Race has structured population membership and exclusion throughout modernity

Evidence

Throughout modernity, race has fashioned “the population.” It has shaped membership and standing in the nation-state from the patchwork of those present. It has ordered inclusion and exclusion, the shaping of taboos and prohibitions that sustain the Chosen and those set apart, the sacred and moral community against the pariahs and outcasts. It has molded demographic diversity, sculpting population heterogeneity to the reproduced benefit of those structurally in power, invariably identified in the racial scheme as white. Race, thus, has defined and refined the population, who makes it up and how to recognize its contours, its boundaries, how it is put to work, how its maps of living, learning, policing, and playing are drawn, how legal regimes and regimes of truth molding the population are constituted. It licenses who is recognized, whose interests and indeed individuality are rendered invisible. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1773 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Most commentators have understood racial configurations and racist articulations in contemporary states as anomalous, and racist states such as Nazi Germany or South Africa as extreme exceptions (e.g., Mann 1984; Kershaw 1989; Burleigh and Wippermann 1991). Rogers Smith (1997; 18) helpfully shifts the grounds of analysis by contrasting with the exceptional thesis a more nuanced characterization of the American polity as embedding “multiple traditions,” both inclusivist and exclusivist. Both traditions, for Smith, are basic to ~ and competing for - American political foundations. Smith‘s revision importantly promotes a more nuanced critical theory of racial states in general, and of the US in particular. I have been insisting throughout, however, on a deeper if commected point. Given the modernity of states as racially premised, the traditions of racial inclusivity are interconstitutive with and codependent upon the traditions of exclusivity. Modern states have ordered and arranged their racial inclusivities on the necessity of racist exclusivities. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 137 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Unruly populations defined through racial extension face necropolitical discipline — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1750; Race constitutively shaped how modern state populations were formed and circulated — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1885; The same racecraft tools operate against every subordinated minority across centuries — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 455 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Race historically shaped national population membership and its exclusions #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1773
• Racial inclusivity and exclusivity are mutually constitutive in modern states #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 137