Treating ethnic groups as stable natural entities may reinforce the reifications that enable genocide

Evidence

Stuart Hall (1985, 1988) has argued that cultural identity is “not an essence but a positioning,” a complex, contradictory, and shifting arena in which racial and ethnic categories become both the dominant way that hegemony and exploitation are experienced, and sites of hybridization and resistance (see also Lowe, 1996). By treating “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” as a real, bounded, and stable natural entity, do scholars and prosecutors of genocide run the risk of reinforcing the hegemonic reifications that were used in catalyzing and attempting to legitimate genocide? — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 267

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reflexive paradox — that genocide scholars themselves risk reifying the very categories that legitimated genocide — is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting thought worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Indigenous and Chicana women frame toxic contamination as systematic genocide — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 233