Race and ethnicity are two concurrent registers of a single racism

Evidence

Both the discourses of “race” and “ethnicity,” then, work by establishing a discursive articulation or “chain of equivalences” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) between the social/cultural and the biological registers, which allows differences in one signifying system to be “read off” against equivalents in the other chain (Hall 1990). Biological racism and cultural differentialism therefore constitute, not two different systems, but racism’s two registers. In most situations, the discourses of biological and cultural difference are simultaneously in play. In antisemitism Jews were multiply racialized on biological, cultural, and religious grounds. As Wieviorka argues, racism exists “where there is an association of these two main strategies, whose unique combination depends on the specificities of experience, the historical moment and individual preference” (Wieviorka 1995). It seems therefore more appropriate to speak, not of “racism” versus “cultural difference,” but of racism’s “two logics.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 342

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘two logics’ framework is the direct scaffold for Islamophobia readings that must treat anti-Muslim prejudice as neither purely biological nor purely cultural but a specific combination. Also the antisemitism example gives a template for how religious-ethnic-biological registers combine.
• SEED: Potential essay: ‘The Two Logics of Islamophobia’ — reading contemporary anti-Muslim discourse through the race/ethnicity register distinction, showing how ‘Muslimness’ shifts between biological (bodily markers, skin color) and cultural registers depending on historical moment.
• DEEPTHINKING: The collapse of the race/ethnicity dichotomy into a single structure with two registers is a genuine reframing that resists one-sentence summary — it changes how one analyzes any identity-based exclusion.