Apartheid naturalized race rhetorically while shifting racial categories to serve white self-interest.

Evidence

In absolutizing race, apartheid’s agents sought to create the illusion of a timeless, naturalized set of social divisions, even as state representatives shifted the categories and criteria to serve white or Afrikaner self-interest as it suited them from time to time, updating their modes of racial management and rationalization according to the dictates of governmentalizing instrumentalities. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1589

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is the core paradox of racial governance — claiming permanent/natural categories while instrumentally redrawing them. Worth chasing how far this pattern generalizes beyond South Africa.
• XREF: connects to: Participants’ terse anti-apartheid statements read as perfunctory correctness. — Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle, Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner…, 148; The apartheid-idea premised racialization of laws on white supremacy. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 552; South African racial categories shifted with expediency despite extreme racism — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 564