Cultural imagining of difference still activates racialized meanings and hierarchies.

Evidence

Although it is certainly true that Indians imagine differences in cultural terms, they also tend to think in terms of biological and phenotypical differences (Warren, in press). More importantly, even if Indians meant simply “ethnic” difference, this would not necessarily put them “beyond race.” As Warren (in press) argues “regardless of what they mean by ‘white,’ Indians are touching into being aesthetic hierarchies, national narratives, symbolic orders, discursive repertoires, political practices, and so on which… have radicalized meanings. And so even if Indians do not conceptualize differences in ‘racial terms,’ this would not therefore mean that their practices were inconsequential to race matters.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3664

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how ‘thinking difference culturally’ is itself a racialized practice regardless of the actor’s own categorization — the structural argument for why denying race is never beyond race.