Strategic essentialism is politically valid but antiracist politics cannot be guaranteed by racial origins

Evidence

On the one hand, Stuart is perfectly willing to concede that there are particular historical moments in which strategic essentialism becomes absolutely germane—if, for instance, you are in a situation where that is all that stands between you and “the fucking LA police.” On the other hand, while he will not accept an antiracism that presumes its politics to be “guaranteed” by racial origins, neither will he support any kind of “post-modern nomadism” that presumes a voluntaristic fluidity in matters of identity. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 900

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines strategic essentialism’s legitimate use and its limits — a crucial concept for the Islamic identity/politics debates downstream.
• ADDENDUM: The refusal of both biologically guaranteed antiracism and postmodern voluntarism is the same tightrope the immodesty moral-panics piece walks between essentialist and constructivist readings of dress.
• XREF: connects to: Strategic essentialism meant reusing hegemonic universals, not repudiating them. — Elizabeth Grosz, Criticism, Feminism and the…, 120; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”