Modern racism targets cultural difference rather than physical traits

Evidence

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: Fighters shift from monocultural to multicultural lives, yet racism persists alongside conviviality — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 57; Cultural racism explains Muslim violence through religion rather than lived circumstances — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 621; Cultural racism locks groups into immutable genealogies as biological racism did — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 554 (+26 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern racism legitimizes itself through cultural difference rather than biological hierarchy. #corroborates (1.00)
• Cultural difference has replaced race as the basis for new racisms #corroborates (1.00) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 866
• Cultural racism substitutes cultural difference for biological difference as a racial logic #corroborates (1.00)
• Cultural racism substitutes cultural traits for biological ones in racializing groups. #corroborates (1.00)
• Biological racism was replaced by a coded cultural new racism #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1871
• European prejudice targets culture rather than race #corroborates (0.95) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 534
• Racism today operates mainly through claims about inferior cultures rather than biology #corroborates (0.95)
• Biological racism and cultural differentialism are racism’s two registers, not separate systems #complicates (0.85)
• Racism combines inferiority-based and difference-based philosophies that coexist rather than alternate #complicates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3129