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This article argues that the vernacular of development, as deployed in and about African communities, is a racial vernacular. It is a racial vernacular of development because it is deployed within, in this case, the resource extraction industry (as well as within the broader development enterprise) in ways that sustain racial thought, index particular racial meanings, and prescribe social practices. How do we understand the processes through which racial codes are embedded and naturalized in practices ranging from the management and bureaucracy of resource extractions to the power structure of the world system that places African sovereignty below Western nongovernmental organizations and corporations? The development complex incorporates the unequal material relationships and processes that structure engagement between the Global South and the Global North, and its racial vernacular is the primary discursive scaffolding for these relationships. [development, race, resource extraction, Ghana]

This article explores chemical skin bleaching practices in urban Ghana to demonstrate the ways that particular racialized understandings of meaning are deployed in a contemporary postcolonial African society. I argue that the processes of racialization indexed by skin bleaching in Ghana must be contextualized within global racial formations; specifically, they can only be understood by examining the interlinked local and global ideologies and practices of race. In elaborating this argument, the essay also engages with contemporary African diaspora theorization that tends to foreground diasporic identity and experience at the expense of contemporary continental processes. By bringing a postcolonial African society into a dialogue about race, processes of racialization, and the interlinked transnational construction of black identities, this essay offers one way out of the ambivalent relationship that I believe diaspora theorization has with Africa.

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