Modern racism legitimizes itself through cultural difference rather than biological hierarchy.

Evidence

In a book of the same title, Martin Barker (1981) discusses the move from biological inferiority to cultural difference - a move by which racist discourse attempts to base its legitimacy. Arguments of the type put forward in particular by Powell are no longer based on hierarchy as much as on difference, nor do they stress the natural features of the “racialized” group, but its culture, language, religion, traditions, and customs. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3126 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

These approaches are grounded in the view that biological or scientific racism has declined in significance, and new forms of racialized hostility have grown to take its place. It is argued that this “old racism” has been superseded by a new racism or by the rearticulation of racism which is characterized by an assertion of the naturalness of both a desire to live amongst “one’s own people” (Us) and hostility towards a culturally or racially distinct immigrant presence (the Other) that threatens the existence of “our way of life.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1871 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Many in the old nation-states, who are deeply attached to the purer forms of national self-understanding, are literally driven crazy by their erosion. They feel their whole universe threatened by change and coming down about their ears. “Cultural difference” of a rigid, ethnicized, and unnegotiable kind, has taken the place of sexual miscegenation as the primal postcolonial fantasy. A racially driven “fundamentalism” has surfaced in all these western European and North American societies, a new kind of defensive and racialized nationalism. Prejudice, injustice, discrimination, and violence toward “the Other,” based on this hypostasized “cultural difference,” has come to take its place—what Sarat Maharaj has called a sort of “spook look-alike of apartheid”—alongside the older racisms, founded on skin color and physiological difference, giving rise in response to a “politics of recognition,” alongside the struggles against racism and for social justice. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 866 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ethnography can serve to critique race-making rather than to represent a culture. — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 44; Cultural difference was routinely misread as a difference in civility. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 61; Hobbes’s prejudice against Native Americans was civilizational rather than racial. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 71 (+18 more)

Broader Connections

• Post-war racism shifted from biological hierarchy to cultural difference. #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3126
• Biological racism was replaced by a coded cultural new racism #corroborates (0.93) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1871
• Cultural difference has replaced race as the basis for new racisms #corroborates (0.92) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 866
• Racism operates through biological and cultural registers that reinforce each other #complicates (0.86)
• Biological racism and cultural differentialism combine rather than replace each other. #complicates (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 344