Neoliberalizing race moves sovereign power from state to market

Evidence

Racial absolutization played a central role in expressing and extending modern sovereignty, defining whose life was worthless and whose was to be encouraged, a register for privilege, power, indeed, life’s limit, expendability, and extension itself. The shift from sacralization to secularization for which racial southafricanization today stands reveals that the neoliberalizing of race displaces that sovereignty from the state to the realm of the economic, diffusing it from state authority to less identifiable, at once more open and less resistible structural forces. The constitutional constraints on state sovereignty are circumvented to some degree by the privatization of social power. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1630

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Core insight: the privatization of race decentralizes but does not eliminate sovereign power over life, making it less identifiable and therefore less resistible — an argument that reframes what ‘post-racial’ societies actually are.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s biopower and to the reader’s own work on institutions preserving structure after formal abolition. — connects to: Racial secularization displaces sovereign control from state to privatized economic forces — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1628
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1630