Interesting book, I learned much from it. Below Hall identifies how race-ism obstructs academic inquiry and, I would add, Left political activism. Race-ism, hyper-vigilant race consciousness, race fetishism, race absolutism is not bringing us closer to the elimination of racism, but rather it safeguards and fortifies those economic relationships which substrate racial inequalities.
Not to mention all the others. Hall:
My visit to Tin Aicha exposed for me the problem of trying to draw
too close a connection between a particular local history of relations
between groups of people over generations and the articulation of racial
arguments.
This may appear an elementary sort of problem for historians
of race in the United States, where dislocation, migration, and industrialization
went hand in hand with the development of racial formation.
At the beginning of my research I had hoped to use microhistories of
relations between particular groups of people over time as a way of tracing
the emergence of racial ideas and racial identities, especially among
former slaves and their former masters. But the problem that the Tin
Aicha case highlights is that racial arguments are, almost by definition,
abstractions that do not adhere well to real places and real people. Race
works instead as an argument about the world, as a moral ordering
device, even at times as a way of conjuring a utopian vision; it does not
work nearly as well in organizing the details of individual relationships. It
is precisely the abstractness of race that makes it so effective because it is
not easily susceptible to empirical disproof, and it can coexist with social
relations that belie the premises of different racial arguments.
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