Race ideology trumped economic rationality even at ruinous cost

Evidence

In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrific price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid whites wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; expenses for municipal government became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 526

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framework: race society as a stable equilibrium where racism overrides profit — the material substrate for how a ‘race world’ maintains hegemony regardless of economic cost. — connects to: By 1924 racial restrictionism had fully displaced economic arguments for restriction — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1911; An economist created the influential racial typology because professional anthropologists declined — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 921; Racial states act on political logic even at economic cost to capital — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1693
• SEED: Angle: ‘when racism is cheaper than efficiency’ — the Color Bar Bill as a case study in ideology overriding economics, relevant to how Islamophobia persists despite economic disutility.