Modern discovery doctrine replaced mythic religious authority with racist legalism

Evidence

Whilst the racial, and racist, basis of the doctrine of discovery is a modern innovation, the doctrine owes much to its premodern forms and ethos. The finding and settlement of putatively unknown lands has long been attended with mythic and religious justification and with rituals of appropriation, all of which strikingly resemble modern practice. Similarity in this case, however, serves to dramatize difference. What marks modern discovery of the occidental variety, the subject of this present paper, is the displacement of the mythic and religious by a combination of racism and legalism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 216 (#expands, via linked claim)

Depending on the interests of the White Christian majority, the US government has used religion to justify enslavement of Africans, settlement of Native Americans’ lands, exclusionary immigration laws, criminalization of Blacks, and securitization of immigrant Muslims. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 1068 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Having come to the proposition that slavery had always been problematic to Western culture, Davis, like Jordan, resorted to mystery: “For reasons that can perhaps never be fully explained, it was the African’s colour of skin that became his defining characteristic, and aroused the deepest response in Europeans.” Davis in conforming to racial convention has inherited its tautology: racial distinctions are the basis of racial sensibilities. He would have been better served by a less presumptuous inquiry into the ideological traditions resident in Western history. Then he might have realized that after some centuries of racial indulgences the substratum of Western thought was unprepared for anything else. Even the shift in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Western thought from a basis of a religious and philosophical epistemology to that of modern science had made little difference. In point of fact, it had merely served to extend the terms and rationales for the fantasy of racial inferiority (for the Jews, Irish, Slavs, and Asians as well as for Blacks). Western scientific thought simply took its place as the latest formal grammar for the expression of a racial metaphysics to which its most natural response was acquiescence. Indeed, during much of the nineteenth century, one of the most persistent projects for which Western science was employed was the attempt to demonstrate what was already understood to be the natural order of the races. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern colonial discovery replaced mythic and religious justification with racism and legalism — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 216; Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 156; Race became a secular theology as scientific authority replaced religious justification — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1345 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern colonial discovery replaced mythic and religious justification with racism and legalism #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 216
• Modern Western science merely updated older religious rationales for racial hierarchy #complicates (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408
• US government has used religion to justify racial subordination throughout history #complicates (0.72) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 1068