Racist ideologies both oppress subordinated groups and can be inverted into resistance

Evidence

Its effects are similar to other ideologies from which, on other grounds, it must be distinguished: racisms also dehistoricize—translating historically specific structures into the timeless language of nature; decomposing classes into individuals and recomposing those disaggregated individuals into the reconstructed unities, the great coherences, of new ideological “subjects”: it translates “classes” into “blacks” and “whites,” economic groups into “peoples,” solid forces into “races.” … It is also pertinent for the dominated subjects—those subordinated ethnic groups or “races” which live their relation to their real conditions of existence, and to the domination of the dominant classes, in and through the imaginary representations of a racist interpellation, and who come to experience themselves as “the inferiors,” les autres . … The racist interpellations can become themselves the sites and stake in the ideological struggle, occupied and redefined to become the elementary forms of an oppositional formation—as where “white racism” is vigorously contested through the symbolic inversions of “black power.” The ideologies of racism remain contradictory structures, which can function both as the vehicles for the imposition of dominant ideologies, and as the elementary forms for the cultures of resistance. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 638

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how racism fits Hall’s apparatus of interpellation: it constitutes racial subjects including the ‘inferiors’ themselves.
• XREF: connects to: A group can move from oppressed to oppressor by changing its racial assignment — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 31; Racism becomes hegemonic when subordinated groups consent to naturalized hierarchy. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 461; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: Ours, True, and the Identity That Defends Both”