Purity, like race, is a socially constructed discursive category

Evidence

The hybridized reality of Creole society left little room for accommodation of claims to cultural and racial purity. It is important to emphasize here that purity, like race, is socially constructed. It emerges out of discursive regimes of representation and practice. The case of Dominica is instructive in underscoring this discursive basis of purity. There, the indigenous Caribs have had a long history of racial intermixing with blacks. Their racially mixed offspring have been immersed in Creole society and in the practices of Creole forms of social organization. Notwithstanding this history, notions of purity continue to act as legitimizing principles for excluding these putative descendants of the indigenous Caribs from Creole nationalist society. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3228

Categorization

• QUESTION: A nice concrete case (Dominica’s Caribs excluded on purity grounds despite histories of intermixing) — worth chasing the actual modern political history behind this claim.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece’s theme of identity/purity signaling, and to Colson’s work on identity construction and classification systems. — connects to: Race is a culturally invented discursive category used to inferiorize groups. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1106; the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”