Subordinate groups can invert racial categories to positive strategic effect

Evidence

Given the embedded nature of racial processes in the contemporary environment, it is unsurprising that subordinate groups may invoke difference to mystify, to deny knowledge of themselves to the dominant groups, to confuse and neutralize those who attempt to control or “help” them, or to reduce them to research objects. They may use difference to stress their own separateness, and to authorize their own representations. They may seek to legitimize their own definitions of cultural difference, including those against others from within their own collectivity. They may seize the category, claim it for their own and invert it, attaching positive value where before it was totalizingly negative (Goldberg, 1993). This can lead at times, as we shall see later, to a strange convergence in the language of the racist right and of black or ethnic nationalists, as both infuse the racial or ethnic category with essentialist, and supposedly naturally inherited, characteristics. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 115

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to vault claims about racialization as a contested, two-way process rather than purely imposed — the reappropriation/inversion logic rhymes with how ‘race’ is treated as socially constructed yet strategically deployable elsewhere in the vault. — connects to: Racism becomes hegemonic when subordinated groups consent to naturalized hierarchy. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 461; Ethnic identity choices are constrained by socially defined categories carrying unequal advantage — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 941
• QUESTION: The ‘strange convergence’ between racist right and ethnic nationalist essentialism deserves unpacking — is strategic essentialism structurally the same move as racism’s nature-attribution, differing only in direction?
• DEEPTHINKING: This passage packs several distinct mechanisms (mystification, denial of knowledge, inverted revaluation) into one account of difference deployed by the subordinate — a genuinely layered treatment of agency within racialization worth sitting with.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 115