Apartheid emerged from South Africa’s modernizing history, not an anomaly

Evidence

From this point on an increasingly cohesive and assertive political theology of race came to structure social belief, polity, economy, and law, including the supply of labor, education, residential space, and voting rights. Overall dispositions were still riven by tensions between racial naturalism and historicism, messianism and the secularized mentality of a missionary moralism. But the way was opened up to the emergent march, the culmination of a century-long trek, if not quite straightforwardly or inevitably, to the apartheid state. Far from anomaly, far from oddity, the apartheid state had roots deep in the modernizing history of South Africa, if not in Europe’s colonial extension (of) itself. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1485

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s loaded term ‘political theology of race’ as a force structuring belief, economy, law, and space.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that apartheid was rooted in modernization — not a regression from it — inverts the common liberal frame and deserves sustained reflection.