Ethnic minority youth actively create identities rather than passively accept ascription

Evidence

As Mette Andersson pointed out, in her excellent study of the experience of ethnic minority youth in Norway, young people are “constituted through difference, but through this spatially and temporally located construction, they shape new modes of subjectivity. They are creative actors, and not passive adapters to external ascriptions of identity” (Andersson, 2000:304). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3036 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Tracey takes offence at the protagonist Karim’s hammy portrayal of an elderly Asian man, suggesting that it simply confirms white stereotypes about Asians as “funny, with strange habits and weird customs. To the white man we’re already people without humanity.” Against Tracey’s assertion of necessary black political solidarity, Karim argues for the individuality of his performance, that it is about “one old Indian man” and does not claim to represent an entire culture (Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia [London: Faber and Faber, 1991], 180). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 676 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Underlying racialism, not unlike nationalism, is an abstract presumption of familialism. As Nadia Abu El-Haj remarks in her revealing interrogation of genealogy in the wake of the human genome project, membership criteria “in family, nation and political society are always entangled.” The traits or characteristics I take myself to share with those I consider like me conjure an abstract familial connectivity. That I am like them, or they like me, must mean that we are familially connected, so to speak. But familiality, by extension, is necessarily conceived, if often silently, by the negation of (racial) otherness, of the differentiated and disconnected, the unlikened and unrelated. Note here the paradoxical relatedness of the racially denied, the constitutive connectedness of the disconnected, the manufactured fabric of familial distinction. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 68 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Student advocacy achieved collective recategorization of Iranians from legal whites to non-white SWANA — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 773; Physical and symbolic ties to homeland drive minority-race identification in children — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 122; Parents socialize Multiracial children toward one of several identities they never personally experienced — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 33 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Marginalized youth actively shape subjectivity rather than passively accept assigned identities #corroborates (1.00) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3036
• Individualized minority self-representation can still reinforce dominant stereotypes #complicates (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 676
• In-group familial identity is built on negating the racial other #complicates (0.71) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 68