They standardize a vocabulary for describing difference, reiffying categories like beauty, talent and fashion, and produce a common frame of organized distinction. They essentialize some kinds of differences as ethnic, physical and immutable, and portray them as measurable and scalable characteristics, washing them with the legitimacy of objectivity. And they use these distinctions to draw systemic connections between disparate parts of the world system. These connections involve previously separated groups into a common realm of competition, forming a global structure that organizes diversity and turns it into what I call common difference. So the diverse characteristics of multiethnic Belizeans become comparable with each other, they are brought into contention through being made structurally equivalent.
People achieve categorical equality, but in the process they lose something.
At a higher level, Belize itself can then become intelligible as one national culture among all the other unique nations that make up a global pageant. Johns Hopkins University Press. Banner, Lois 1983 American Beauty. University of Chicago Press. The Practice of Everyday Life.