Naturalizing racial categories reproduces the racism it aims to escape.

Evidence

The essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. The moment the signifier “black” is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct. In addition, as always happens when we naturalize historical categories (think about gender and sexuality), we fix that signifier outside of history, outside of change, outside of political intervention. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 290

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘essentializing’ means in anti-racist critique: naturalizing and dehistoricizing a socially constructed category, which paradoxically revalidates the racist ground.
• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s Scaffolding Theory purpose: this is the anti-essentialist move foundational to later critiques of racialized identity in Islamophobia studies. — connects to: Anti-racists who accept fixed race categories repeat the racists’ own trap — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 104; British racism forecloses full naturalization even for assimilated nonwhite writers — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 540; Racist tropes enter mainstream commonsense making race-based discrimination seem natural.