Privileged groups preserve power by shifting from inherent-inferiority to cultural-deficit rationales after formal equality.

Evidence

Third, while it may seem obvious in all three cases that antiracist struggle is also antiracial struggle, this connection in fact is not always so straightforward or clear. Consider the shift from racial naturalism to historicism, from the inherent inferiority claim fueling racial slavery and apartheid to the claim of historical immaturity and unskilled ineptitude, even if admitted moral equality, underpinning much of the white and bourgeois abolitionist movement, condescending anticolonialisms, and the less affirming expressions of the affirmative action debate. Or consider yet again and more recently the begrudging white ceding of political power in the face of apartheid’s demise. In the historicist and postapartheid instances, whites no longer bedeviled blacks by explicit insults of inherent ineptitude so much as they damned them to ongoing impoverishment by dismissals of their lingering lack of skill rationalized away by claims to cultural poverty. In doing so, they were reserving to themselves the differential power to compete and consume, to define and determine. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 113

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is this naturalism-to-historicism shift an instance of threatened-privilege adaptation that would parallel non-racial axes? Useful for the generalization test.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘historicism’ as the post-racial mode of domination via claims of cultural poverty rather than innate inferiority.
• XREF: connects to: Privileged groups rationalize oppression by claiming the oppressed enjoy advantages — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1972; Dominant groups defend privilege through bounded ideological justifications; Racial inequality persists in new symbolic forms that defend privileged group positions — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3421 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial inequality persists in new symbolic forms that defend privileged group positions #corroborates (0.90) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3421
• Race retained power by distinguishing cultural capacity for European privilege rather than biology #exemplifies (0.90) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 981
• Privileged groups rationalize oppression by claiming the oppressed enjoy advantages #qualifies (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1972
• Culture-clash discourse lets dominant groups feel superior by claiming shared Western values. #exemplifies (0.85)
• Dominant groups defend privilege through bounded ideological justifications #expands (0.80)
• Prejudice is a cultural mechanism protecting dominant groups’ privileges #corroborates (0.75) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 653