Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the concept of race stressed distinctions of color as fixed and unchangeable. But for Hall, twentieth-century redefinitions of blackness reveal how identities and  attitudes can be transformed through the medium of language itself. Like the “badge of color” W. E. B. Du  Bois evoked in the anticolonial era, “black” became a sign  of solidarity for Caribbean and South Asian migrants who  fought discrimination in 1980s Britain. Hall sees such manifestations of “new ethnicities” as grounds for optimism in the face of worldwide fundamentalisms that respond with fear to social change.