Discovery doctrine’s racial core lies in sovereign assertion, not property rules.

Evidence

It is this sovereign assertion which, more than anything else, distinguishes occidental title and makes manifest the racial basis of the doctrine of discovery. Bluntly, the discoverers were the kind of people who had sovereignty and title, and the discovered were the kind of people who had neither. Not only did the discoverers acquire “absolute” and “exclusive” title to the land, not only did discovery thence give them “the exclusive right… to appropriate the lands occupied by the Indians,” they also “asserted the ultimate dominion to be in themselves” (p. 574). Unlike Vitoria’s involving natural law which recognized something like sovereignty vested in them, the Indians were now utterly subordinate to a sovereign power and were “excluded… from intercourse with any European potentate than the first discoverer” (p. 573). The doctrine of discovery becomes one in which the discovered are no longer actors but merely acted upon. They are excluded from operative participation in the doctrine as a mode of legal determination and its constituent purpose becomes “to avoid conflicting settlements, and consequent war” between “European potentates” (p. 573). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to vault definitions of racialization — the discovered are constituted as non-actors through legal doctrine, an instance of racial formation via law. Cross-links to Omi & Winant’s racial formation framework.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the ‘excluded from operative participation’ mechanism that parallels how trees/sacrifice subjects are denied agency in my earlier articles’ framing of constituted passivity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 232