Early Cape racial boundaries were drawn on religious rather than biological lines.

Evidence

The deepest defining distinction well into the eighteenth century continued to be religiously prompted, that is, between the God-fearing and the heathen. Heathen was taken polygenically to occupy the categorical space between human and animal, marking out as pre-Adamite the non-Christian, and so the non-European, from the children of Adam, on one side, and the animal kingdom on the other. Race was still religiously delineated and defined. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1360

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘threatened-privilege’ research question: here religiously-defined boundary-drawing precedes racialized privilege, showing the categorical-exclusion mechanism operating through a different axis than biology. — connects to: Cultural mixing outpaced racial mixing at the colonial Cape despite policing. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1330; Late-eighteenth-century Cape recordkeeping made white the default superior racial category. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1388
• QUESTION: Does the pre-Adamite/heathen slotting of a group between human and animal function as a distinct privilege-protection mechanism versus later biological racism?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1360