Early Cape racial hierarchy existed without a race-based governing rationality

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Severe sex-ratio imbalance drove early intimate racial mixing at the Cape — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1315; Cape settlers imported the biblical Ham myth to rationalize racial control by 1707 — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1352; Late-eighteenth-century Cape recordkeeping made white the default superior racial category. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1388 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial hierarchy and whiteness were invented inside Europe before modern capitalism #complicates (0.81)
• In eighteenth-century Cape, race was defined religiously as the space between human and animal #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1360