Historicist racial argumentation is harder to dismiss than biologized racism

Evidence

Thus, in evading for what principally are philosophical reasons the standard biologized conception of racist commitment, the “ancien régime” of race rule, so to speak, Locke initiates a new line of interpretation. It is one that though less remarked has remained at least as popular since, perhaps precisely because more nuanced and easily hidden, harder to pin down and tougher to dismiss. So, Locke initiated a tradition of racial argumentation that runs clear through John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte in the empiricist tradition of the nineteenth century. But it equally marks the technological progressivism and streak of historicist developmentalism in Marx, as it does also contemporary monoculturalists and conservative liberals. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is the historicizing strain actually more durable than the naturalizing one because it can absorb critique? Goldberg says yes — this claim about the relative stickiness of racisms deserves further testing against other cases.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the more nuanced historicizing racism is the more persistent and harder-to-pin-down form — because it evades refutation by absorbing critique — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting observation about how racial ideology operates.
• XREF: connects to: Reading judicial opinions as cultural productions exposes races’ contested origins — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 364

Related

• Racial historicism makes racial structures invisible and absolves individuals of responsibility for them (similarity 0.82)
• Racial historicism and the rule of law co-evolved as instruments of dominance (similarity 0.81)
• Reading judicial opinions as cultural productions exposes races’ contested origins (similarity 0.79)
• Race is a contemporary, evolving formation rather than a premodern leftover (similarity 0.79)
• Historicist racial thought fueled abolition while naturalism underpinned slavery (similarity 0.79)
• Historicist regimes govern race by constituting it through law itself (similarity 0.79)
• Race in racism is an explanatory idea, not an object of scientific study. (similarity 0.79)
• Racisms are only intelligible through their specific historical context, not a universal essence. (similarity 0.79)
• Racism relocated from biology into culture after Darwinism lost legitimacy (similarity 0.79)
• Nineteenth-century racial historicism framed non-Europeans as immature rather than inferior (similarity 0.78)
• Race and racism must be distinguished analytically and politically (similarity 0.78)