Friedman on Essentialism and Hybridity

In a brilliant critique of the postcolonial concept of "hybridity" as a cosmopolitan goal for the mixing of humanity, Jonathan Friedman defines racism and essentialism in a surprisingly clear way before explaining how the implications of these concepts ensure that hybridity is a self-defeating philosophy.

First, there are two separate arguments that are made in conjunction with racism:

1. "All X are bearers of a set of traits, physical or cultural"
   
2. Cultural traits are reducible to physical ones
   

   Point 1 above is racism proper (eg. all blacks have small brains but athletic physiques, or all blacks are naturally animist), and point 2 is merely essentialism--the idea that beings have an essence from which their traits and practices can be derived (eg. Blacks are naturally animist because their brains are too small to understand reason and empirical evidence)
   

   Which seems the more insidious to you: racism or essentialism?
   

   My reflexive answer would be essentialism of course, given the examples--especially since it flies in the face of individuality, individual responsibility and agency. But preferring reflection to reflex, I can also see how the essentialist idiocy in my example is really only a particular essentialism which would be impossible to think without the prior racist assumptions.
   

   Are there benign essentialisms? Is the idea that individuals have essences, or that species share essential traits really a completely false concept? Friedman argues no: there is no differentiation of species without essentialism, no such thing as habitus. The problem with essentialism is not the concept, but its use. When the concept of essentialism goes beyond ontological considerations (of being, of defining self/ego) and falsely pigeonholes a practice into an inherent property OF being, THAT's when it becomes a problem. And the reason it's a problem is because that's the point at which culture is reduced to the ontological idiosyncrasies of the individual writ large.
   

   So the critique of hybridity as a project, as the endpoint of a goal of cultural mixing then is that it buys into essentialism thinking that mixing individual identities will somehow equal mixing cultures, thereby confusing culture as practice with culture as manifestation of the essence of a certain kind of self/ego. In this sense, hybridity, which claims to be ANTI-essentialist, does NOT present the converse argument (that all X do NOT bear the B cultural trait which most X do), but rather a dependent one (that all X DO carry B trait, so mixing X race with Y race will allow Y race to have B trait too).
   

   Friedman makes a number of other fantastic and rigorous points which I'll post on later in relation to this topic. (Notably: The dangers of cosmopolitanism as an attitude toward culture claiming cultural authority, but not having cultural content of its own.)
   

   
   

   Friedman, Jonathan. "The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush" Spaces of Culture. Ed. Mike and Lash Featherstone, Scott. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publishers, 1999.