Hall’s anti-essentialist method rejects any universal structure of racism across societies

Evidence

What then becomes clear in the final part of this chapter is how readily the critique of essentialist forms of Marxism can be transposed to the analysis of questions of race and ethnicity. Here Stuart rejects analyses that invoke a common/universal structure of racism as a general feature of human societies. Rather his declared aim is to develop an analysis of the historically specific forms of racism and its effects and of the different ways in which racist ideologies have operated in specific historical and empirical conjunctures. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 301

Categorization

• XREF: The historically-specific-racism claim parallels the reader’s earlier notes on settler colonialism vs. generic discrimination, and on how media moral panics attach to specific conjunctures rather than timeless prejudice.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the historian’s curse on antiracism’ — how treating racism as a transhistorical universal actually weakens analysis of any given conjuncture, per Hall.