Race-ethnicity distinctions legally include and exclude colonized populations simultaneously

Evidence

What is important to consider, therefore, is the history whereby the distinction between race and ethnicity is here primarily a legal distinction by means of which a population is both included (ruled by Western law) and excluded (deemed to be exterior to the law by the law) and falling under a different set oflaws named “customary.” The colonial state and Western law produced political differences within the colonized, but it also naturalized these political differences as cultural, and indeed ethnic. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 42

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The race/ethnicity dichotomy is reframed as one legal apparatus performing simultaneous inclusion-exclusion — a genuinely paradigm-level distinction worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Progressive-era immigration law expressly excluded the diseased, criminal, illiterate, and Asiatic. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3884; State commissions manufactured ethnic categories and attached graded citizenship rights to them — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 560