Race historically shaped national population membership and its exclusions

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘the population’ means as a raced category — membership, exclusion, recognition — giving a working vocabulary for the book’s argument.
• 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 1921 quota law locked in racial composition as nationality limits — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1878 (+1 more)