Scholars’ scare quotes mark race categories as both aberrant and constitutive of lived experience

Evidence

Many a preface to an historical or sociological study of apartheid (my own included) comments on the use of racial “nomenclature.” Announcing a distaste for official apartheid racial categories, yet recognizing the impossibility of dispensing with them, many scholars have resorted to inverted commas to deal with this dilemma. But within the space of these inverted commas, the raw nerve of “race” is exposed and then sealed: on one hand, the association of racial categories with the discourse of apartheid, imposed on the country by a repressive regime, rendered them aberrant; on the other hand, these categories could not be erased since they were also (somehow) constitutive of the lived experiences of South African people. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 575 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Scholars’ inverted commas around race exposed but sealed the concept — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 575; Race is psychoanalysis’s constitutive but disavowed foundation — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1402; Outward racial rigidity masks internally contradictory individual subjectivities

Broader Connections

• Scholars’ inverted commas around race exposed but sealed the concept #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 575