Race categories are historical and political, not pigment-based

Evidence

But the word “black” was never uttered. Why? No black people around? Lots of them, thousands and thousands of them. Black is not a question of pigmentation. The black I am talking about is a historical category, a political category, a cultural category. In our language, at certain historical moments, we have to use the signifier. We have to create an equivalence between how people look and what their histories are. Their histories are in the past, inscribed on their skin. But it is not because of their skin that they are black in their heads. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 232

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definitional move: ‘race’ as historically/politically constructed category, the signifier creating an equivalence between appearance and history.
• XREF: Lays groundwork for the reader’s downstream Islamophobia section — the same ‘the signifier as political category’ logic Fanon and Said deploy for the constructed Other. — connects to: Nineteenth-century race was a loose cultural term, not a fixed category. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 69; Races are produced by racism, not biology, through imperial practice — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 88; Racial categories are relative, situational constructs engendered by historical processes. (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense and paradigm-shifting for race theory: the insight that ‘black is not pigmentation’ yet skin-identity is still being forged as a category is rich enough to sit with.