Civilizational ranking justifies denying Millian civility to colonized peoples

Evidence

The grip of governing the historically immature to the point of ruling themselves meant that colonial space had to wait well into the twentieth century before loosening at least the direct metropolitan stranglehold on self-determination, challenging John Stuart Mill’s two conditions for civility: private property and free expression. The insistent (and later resistant) absence of each in colonial societies, at least largely for the locals if pointedly not for the settlers, has been taken as the persistence, natural or cultural, of illiberal constitution. It is seen as the mark of missing modernity, and as such the sign of incivility, of uncivil states, of culturally driven civil unrest or of civilization’s singularly “natural” limits. Driven by “impulse” rather than the ability to “calculate” rationally, the natives are “savage” rather than “civilized,” the specter of the state of nature and its shadow of an untimely, ghastly death always threatening to haunt civil society and by extension the state established in its name. It is the persistent paranoias prompted by this haunting that has continued to fuel the steady shift to what in the later pages of Chapter 1 I characterized as the privatizing logics of “born again racism” in the wake of the postcolonial condition. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 228

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that ‘incivility’ labels are imposed to deny self-determination to a governed group parallels the reader’s contact/institution gap: discrimination persists institutionally while contact-adjacent ‘civility’ rhetoric masks it. Strong cross-axis analogy to nativity-based exclusion. — connects to: Mill justified colonization as tutelage ending in eventual self-governance — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 39
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the complaints-about-immodesty article: dress/custom judged against a ‘civilized’ standard maps onto the morality-panic framing there.

Broader Connections

• Mill justified colonization as tutelage ending in eventual self-governance #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 39