Intellectuals function as the day-laborers who cement racial power in place

Evidence

Thus the labor of race is the work for which the category and its assumptions are employed to effect and rationalize social arrangements of power and exploitation, violence and expropriation. Race was turned into a foundational code. But as with all foundations (conceptual and material), it had to be cemented in place. Racial thinkers, those seeking to advance racial representation – scientists and philosophers, writers and literary critics, public intellectuals and artists, journalists and clergy, politicians and bureaucrats – for all intents and purposes became the day-laborers, the brick-layers, of racial foundations. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 61

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and the idea that intellectual labor is construction work — resonates with the reader’s notes on how categories are actively built rather than natural.