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The difference sameness makes
[journal article]
Abstract This article examines the form and effects of differentiation that surface within the artifice of racial sameness. Using contemporary debates between ‘native-born’ and ‘foreign-born’ blacks in the USA over the right to ‘African American’ identity and the ... view more
This article examines the form and effects of differentiation that surface within the artifice of racial sameness. Using contemporary debates between ‘native-born’ and ‘foreign-born’ blacks in the USA over the right to ‘African American’ identity and the socioeconomic threat posed to the former by the latter, I show how the operation of the logic of race internally within a racial group reiterates familiar effects of racialization. Drawing on Freud’s notion of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ as a framing device, I point out that this difference/sameness relation is not simply antagonistic through an analysis of the ambiguity of Africa as posing a socioeconomic threat in the migrants it sends while also presenting the historical and symbolic basis for African American claims to cultural distinctiveness. The article builds a critique of the invention of sameness that makes difference in two key ways: first, through the representation of difference as an antithesis that affirms the racialized self characterized by sameness; and second, that this makes a political difference in the sense that this dialectic of black as self and other reifies the social problematic of its sameness/difference relation as intrinsically (intra)racial to the extent that the substantive socioeconomic causality of racial stratification and racism are obscured.... view less
Free Keywords
African American; black; ethnicity; race; racism;
Document language
English
Publication Year
2005
Page/Pages
p. 343-364
Journal
Ethnicities, 5 (2005) 3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796805054960
Status
Postprint; peer reviewed
Licence
PEER Licence Agreement (applicable only to documents from PEER project)