Group violence requires the victim to be abstracted into a category

Evidence

Unlike individual violence, “group violence is by definition abstract”; “real individual neighbors are not necessarily loved, but they are loved or hated for concrete, not abstract reasons… On the contrary, in order to apply group violence to the neighbor as belonging to a category, the concrete individual’s face has to be erased: the person must become an abstraction.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 383

Categorization

• DEFINE: Delivers a clean mechanism distinguishing group violence from individual violence: erasure of the concrete face, reduction to a category.
• XREF: Connects to vault discussions of dehumanization and how racism renders its targets interchangeable — echoes the anti-Semitism-as-interchangeable-victims claim in the Frankfurt School reading. — connects to: Ritual-abuse accusations function to justify violence against target groups — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 274
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 383