America’s cultural politics is always defined by constructing ethnic hierarchies

Evidence

First, I remind you of the ambiguities of that shift from Europe to America, since it includes America’s ambivalent relationship to European high culture and the ambiguity of America’s relationship to its own internal ethnic hierarchies. Western Europe did not have, until recently, any ethnicity at all. Or did not recognize it had any. America has always had a series of ethnicities, and consequently, the construction of ethnic hierarchies has always defined its cultural politics. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 271

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that Western Europe ‘did not have, until recently, any ethnicity’ is a striking precondition for later Islamophobia readings — Europe’s recent ‘discovery’ of its own ethnicity tracks the construction of Muslims as its racialized Other.