Creole discourse normalized racial hierarchy while hiding its exploitative basis.

Evidence

Creole discourse has been the bonding agent of Caribbean society. It has functioned in the interest of the powerful, whether represented by a colonialist or nationalist elite. It is the identific glue that bonds the different, competing, and otherwise mutually exclusive interests contained within Caribbean society. It paved the way for accommodation of racialized discourses of difference upon which rested the legitimacy of colonial power and exploitation. Racial difference was rendered benign in the cognitive merger created and sustained by Creole discourse. Competing interests and relations of exploitation and privilege became socially organized in a fluid clinal system of racial and cultural hierarchy. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3197

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to discussions of national identity construction elsewhere in this companion—e.g. toward-and-from concepts of hybridity as ideology, not just aesthetics. — connects to: Creole language variation prevents identity from reifying into essence — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 349; The Plantation’s rigid racial hierarchy paradoxically generated ambiguous complexity — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 379; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”