The difference sameness makes

Journal article | Zeitschriftenartikel

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.

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• Extent: Seite(n): 343-364
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Status: Postprint; begutachtet (peer reviewed)

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Ethnicities, 5(3)

Classification and Topics

• Subject: African American; black; ethnicity; race; racism;

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Louis, Brett
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (when): 2005

Further information

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796805054960
• URN: urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-230197
• Rights: GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften. Bibliothek Köln