Assimilation can integrate minorities into shared masculine conflict cultures rather than difference.

Evidence

Philly Desai has pointed out that to see the involvement of young Bengali men in violent conflict with white peers as a manifestation of “poor race relations” is to miss the patterns of masculine embodied culture that they share (Desai, 1999). In this sense he argues that the process of “assimilation” has been all too effective, in that Bengali men have been integrated into cultures of conflict that both predate immigration and prefigure the experience of growing up in these urban locations. Here it is not a matter of “difference,” but rather, of marking division within shared patterns of masculine culture. Violent confrontations are racialized, which in turn become a means to exclude or differentiate between groups of young men who in many respects mirror each other in terms of the forms of cultural embodiment that they perform as they move through the city. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2999

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘assimilation’ can mean being absorbed into a shared culture of masculine violence — so that racialized violence is division within sameness rather than clash of difference — upends the standard liberal frame where racism is about difference. It reframes integration itself as the enabling condition for racialized conflict.