Racisms must be studied as historically specific systems, not a single general structure.

Evidence

This would have to begin from a rigorous application of what I have called the premise of historical specificity. Racism is not dealt with as a general feature of human societies, but with historically specific racisms. Beginning with an assumption of difference, of specificity rather than of a unitary, transhistorical universal “structure.” This is not to deny that there might well be discovered to be certain common features to all those social systems to which one would wish to attribute the designation “racially structured.” But—as Marx remarked about the “chaotic” nature of all abstractions which proceed at the level of the “in-general” exclusively—such a general theory of racism is not the most favorable source for theoretical development and investigation … Racism in general is a “rational abstraction” in so far as “it really brings out and fixes the common element and saves us repetition.” Thus it may help to distinguish those social features which fix the different positions of social groups and classes on the basis of racial ascription (biologically or socially defined) from other systems which have a similar social function. However, “some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few. Some will be shared by the most modern epoch and the most ancient.” This is a warning against extrapolating a common and universal structure to racism, which remains essentially the same, outside of its specific historical location. … It is only as the different racisms are historically specified—in their difference—that they can be properly understood as “a product of historical relations and possess … full validity only for and within those relations.” It follows that there might be more to be learned from distinguishing what, in common sense, appear to be variants of the same thing: for example, the racism of the slave South from the racism of the insertion of blacks into the “free forms” of industrial capitalist development in the postbellum North; or the racism of Caribbean slave societies from that of the metropolitan societies like Britain, which have had to absorb black workers into industrial production in the twentieth century. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 632

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘historical specificity’ as applied to racism analysis.
• XREF: Hall applies Marx’s method of abstraction from the Grundrisse to racial theory, echoing the Frankfurt School habit and offering the reader a transferable analytic move for their own economic thinking.
• SEED: Possible essay: ‘When abstraction goes wrong’ — how treating structurally distinct systems as one ‘thing’ (racism, or ‘the market’) produces chaotic theory.