Hybridity discourse expressed white anxiety over the fragility of dominance
Evidence
If whites were supposedly superior intellectually and culturally to those not white, then on amalgamationist assumptions the mixing of those non-white with white generative capacity ex hypothesi would imperil the power of the latter, would result in their degeneration. Hybridity thus assumed the conceptual expression of anxiety, of white people’s paranoia, signaling the ultimate powerlessness of the powerful. Powerlessness precisely in that hybridity poses a challenge to the guard- ians of purity, power, and privilege, a challenge channeled through desire: the libidinal pull of sexual desire, the lure of forbidden fruit, in the one instance; the exciting, energizing magnet of cultural renewal and so an implicit judgment concerning the static predisposition of “the pure in the other. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 784
Categorization
- STORYSTEM: A narrative seed: a character in a society where ‘purity’ ideology flourishes precisely because elites feel internally fragile and near collapse — the purer the rhetoric, the more real the rot.