Unified strategic identity categories inevitably silence subordinated members within them.

Evidence

However, as he explains, although at that stage ideas of ethnicity and multiculturalism were seen as unhelpfully divisive, there later came a point at which it had to be recognized that the construction of a singularly inclusive black identity also created many serious problems. Not least, it tended to silence all those who were subordinated within this category—notably, in the British case, people of various Asian ethnicities and, in all cases, those outside the normative category of heterosexual masculinity. To this extent, his argument is that, necessary as the moment of strategic essentialism had been in constructing a positive imagery of blackness around which to unite those marginalized and repressed by the racism of British culture, nonetheless, by the late 1980s, these silences could be maintained no longer. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 149

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines strategic essentialism as a necessary but ultimately silencing stage in anti-racist identity politics.
• XREF: Directly feeds later Islamophobia readings on how ‘Muslim’ as a category similarly silences internal diversity; echoes Gayatri Spivak’s strategic essentialism debates.
• SEED: Article angle: how single-axis identity categories in anti-racist movements reproduce the same exclusions they contest.