Race is a modern construct disguised as ancient, not a premodern condition

Evidence

Race then is not a premodern condition but a quintessentially modern one masquerading in the guise of the given and the ancient, bloodlines and genetic pools. States have acquired their modernity more or less and partially through racial assumption, through being drawn into the terms and forms, shapes and spaces, temporalities and rhythms of racial world ordering and world racial definition. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Reverses the common intuition that race is archaic and premodern; the key reframing claim of the chapter.
• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters’ genealogy of the racial state and to broader critical race theory claims that race is modern (e.g. recent scholarship on race as emerging with colonial modernity). — connects to: Immanuel Kant supplied the first scientific definition of race in 1775. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 264; Race has no scientific basis and is a social myth dating to UNESCO 1950. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 98; Realist racial-formation theory treats religious-flavored premodern hostility as not a form of race. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 21 (+4 more)

Related

• Race is a modern condition masquerading as ancient (similarity 0.93)
• Race is a contemporary, evolving formation rather than a premodern leftover (similarity 0.92)
• Race is a modern construct that states adopt to become modern (similarity 0.90)
• Race is a distinctly modern construct central to globalization (similarity 0.90)
• Race is a modern concept tied to early global capitalism and colonial conquest. (similarity 0.89)
• Race is a modern concept barely existing before the Enlightenment (similarity 0.89)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state from its emergence (similarity 0.88)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state, not incidental to it. (similarity 0.87)
• Ancient notions of race as biology do not match reality (similarity 0.87)
• Race as a configuration dates only from the late eighteenth century (similarity 0.86)
• Race was once understood as a fixed natural essence, not a social construct. (similarity 0.85)
• Race is an unstable, fully-fledged social fact like class or gender (similarity 0.85)
• Race is counter-historical in displacing theological modes of rationality and sociality (similarity 0.85)
• Race and racism must be distinguished analytically and politically (similarity 0.85)
• Racial theory needed post-Enlightenment science to become a legitimation system (similarity 0.84)