Apartheid absolutized sovereign power through racial depersonalization and ascription.

Evidence

Driven by racial absolutization, apartheid fueled a commanding and unqualified sovereign power. It exercised the limitless juridical power it ceded itself so as to depersonalize through racial ascription, absolutizing state power and undercutting or delimiting the “right to have rights,” as Arendt puts it. Racial secularization, by contrast, could be said to depress the sovereignty of the sovereign, deflating power by dismantling a technology key to modernity’s assertiveness while leaving its traces – its structures, effects, relations, social differentiations – imprinted into the social landscape of power and privilege. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1629

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ connects directly to the reader’s prior readings on statelessness and bare life. — connects to: Anticipatory threats of dissolution and extinction drove apartheid’s creation — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1505; The apartheid-idea premised racialization of laws on white supremacy. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 552