Racism combines inferiority-based and difference-based philosophies that coexist rather than alternate

Evidence

Thus, observers of racism in Europe are struck by the capacity of the phenomenon to change while remaining the same. This is why there has been discussion of two different forms of racism, one of which is classical, scientific, and unequal, based on the idea of the superiority of some races over others, and the other, recent, cultural, and differentialist, which is based on the idea of a radical incompatibility of cultures to live together. This gives rise to important theoretical debates: might it not be better, as I have suggested (Wieviorka, 1991, 1997), to consider that any experience of racism which has a degree of historical depth necessarily combines two different philosophies - one of inferiority and the other of differentiation - contradictory as this may seem? When an immigrant-origin group is particularly prone to exploitation at the workplace because it is subject to racism, and is moreover isolated in urban space, possibly even being ordered to go home, does this not imply that this group is subjected to these two forms of racism at one and the same time? Instead of confronting two forms of racism and suggesting that they follow each other in time, it does seem to me to be preferable to show that the two major schools of thought necessarily coexist, but the forms vary: today, it is the case that in Europe we see a situation in which an approach stressing difference is stronger or more visible than that referring to inferiority, in particular when unemployment is widespread and immi- grant-origin populations may seem, temporarily, not to fulfil any useful function, because no employer needs them. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3129

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the two-school model of racism — classical scientific inferiority vs. cultural differentialism — and the claim that they coexist rather than succeed one another in time.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interests in how ideological categories mutate while persisting; parallels the ADDENDUM article on immodesty moral panics as class/identity signaling. — connects to: Structural-historical and confessional-memoir antiracisms may complement rather than rival each other — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 772; the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that inferiority-based and difference-based racisms coexist in varying proportion, rather than succeeding each other, is a paradigm-shifting reframe of how racism is periodized and theorized.