Race gives bodily power a secular license that still draws humanism’s boundaries at kin

Evidence

Race, in short, grants embodiment to the will to power. If religion is a project of inherent self-servitude, of subjection to God’s will, then religion’s supposedly secularizing repression under modernity by killing off God is a project of self-liberation, an abolitionist project. God is done away with in the name of humanity’s self-willed power. But it is a humanism that coterminously constrains its extension, delimiting its license to those just like me, the familiar and familial. The family of man previously conceived in and by religious order is now animated by the absolutes of racial representation. Where group slaughter was hitherto prompted directly in the name of religious demonism, for the modern project mass slaughter becomes mediated through the motivating threat of racial termination. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1347

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘securing the familial in their chosen status’ logic parallels threats to privileged in-groups — directly relevant to threatened-privilege mobilization research.
• XREF: connects to: Socially constructed races still drive real-world outcomes and were invented to justify slavery — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 110; The skin functions as the organizing referent of a political theology of race — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1501; Race became a secular theology as scientific authority replaced religious justification — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1345 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Race became a secular theology as scientific authority replaced religious justification #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1345
• Race is a social reduction to sheer force, not a natural trait #corroborates (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 124
• The skin functions as the organizing referent of a political theology of race #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1501
• Socially constructed races still drive real-world outcomes and were invented to justify slavery #expands (0.78) — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 110