Race both licenses and forecloses what societies may think

Evidence

Stated thus, “occupation” also concerns ideas with which one is currently consumed: “I am occupied by/with these ideas.” These are one’s preoccupations, the things by which one – or what one takes as one’s group, culture or society – is driven before taking action on them, as a prelude to taking action, sometimes even a foreclosure on the possibility of doing something, or of doing it otherwise. As a set of transforming ideas over time and in place, race has set distinct horizons on what is – if not possible or impossible – licensed to think about social groups and their members, where they can be or the modes of work in which they can engage. Race, accordingly, not only licenses or encourages but equally forecloses and discourages thought and action. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1848

Categorization

• DEFINE: Third sense of ‘occupation’ — preoccupation — and race’s role in bounding thought itself.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”