Cultural homogeneity is sustained only by repression and purging difference

Evidence

Besides the fact that such presumed homogeneity necessarily takes for granted the coherence, purity, boundedness, and racial identity of cultural likeness, such homogeneity can only be purchased with the coin of severe repression, of purging difference and denying its influence if not its miscegenating seed. The sustaining of homogeneity necessarily requires restriction, keeping out those one takes to be unlike one, in some ways keeping in those one identifies with or who are at one with one. Hardly a natural condition, the very possibilities of the distinctions require work both to define and to sustain them. Their premise is built upon repression, aggression, blindness to other identifications, cross-seminations. Seemingly safe, the insistent closures and totalizations of homogeneity prompt and promote, mobilize and multiply their counter, resistances, the commitment to undress, transgress, redress. In short, homogeneity is a recipe for constitutive conflict and repetitively destructive, debilitating politics. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1899

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on sacrifice and social stabilization — homogeneity as a repressive, work-intensive construction parallels how ritual order requires maintenance cost. — connects to: Culture’s inherent heterogeneity makes its own identity a perpetual threat to itself — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1891
• SEED: Angle: the counterintuitive claim that homogeneity, often framed as safety and comfort, is itself a recipe for constitutive conflict — an essay on why monocultures (ethnic, agricultural, ideological) breed their own contradictions.