Civil society institutions emerged to absorb and legitimate racialized relations of domination.

Evidence

Civil society, then, is to be understood as the particular ways in which disputes and conflicts are fashioned (“constructed”), approached (“managed”), licensed (“legitimated”), and dissipated (“resolved”). It is the sphere – the mode and manner, the style, the rules and regulations – in, for, and through which “civil” conflict and contrast, dispute and distinction emerge, are classified and conceptualized, comprehended and controlled, massaged and managed. Such a sphere requires a set of emergent or already existing institutional arrangements, premises, modes of thinking and interacting, associations and established forms of engagement filling “the space” – the gap or chasm, field or terrain – at least conceptually, modally, between state and individual, family and economy. The arrangements that became identified as civil society emerged to manage and legitimate the otherwise bald, antagonizing, and often resisting relations of domination – economic, political, legal, cultural – between those occupying differentiated social (class, caste, ethnic, racial) positions. … In short, civil society and its attendant modes of civility are the spaces of accommodation to existing relations of social domination and order, racially inscribed. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 229

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the author’s distinctive sense of civil society as conflict-management machinery rather than the Habermasian public sphere.
• XREF: Connects to Goldberg’s racial-neoliberalism thesis the reader keeps returning to across this project; the ‘gap between state and individual’ framing directly feeds the reader’s contact/institution-gap question. — connects to: Civil society is a racially inscribed accommodation to social domination — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 231; Civil society institutions reproduce racially structured societies through non-coercive means — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 140; Civil society functions as a management apparatus for social domination — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 229

Broader Connections

• Civil society is a racially inscribed accommodation to social domination #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 231
• Civil society institutions reproduce racially structured societies through non-coercive means #expands (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 140
• Civil society functions as a management apparatus for social domination #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 229