Excluded groups shun their own kind because distinctiveness only exists in mixed company.

Evidence

Despite their clannishness, it is true, as Proust observed, that “save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus,” all these newcomers shunned intercourse with their own kind. The reason was that all marks of distinction were determined only by the ensemble of the cliques, so that Jews or inverts felt that they would lose their distinctive character in a society of Jews or inverts, where Jewishness or homosexuality would be the most natural, the most uninteresting, and the most banal thing in the world. The same, however, held true of their hosts who also needed an ensemble of counterparts before whom they could be different, nonaristocrats who would admire aristocrats as these admired the Jews or the homosexuals. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 267

Categorization

• XREF: Illuminates why a stigmatized group’s own internal community feels ‘banal’ to its members, relevant to how internalized stigma operates in colonized/racialized selfhood the reader is mapping.