Race’s apparent naturalness conceals the labor that reproduces racial arrangements

Evidence

By the late nineteenth century race had assumed throughout the European orbit a sense of naturalness and commitment, a more or less taken-forgranted marking of social arrangements and possibilities, an assumed givenness and inevitability in the ascription of superiority and inferiority, sameness and difference, civilization and vulgar lack. This supposed naturalness meant the ease of racial reference for the relatively powerful and privileged. This easiness of racial ascription served to hide from view – to hide from and for the more racially powerful themselves – exactly the hard work, conceptually and materially, socially and politically, legally and forcefully, it took to set up and reproduce racial arrangements. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 58

This supposed naturalness meant the ease of racial reference for the relatively powerful and privileged. This easiness of racial ascription served to hide from view – to hide from and for the more racially powerful themselves – exactly the hard work, conceptually and materially, socially and politically, legally and forcefully, it took to set up and reproduce racial arrangements. Science and literature, scripture and law, culture and political rhetoric all worked in subtle and blunt ways to establish the presumption of white supremacy, to naturalize the status of white entitlement and black disenfranchisement, of European belonging wherever the claim might be staked and of non- European servitude and servility. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 58

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism — that naturalized ease hides the constitutive work of racial reproduction from even its beneficiaries — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how regimes stay invisible to their own operators.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on how ‘common sense’ and ease of reference in any domain (gender, class, technology) function as camouflage for the ongoing labor of reproduction.
• XREF: Naturalization of an oppressive arrangement parallels the threatened-privilege mechanism: privilege that comes to seem natural is defended as if it were baseline reality. — connects to: The apparent erasure of race and the ongoing racial ordering are one process — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 958; Claiming a new racial identity unravels when ancestry is revealed, except through passing.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 58