Racial essences work through flexible strategic attribute-selection, not fixed traits

Evidence

Racial essences, like those honed in the Indies, rested not “on immovable parts but on the strategic inclusion of different attributes, a changing constellation of features, and a changing weighing of them.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 987

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides the actual mechanism by which racial epistemology operates: flexible reweighting, not static essence.
• XREF: Echoes Stoler’s account of how racial categories absorb new attributes strategically; also parallels debates in STS about flexible classification. — connects to: Black racial idealization repurposed essentialist traits to negate white superiority — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 669