Anti-racists who accept fixed race categories repeat the racists’ own trap

Evidence

Fourth, “race” is not simply a category of classification or differentiation but rather a construct that emerges from practices of racism. Thus, while Orientalism has a long history in the United States and in European nations, it is a protean ideology that exhibits veneration as well as vilification. Significantly, Orientalism is not always tied to systems of oppression like colonialism or imperialism. What my analysis shows is that there is no straight line from the Spanish Inquisition to the torture regime of Abu Ghraib. Even while various projects of racialization draw on the past and attempt to fix “race” as existing across time, there are in fact no unbroken lines of continuity. Anti-racists should avoid falling into the trap of accepting the fictive concept of “race” and its transhistorical and essentializing modes of articulation. Thus, the book sets out to explain how historical context shapes various projects of racialization amidst variance and change. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 104

Categorization

• XREF: This methodological claim about historical discontinuity pays off the reader’s MOC — it is the caution against treating the enemy-making machine as monolithic or transhistorical; connects to the earlier extracted claim that anti-Muslim racism is historically contingent and therefore endable. — connects to: Treating race as a fixed biological category replicates the racism it opposes; Naturalizing racial categories reproduces the racism it aims to escape. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 290
• DEFINE: Race is defined here as a construct produced by racism, never a pre-existing classification category.

Broader Connections

• Treating race as a fixed biological category replicates the racism it opposes #corroborates (0.95)
• Naturalizing racial categories reproduces the racism it aims to escape. #corroborates (0.90) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 290