Critiquing essential black identity was attacked as distraction from anti-racist struggle.

Evidence

It is for these reasons that, as he ruefully notes here, he had been earlier driven to speak “in an unguarded moment” of the “end of the innocent notion of an essential black subject.” He refers here to the intense debate generated by the initial publication of his “New Ethnicities” article, which had been heavily criticized by some activists in the UK for raising what some saw as unnecessarily complex theoretical problems that, it was argued, functioned as an unhelpful distraction from the fundamental struggle against racism. However, rueful as he may have been about the controversies associated with what he calls here this “somewhat notorious” argument, Stuart would not be swayed from what he saw as its intellectual necessity, if we are to ever develop adequately dialogic—rather than simplistically oppositional—political perspectives and strategies. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 152

Categorization

• XREF: The tension between theoretical nuance and activist urgency recurs in the Islamophobia field’s debates about whether complexity distracts from anti-Muslim discrimination. — connects to: Naming and airing black grievances disarmed black political challenges to Hartsfield. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 97