Apartheid needed little rationalization because it rested on divine mandate

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Apartheid accordingly turned these convictions, this self-urging, into an urgency to complete its edifice, to order all social arrangements in and across racial terms, to orchestrate racial relation and restrain racial intercourse. The racial terms of this set of convictions – broadly set at the foundations if not always settled, shifting in content, subject to negotiation as much personal as political – represented deep-seated commitments. They were immanent in presumption, if instrumentalized in relation to material conditions. They offered the a prioris of a sociality that were both rationalization of their social history, their guiding historical narratives, and the broad terms of engagement of their contemporary conditions. They were, as such, as much political principle as economic rationalization. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1529 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Apartheid accordingly turned these convictions, this self-urging, into an urgency to complete its edifice, to order all social arrangements in and across racial terms, to orchestrate racial relation and restrain racial intercourse. The racial terms of this set of convictions – broadly set at the foundations if not always settled, shifting in content, subject to negotiation as much personal as political – represented deep-seated commitments. They were immanent in presumption, if instrumentalized in relation to material conditions. They offered the a prioris of a sociality that were both rationalization of their social history, their guiding historical narratives, and the broad terms of engagement of their contemporary conditions. They were, as such, as much political principle as economic rationalization. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1529 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Afrikaner domination was framed as divine calling and destiny, not rationalized self-interest — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1536; Apartheid’s racial order rested on direct theological self-legitimation, not post-hoc rationalization. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1538; Apartheid’s ideology rested on God-ordained separate-but-equal racial development — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1507 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Apartheid’s racial order rested on direct theological self-legitimation, not post-hoc rationalization. #corroborates (0.96) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1538
• Apartheid rested on commitments that were simultaneously political principle and economic rationalization. #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1529
• Apartheid functioned as political principle as much as economic rationalization. #complicates (0.77) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1529
• Apartheid’s forty-year history emerged from contingency rather than a master plan #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 553