Racial Constructions

Matt Feeney thinks Hau Hsu is missing something:

I would argue that, over the last twenty years especially, blackness (and also nonwhiteness, of course, both more generally and in its other specific forms) as an identity, an idea, a cultural marker, has been an object of furious constructive labor not just by self-conscious hip hop jesters and personality-artists, but by advertisers and other corporate sales experts, record execs and producers and promoters, lawyers and politicians, policy entrepreneurs and impresarios in the world of therapy and cultural counseling, educators and human resource professionals. The narrative of liberated multicultural blackness is, I would argue, as much a construct as the old definition of blackness as the hobbled other of whiteness. It has been so furiously taken up for purposes of commerce and politics – people have made so much money off of it – you’d think all those suspicious hermeneuts would approach our new celebratory multiculturalism with the same suspicious wince that they bring to the old tables of racial order.