Race is a medium that transforms contingent attributes into supposed essences

Evidence

Rather, it is best to see race as always a medium by which difference is represented and otherness produced, so that contingent attributes such as skin color are transformed into supposedly essential bases for identities, group belonging and exclusion, social privileges and burdens, political rights and disenfranchisements. … We are pointing to the fact that race is fabricated, socially made and politically manipulated (Giroux, 1993; Sears, Sidanius, and Bobo, 2000). Blackness and whiteness, “colored” or “mestizaje” accordingly are not essential characteristics of human beings but defined by sociohistorical conditions and political struggles over their valence and meaning, referents and extension. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 106

Categorization

• DEFINE: A compact statement of the racialization mechanism — contingent phenotype made into essentialized basis for hierarchy — useful as reference grounding for the vault’s formation claims.
• XREF: Echoes the vault’s treatment of race as produced otherness and anticipates the fully theorized racial formation definition in the Omi & Winant selections. — connects to: Bodily and cultural notions of race developed together from the start — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 125; If race is social, race is an amalgam of practices, not proxies like phenotype — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 89; Racecraft has material dimensions because segregation itself enacts race. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 328 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 106