Economic stratification now exceeds race as the axis of contemporary difference.

Evidence

But global capitalism at the moment creates such a gap between the wealthy and the deeply immiserated people and societies. And so some of that will surface in terms of black people in terms of Africa, where the people we’re talking about are black. But in the Middle East, the people are brown, and in China they’re something else; I don’t know what they are in China. China is a complete mystery to me, but you understand what I’m saying? Race alone, the line along which the field was divided, will no longer on its own sustain the strong sense of difference around which contemporary struggles polarize. You have to expand it in some way to see how difference plays into the way in which rich and poor now have to negotiate a common space, a common life. That’s the “multicultural question”! — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1154

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the reader’s race-centric Islamophobia frame: Hall insists the rich/poor divide now supersedes race as the polarizing line, a corrective to carry into the corpus.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the racialization of Muslims fit into Hall’s claim that race alone no longer sustains difference? A generative tension for the field.