Liberal segregationists justified racial hierarchy by cultural historicism, not biology.

Evidence

While segregation was long fueled by a sense of superiority, that sense was just as easily sustained by presumptions of racial historicism as by racial naturalism, even among Afrikaner leaders. Thus the more liberal likes of Jan Smuts, F. S. Malan, and Jan Hofmeyr nevertheless espoused white cultural elevation over blacks. The latter two went so far as to call in their own ways for at least a limited black franchise, if only on pragmatic grounds. Smuts, by contrast, insisted on long-term trusteeship for the supposed sake of black wellbeing, ostensibly for promoting their own interests. As I have suggested in other regional contexts too, this range represents the classic commitments of racial liberalism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1496

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the racial-liberalism spectrum Goldberg says he finds in other regional contexts, and parallels the ‘immodesty’ theme of class/identity signaling in dress moral panics.