"It lasts all day, a masquerade with banjos, feathers and sneakers spray-painted gold. Sometimes raunchy, other times glamorous."

Sounds rather like Notting Hill Carnival to me.

All these traditions do feed into one another, and have all kinds of links. But things that look similar can have a very different meaning in different cultures.

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Wysiswyg said something interesting earlier "...racism in the UK and USA seem to have different elements and underlying histories. I often get the feeling, when racism is discussed here, that the USers and the Brits are talking about apples and oranges. Both fruit, but not the same fruit."

That's true - one difference, I think, may be that in Britain racism has tended to be more a kind of xenophobia, much of the time, together with various imperial overtones, whereas in America the experience of slavery and post-slavery repression is the key historical context.

So the significant thing about the Turkish Knight isn't that he's black (which he often isn't anyway, after all very few Turks are black), but that he is foreign.