Contempt for labor gave the Boers’ race concept economic meaning.

Evidence

The black slaves in South Africa quickly became the only part of the population that actually worked. Their toil was marked by all the known disadvantages of slave labor, such as lack of initiative, laziness, neglect of tools, and general inefficiency. Their work therefore barely sufficed to keep their masters alive and never reached the comparative abundance which nurtures civilization. It was this absolute dependence on the work of others and complete contempt for labor and productivity in any form that transformed the Dutchman into the Boer and gave his concept of race a distinctly economic meaning. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 505

Categorization

• XREF: The link between parasitism, contempt for labor, and racial meaning connects to the reader’s toolkit on how economic relations get expressed as race — a mechanism relevant to how Islamophobia encodes economic anxieties. — connects to: The Boers twisted chosenness into license for lazy domination.; Race-based dignity made manual labor degrading for Boers; Racism in South Africa stems from its economic structure, not petty official bias (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 505

Broader Connections

• Race-based dignity made manual labor degrading for Boers #expands (0.92)
• Racism in South Africa stems from its economic structure, not petty official bias #expands (0.80)
• Labor economics drove the legal invention of Blackness as property. #complicates (0.72)