Structuralist accounts render subalterns passive and erase their agency in sustaining racist ideologies

Evidence

Notice that Duany describes blacks as “subject to” whitening. He implies that blacks are simply passive repositories of these ideologies. The notion that blacks may articulate, sustain, and aggressively encourage whitening is side-stepped. In fact, who or what is subjecting them to these ideologies is not addressed. Instead power is portrayed as freefloating and abstracted from actors. The crucial questions about the source of racist values and discourses as well as how individuals are negotiating this cultural terrain are left unexamined. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3612

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense methodological critique: how scholarly framing choices can themselves perpetuate a sanitized depiction of hegemony by denying subalterns any complicity — a genuinely paradigm-questioning point.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: scholarship that protects the oppressed from the charge of racist agency may inadvertently reduce them to passive victims, flattening their actual historical complexity.
• XREF: connects to: The Subaltern group’s glorified speech model rests on a crude psychology — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1795; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”; the MOC “The Forge and the Other: How Power, Discourse, and Encounter Cast the Self” (+1 more)