Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories

Evidence

As modern states paradigmatically understood, racial states are no exception. Their very modernity is ordered through the racial configuration of law, and the legal fashioning of racial definition and articulation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 76

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Goldberg’s broader argument that race is not a biological given but a state-produced legal-political category — echoes the earlier US-South Africa comparison on this page. — connects to: Race constitutively shaped how modern state populations were formed and circulated — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1885; States build durable categories that tie unequal rights to separated groups. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 553; Racial states regulate labor, demographics, and crime as core functions — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1665 (+6 more)

Related

• The racial state is a template, not a fixed form (similarity 0.87)
• The modern state has been centrally shaped by racial formation and exclusion. (similarity 0.87)
• Modern statehood is constitutively racial and gendered, not contingently so (similarity 0.86)
• Racial states actively define populations into racial groups through state apparatuses (similarity 0.86)
• Racial states are conditions of being as well as governance structures. (similarity 0.86)
• States fabricate races from existing threads while racial ideas reciprocally shape the state. (similarity 0.86)
• State racial classification shapes social status, opportunity, rights, and identity. (similarity 0.86)
• The modern nation-state is constitutively ordered through racial configuration (similarity 0.85)
• Racial states speak through law yet can only institute racial arrangements brutally (similarity 0.85)
• Racial statecraft is normal to modernity, not an aberration (similarity 0.85)
• The racial state is normal, not exceptional, to modernity (similarity 0.85)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state, not incidental to it. (similarity 0.85)
• Racial states form and persist through relational positioning in a global colonial arrangement. (similarity 0.85)
• Racial states are inherently violent, not merely exercises of power (similarity 0.84)
• Race is a contemporary, evolving formation rather than a premodern leftover (similarity 0.84)