Post-apartheid racial secularization preserves racialized suffering under new forms

Evidence

A people stricken of AIDS told to chew on beetroot and garlic. A thousand deaths a day and nearly two million children orphaned to a disease and abandoned to inadequate state care and private charity (another 4 percent of the population facing almost certain impoverishment). The return of drug-resistant tuberculosis in a country with the best healthcare system on the continent. Non-stop corporate construction, facing away from non-ending shantytowns across town if not across the street, stretching cities well beyond their limits, landless across rural landscapes. Prison incarceration rates second only to the US, institutions run by the same private global enterprises, and still not known for respecting human rights. In each instance, those suffering these social conditions under racial secularization are racially related to those who suffered it under racial absolutization. Racial southafricanization makes evident that relation between the centrality of race to modernity and its invisible indispensability to neoliberalism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1615

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘racially related’ claim — that the same racial subjects now suffer under neoliberalism that suffered under apartheid — invites scrutiny about continuity versus distinct mechanisms of harm.
• SEED: Article angle: how visible racial rule (apartheid) gave way to invisible racialized suffering under austerity and privatization — race as the silent carrier of neoliberal harm.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how institutions and reputation systems structure outcomes — here the private prison industry and state healthcare as racialized infrastructure. — connects to: Post-apartheid sovereignty governs the quality of living but not who lives — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1628