European culture masked its ethnic origins while America centered Black traditions in its vernacular.

Evidence

Hence he insists on trying to spell out some of the crucial differences between the Western European and North American forms of popular culture. As he notes, while Western European popular culture long failed to recognize that it was founded on any particular ethnicity at all, in America, the vernacular had always contained within it black traditions, even if they had been routinely marginalized and displaced. In a context where globalized, postmodern commercial cultures no longer simply repress that which is defined as primitive but rather serve to license the fascination with bodily and ethnic difference for their own commercial reasons, it is crucial that our analyses are subtle enough to register these distinctions. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 150

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that European culture masks its own ethnicity connects to the field’s later critique of how secular/Western universals conceal specific racial histories.
• DEFINE: Introduces the mechanism of ‘licensing’ ethnic difference for commercial purposes as distinct from outright repression — key to understanding commodified multiculturalism.