Homogeneity is never natural but requires constant repressive maintenance

Evidence

Besides the fact that such presumed homogeneity necessarily takes for granted the coherence, purity, boundedness, and racial identity of cultural likeness, such homogeneity can only be purchased with the coin of severe repression, of purging difference and denying its influence if not its miscegenating seed. The sustaining of homogeneity necessarily requires restriction, keeping out those one takes to be unlike one, in some ways keeping in those one identifies with or who are at one with one. Hardly a natural condition, the very possibilities of the distinctions require work both to define and to sustain them. Their premise is built upon repression, aggression, blindness to other identifications, cross-seminations. Seemingly safe, the insistent closures and totalizations of homogeneity prompt and promote, mobilize and multiply their counter, resistances, the commitment to undress, transgress, redress. In short, homogeneity is a recipe for constitutive conflict and repetitively destructive, debilitating politics. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1899 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The natural unity of individual and genus must be sublated into opposition — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 298; Opacity for the other triggers assimilation or annihilation, never coexistence — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 296; Homogenization renders others interchangeable resources to be managed — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 593 (+6 more)

Broader Connections