Subordinate groups strategically deploy difference to resist dominant control and revalue themselves

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. … 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: The ‘strange convergence’ between racist right and ethnic nationalists echoes the essay on sacrifice’s treatment of how opposing sides can share a logic. — connects to: Social control operates through voluntary organizations rather than formal coercion — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115; Domination consigns all who differ merely by virtue of difference to the enemy camp; Subordinate groups historically reversed self-derogation into positive in-group identity and militancy — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 2695 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of a stigmatized category into a positive essentialist identity — and its convergence with the oppressor’s own essentialism — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about identity politics.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 115