Critical deconstruction of racial ideology can become ideology itself

Evidence

For all of this, however, I think these critiques have often gone too far. In making these points they have too often simply exchanged one totalization (that sport is a positive force for racial change) for the other (that it is a negative, impeding one). Deconstruction, to put it even stronger, is virtually all these critiques have accomplished. And in failing to do more than deconstruct the popular ideology, these critiques have become (or at least threaten to become) a one-sided ideology of their own, an ideology which fails to appreciate the actual complexity and possibility of sport’s place in the American racial order. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2774

Categorization

• DEFINE: A useful warning against pure deconstruction-as-method: exchanging one totalization for its inversion leaves no room for countervailing empirical complexity.
• SEED: Essay angle: when does criticism stop illuminating and start functioning as its own one-sided orthodoxy?
• XREF: connects to: Empiricism that excludes man-made context becomes ideology — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 454; Deconstructing blackness as fiction does nothing to shift racial power relations — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 64; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them” (+1 more)