Shifting racism’s targets exposes the social construction of race itself

Evidence

The recodification of racism in North America (and, by extension, Western Europe) is an exceedingly important and historic development, for from our vantage point it in fact, and quite paradoxically, defetishizes the famous color line that W. E. B. Du Bois identified as the defining moment of the twentieth century; and it exposes the social construction of racism and the manufactured racialization of humanity, thus divided so that it may be better ruled. With the services they are eager to provide, the native informers present a paradoxically positive aspect, for they become caricatures of themselves by caricaturing the cultures they represent or misrepresent. By overselling themselves, the native informers expose the transitory paradigmatics of manufacturing race, ethnicity, and gender apartheid mechanisms. The color line can no longer claim to be the defining moment of the twentieth century with Barack Obama as president and, more important, with the transmutation of black into brown, African into Arab, and Jew into Muslim. This transitional period exposes the naked neurosis of the racist imagination and should release humanity forever from the artificial bondage of manufactured racialization, of racialized minorities (who are in fact the majority), cross-fetishizing their “races”. For every black or brown native informer there are millions of human beings who are not and should not be trapped inside a racialized imagination. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 639

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradoxical claim that new racisms defetishize the old color line, exposing racialization as manufactured and freeing humanity from it, is a genuinely counterintuitive and rich reframing.
• XREF: connects to: Race emerges from prior racist practice, not from perceived difference — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 32; Racialization describes how signifying processes construct social groups as races. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 36; Racialization is a changing process where context shapes anti-racism too — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 751 (+1 more)

Related

• Shifting racist targets from black to brown defetishizes Du Bois’s color line (similarity 0.90)
• Racism persists while its targets shift from black to brown and Jew to Muslim (similarity 0.84)
• Racialization is a changing process where context shapes anti-racism too (similarity 0.83)
• American racism has recently recoded blacks and Jews into Arabs and Muslims (similarity 0.82)
• Distinct racist systems fuse by cross-codifying their targets. (similarity 0.81)
• A black-white paradigm in antiracism theory obscures other racisms and inequality forms (similarity 0.79)
• Capital constantly recodifies racist power relations, so oppression shifts targets (similarity 0.79)