Celebrating racial difference can itself reproduce racial hierarchies

Evidence

In one of her most provocative papers, in fact, Cole (1996) argues that there is a prevailing cultural logic that links, albeit by inversion, racial images in sport and racial images about crime. Sport’s racial imagery thus constitutes and contributes to a rather insidious form of “enlightened racism” (McKay 1995) in which racial stereotypes and hierarchies are reproduced even as mainstream audiences believe they are being subverted. In any case, the point is clear: that racism is a complicated, multifaceted cultural system which often ironically finds expression in the celebration and consumption of racial difference itself. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2772

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how the celebration of black athletes by ‘enlightened’ white audiences functions as a mode of racism — parallels modern corporate diversity-washing and commodified identity markets.
• XREF: Connects to the theme of moral panics and racial signaling in the reader’s collection on discourse and control; also echoes ‘enlightened racism’ as a cousin of racialized consumption critique. — connects to: Playful performance can denaturalize links between phenotype and ethnic identity. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 99; Racecraft’s real function is preserving racial hierarchy