However, as James Procter notes, “while the inclusive nature of ‘black’ in the 1970s offered a way of overcoming cultural ‘differences,’ it also led to the suppression of difference in presenting a unified front against racism. ‘Black’ was forced to conceal and perpetuate a range of inequalities and tensions internal to the imagined community it drew together.”

XREF: Connects to broader debates about identity categories and strategic essentialism — Spivak's strategic essentialism and critiques of single-axis identity politics.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 151