Civility depends on negotiating difference and dies with racial sameness

Evidence

Conceived thus, civil society is the negotiation of – and therefore, through such negotiation, some sort of engagement with – distinction, with heterogeneity. Heavy racial investments in trans-population identity or sameness, ultimately in cultural or biological clones, thus constitutes the threat of the death – the suicide – of civil society, the end of the necessity of civility as the modes and spaces of negotiation. No need for civility if my neighbors or fellow-citizens are just like me. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 225

Heavy racial investments in trans-population identity or sameness, ultimately in cultural or biological clones, thus constitutes the threat of the death – the suicide – of civil society, the end of the necessity of civility as the modes and spaces of negotiation. No need for civility if my neighbors or fellow-citizens are just like me. We are all conforming members of that artifice of familiarity prompted by the racially fabricated sense of familiality mentioned in Chapter 1. No need, alas, even for me. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 225

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle on how homogenization (political, cultural, algorithmic) erodes the social necessity of civil negotiation — from the echo chamber to cloned identity politics.
• XREF: This negative case — forced sameness ending the need for civility — is the mirror image of the reader’s threatened-privilege mechanism: diversity is what makes negotiation necessary, so pure identity-purity ideology is the suicide of civil society. — connects to: Everyday convivial civility can both preserve difference and transform identities. — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 43; Civility discourse ties social decline to urban diversity and incivility — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 180
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 225