America’s cultural politics is defined by constructing ethnic hierarchies, unlike Western Europe

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. And, of course, silenced and unacknowledged, the fact of American popular culture itself, which has always contained within it, whether silenced or not, black American popular vernacular traditions. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 271

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The ‘Europe had no ethnicity until recently’ claim is a loaded, debatable one relevant to how the Islamophobia field treats ‘Muslim’ vs. ‘ethnic’ as categories in Europe.

Related

• America’s cultural politics is always defined by constructing ethnic hierarchies (similarity 0.97)
• European culture masked its ethnic origins while America centered Black traditions in its vernacular. (similarity 0.87)
• American mainstream popular culture has always incorporated black vernacular traditions (similarity 0.80)
• US ethnic-studies practice subsumed ‘racial’ groups under ‘ethnic’ categories (similarity 0.79)