Formal legal inclusion preserved incumbent control of incorporation criteria across slavery, colonialism, and apartheid.

Evidence

What the movements ended up doing in each instance, not insignificantly but also revealingly, was to admit, all too often begrudgingly, those hitherto excluded into social arrangements and conditions the definitions of which continued to be dominated by those who had held racial power in the first place. This nominal admission was, for the most part, principally legal. Political, social, and cultural recognition and access were much less compelling and so more ambivalent. What changed little or less so were the criteria of incorporation and the defining power over those criteria. … Former slaves could compete formally for positions from which they were hitherto excluded as slaves and now excluded for the most part by (relative) lack of education, training, capital, accumulated wealth, and social standing. Likewise, though in different ways and to different degrees, with former colonial or segregated subjects and apartheid’s discarded. Equal access to unequal resources and possibilities from positions of unequal preparation and power ultimately entails a third-class ticket to nowhere. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 114

Categorization

• XREF: Strongly tracks the contact/institution gap the reader is researching — nominal inclusion alongside unchanged defining power. Compare to Loïc Wacquant on ‘advanced marginality’ and the transnational replication of the ‘contact/institution’ mechanism. — connects to: Colonial officials kept legal distinctions after freedom to sustain slavery.; Slavery-like conditions persisted legally and forcibly after emancipation to block black wealth building — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 50
• SEED: Angle: a tripartite comparative tracing how each antiracist breakthrough (abolition, decolonization, anti-apartheid) re-secured white control over criteria of incorporation — candidate evidence that threatened-privilege reproduction is a general mechanism.

Broader Connections

• Colonial officials kept legal distinctions after freedom to sustain slavery. #corroborates (0.85)
• Slavery-like conditions persisted legally and forcibly after emancipation to block black wealth building #corroborates (0.85) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 50