Apartheid’s racial order rested on direct theological self-legitimation, not post-hoc rationalization.

Evidence

However instrumentalized its sometime expression, the designer racial order and the repression necessary to sustain it – the physical and intellectual violence, the humiliations, the sense of divine power and complete control, of absolute self-righteousness and moral self-elevation, of being the bearer of God’s word and carrying out His command – were at basis taken to be inspired, natural law, God’s plan. The need formally to rationalize, legitimate, or even to represent predefined interests or commitments in terms of the articulation of racial superiority was secondary and soft, at best. The ratiocination was principally direct: we are ordained by God, the Chosen, driven to self-determination to preserve ourselves and all that is dear to us, suffering – as Donald Moore aptly puts it in a neighboring and reversed context – for territory. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1538

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that apartheid’s justification was primarily direct religious authorization rather than secondary rationalizing of pre-existing interests.
• XREF: connects to: Apartheid’s ideology rested on God-ordained separate-but-equal racial development — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1507; Afrikaner domination was framed as divine calling and destiny, not rationalized self-interest — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1536