Race emerged as a civic religion responding to urbanization and collapsing kinship intimacy.

Evidence

Conceived in large measure as the face of structurally inscribed and embedded violence, modernizing civility is enacted through racial characterization. By the late eighteenth century, race had begun to take hold across the European orbit as the new civic religion, offering novel threads to the civic fabric(ation) of being and relation. Race provided the artifice of substance to otherwise abstracted social intimacy, fashioning permissible or acceptable contours to civility in the face of – as responses to – rapidly expanding populations, quickening urbanization, intensified demographic and cultural heterogeneities, increasing anonymity, and the collapsing intimacies of close(d) kinship communities. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 222

Categorization

• QUESTION: What precisely allowed race to supply ‘artifice of substance’ where older kinship ties had collapsed — worth tracing the specific mechanisms.
• XREF: connects to: Race gained social hegemony as religion declined, becoming a secularized civic theology — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1345; Race emerged as a civic religion responding to urbanization and anonymity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 223