Even conceptually abstract race is never far from racism’s violence

Evidence

As an abstract conception of social categorization, then, race perhaps need not be exercised to exclusionary, debilitating, and humiliating ends against those taken not to belong to the designated privileged group. But historically it has been invoked throughout its half-millennial histories to these ends. It carries the prospect if not the promise of violence with it. It follows historically that when invoked to mark the human, race almost invariably operates as threat, as pernicious, as disruptive. Racism, of course, always incorporates race within it as basis of conceptual differentiation. In that sense, racisms can be said to order race, to require and to fabricate it. But the related point I am pushing here, the one to which the reach of arguments throughout the book draws, is the complementary one, at once simpler and more obscure. Race, in short, is never far from racism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1842

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the book’s title and earlier chapters’ argument that racial conception is inseparable from racist practice. — connects to: Racialized minorities in white communities may integrate but never congregate without provoking violence