reagan’s “welfare queens”). The welfare state is only for white people. This is Arendt’s “school of character” … if we see it, we see that we were always already and are still looking with an imperial gaze.