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.