Creole culture masks racial hierarchies by re-framing difference as creole versus non-creole

Evidence

An examination of the Caribbean raises profound conceptual questions about race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Nationalism, according to Benedict Anderson (1983:19), is to be understood in terms of “the large cultural system that preceded it, out of which - as well as against which - it came into being.” And culture constitutes the representations and practices of ethnicity. From this perspective, Caribbean ethnicity is constituted by its representations and practices of creolite. The problem, however, is that Creole culture serves to hide a racialized division of labor and a racialized allocation of power and privilege. It renders these divisions invisible. The discourse of racial difference is shifted to distinctions between the Creole and non-Creole. Such a shift serves to hide commonalities in social practice that can form the basis of counterdiscursive challenges to power. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3277

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Anderson’s Imagined Communities and to discourses of hybridity vs purity in postcolonial theory. — connects to: Creole language variation prevents identity from reifying into essence — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 349
• DEFINE: Clarifies creolite as an ethnic representation that conceals underlying racial economy rather than a celebration of mixture.