Perceived numeric threat shifts rulers from assimilation toward segregated dominance

Evidence

In British Natal and the boer republics, by contrast, African presence was more palpably felt as threatening, conjuring insecurities regarding not only land and labor but likewise and perhaps more pressingly of physical and cultural degeneration. Indigenous groups vacillated between openness to the boers or the British, depending on who would extend them greater respect, resources, or simply peaceful coexistence, and outright hostility. Indigenous resistance was inevitably folded into the pre-existing set of colonizing dispositions regarding race, re-enforcing the dominant sense of primitivity and naturalized hostility. Once the British left the southwestern security of Cape control over political economy for the less settled northeast, their ruling disposition came quickly to emulate that of the boers. South Africa’s future lay ultimately in the racial dynamics of the territory’s more northern field of vision. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1434

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels threatened-privilege findings on Whites’ demographic-decline threat; shows same shift in South Africa. Strong candidate for the reader’s cross-axis generalization test. — connects to: Equality gains by subordinate groups trigger perceived threat in dominant groups — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 151
• SEED: Angle: demographic ratio as a switch between assimilationist and segregationist ruling modes across cases (US West/South, South Africa, Natal) — a comparative test of threatened-privilege theory.