Political identity is learned, not an innate hidden self

Evidence

Then black erupted and people said, “Well, you’re from the Caribbean, in the midst of this, identifying with what’s going on, the black population in England. You’re black.” … At that very moment, my son, who was two and a half, was learning the colors. I said to him, transmitting the message at last, “You’re black.” And he said, “No. I’m brown.” And I said, “Wrong referent. Mistaken concreteness, philosophical mistake. I’m not talking about your paintbox, I’m talking about your head.” That is something different. The question of learning, learning to be black. Learning to come into an identification. … What that moment allows to happen are things which were not there before. It is not that what one then does was hiding away inside as my true self. There was not any bit of that true self in there before that identity was learned. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 241

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines identity as an achieved, constructed identification (‘learning to be black’) over against an essentialist true-self model — the pivotal definitional move of the chapter.
• XREF: The ‘paintbox vs. head’ distinction is the anti-essentialist theory of identity that scaffolds how the Islamophobia field treats Muslim identity as discursively constructed rather than given. — connects to: Institutional fit, not sincerity, makes political conduct feel natural. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1277; Civic virtue rests on group identification and satisfying identities, not just self-discipline; Taken-for-granted belief patterns are politically invented human products, not natural or inevitable — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 587 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that there was ‘not any bit of that true self in there before that identity was learned’ fully detaches identity from essence — paradigm-shifting within the scaffolding module.