Essentialist anti-racist discourse reproduces the biology it claims to oppose.

Evidence

Hall argues that essentialist forms of political and cultural discourse naturalize and dehistoricize difference, and therefore mistake what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. The moment we tear the signifier “black” from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodge it in a biologically constituted racial category, Hall insists, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct. We fix the signifier outside of history, outside of change, outside of political intervention. This is exemplified by the tendency to see the term “black” as sufficient in itself to guarantee the progressive character of the politics articulated under that banner. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 127

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘black essentialism’ means: treating a historically constructed political signifier as a biology-grounded racial category.
• XREF: Parallels the earlier note in this book’s intro about essentialist ‘liberatory’ narratives suppressing internal difference; also connects to ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ or ‘Things Fall Apart’ themes of identity construction under pressure.