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%T The difference sameness makes %A Louis, Brett %J Ethnicities %N 3 %P 343-364 %V 5 %D 2005 %K African American; black; ethnicity; race; racism; %= 2011-03-01T06:25:00Z %~ http://www.peerproject.eu/ %> https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-230197 %X 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. %G en %9 journal article %W GESIS - http://www.gesis.org %~ SSOAR - http://www.ssoar.info