Cultural difference has replaced race as the basis for new racisms

Evidence

Many in the old nation-states, who are deeply attached to the purer forms of national self-understanding, are literally driven crazy by their erosion. They feel their whole universe threatened by change and coming down about their ears. “Cultural difference” of a rigid, ethnicized, and unnegotiable kind, has taken the place of sexual miscegenation as the primal postcolonial fantasy. A racially driven “fundamentalism” has surfaced in all these western European and North American societies, a new kind of defensive and racialized nationalism. Prejudice, injustice, discrimination, and violence toward “the Other,” based on this hypostasized “cultural difference,” has come to take its place—what Sarat Maharaj has called a sort of “spook look-alike of apartheid”—alongside the older racisms, founded on skin color and physiological difference, giving rise in response to a “politics of recognition,” alongside the struggles against racism and for social justice. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 866

Categorization

• XREF: Direct toolkit link to Islamophobia readings: the shift from biological racism to culturalist racism (hypostasized cultural difference) is foundational to how anti-Muslim prejudice is theorized. — connects to: Fighters shift from monocultural to multicultural lives, yet racism persists alongside conviviality — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 57; Cultural difference was routinely misread as a difference in civility. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 61; A new nationalism rechanneled existing race feelings onto immigrant targets — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1012 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Echoes the class/identity signaling dynamics in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both treat moralized surface attributes as vehicles for exclusion, here cultural difference rather than dress.