Race can ethnicize and ethnicity can racialize, generating twin political demands

Evidence

Given the way “black”—originally a negative epithet—has become a term of positive cultural identification (Bonnett 1999), we may speak here of the “ethnicization” of “race.” At the same time, cultural difference has taken on a more violent, politicized, and oppositional meaning—which we might think of as the “racialization” of ethnicity (e.g., “ethnic cleansing”). The consequence is to place on the agenda of a British multiculturalism two related but different political demands which have hitherto been considered mutually exclusive: the demand (against a differentiated racism) for social equality and racial justice, and the demand (against a universalizing ethnocentrism) for the recognition of cultural difference. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 345

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the paired concepts ‘ethnicization of race’ and ‘racialization of ethnicity’ as distinct directions of cultural-political transformation.
• XREF: Directly prefigures the double demand of equality vs. recognition that recurs throughout Hall’s work on multiculturalism and in the broader Islamophobia field’s framing of race vs. culture critique.