The predicament of identity: to join or not to join them

Cultures are defined against each other. As long as you define yourself as "belonging to" this or that culture, you set yourself in opposition to all others, driven by a subliminal urge to flock that you are hardly aware of, except for its external consequences. In human groups, this dynamic becomes a social fact beyond the control of the individuals comprising the group. Individuation, in the Jungian sense, helps the individual become aware of their place in a group as a fully realised individual: it becomes an ongoing conscious decision-making process to cooperate with others without succumbing to the "herd instinct".

Most branches of anthropology and sociology look into purely social facts, knowingly or unknowingly ignoring psychological facts. They are sciences of group cultures, not individuals. I personally am interested in a holistic, philosophical understanding of the human condition, rather than in lining up social facts in the most rational way. That, perhaps, makes more biased towards individuated persons, as I'd rather find out how an individual finds sense and purpose living among other humans, rather than research the infinite variation of the basically same human activity: flocking into groups, creating intra-group social difference and engaging in inter-group relations.

How can we shut down racism?

Flocking into groups based on any shared, real or imaginary, trait is a basic human drive. The good side of it is that humans can only survive by cooperating. On the flipside are racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, groupthink, etc. It takes a self-realised individuated human to become aware to what extent one needs to be part of a group and when it is time to say, 'I'm out of here'. Overcoming group dynamic by propaganda and mass education will mostly create knee-jerk reactions of the anti-political-correctness kind. Even when suppressed very effectively, sooner or later this will burst into something ugly (kind of like suppressed wish pops up elsewhere as a neurosis): just look at how rampantly and shamelessly xenophobic have become the supposed bulwarks of tolerance like Holland and Denmark.

Deindividuation and deindividualisation in racialised context

Deindividuation, in plain English, is when individuals turn into a mob. Deindividualisation is when you paint a social group as a homogeneous slab whose members allegedly have no individual characteristics, like "Muslims", or "African-Americans", or "gays", or even "women". 

Neither is a pretty thing. The herd instinct is behind Nazi rallies, lynching, and Black Friday stampedes. Ostracising social groups is Divide and Rule 101, an age-old technique of cynical mass control.

The two can cross-pollinate selectively. That's when it turns really ugly. Thus, London riots of 2011 became racialised as "ethnic minorities going out of hand", and the perpetrators get meted out 1800 years of prison sentences.  On the other hand, drunk college jocks rampages or the Bullingdon club's violent antics are written off as "boys going wild". The class, race and increasingly religion-centred prejudice make out essentially the same events as if radically different in nature.

In essence, that's what anthropologists do too, just from the other (left-wing) side of the same paradigm. The psychological aspect of mob behaviour often escapes social scientists, who look for all answers in social contexts, as if individuals do not exist. Unfortunately for anthropologists, the tireless paeans of cultural difference, some things are just really "universal human nature". Dismissing that fact precludes any meaningful understanding of social events: humans are reduced to the reductive Homo Anthropologicus, a perennial cultural group actor, put into action by collectively shared beliefs and rituals differing based on class, gender, or ethnicity.

What is identity?

... an illusionary habit of an unawakened mind and reaffirmed by a collective belief in its reality, somewhere between the minimum group paradigm and the mirror stage..

Reproducing the hierarchy

The only advantage that ruling elite haves is their training in a misplaced sense of entitlement that they later project onto the Great Unwashed to legitimise their power.

 

If you are born into the right family, you're trained to behave like a alpha, or fake it. That alone upholds the order. And that's how we end up ruled by clueless clowns who know how to look powerful and important.