Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state from its emergence

Evidence

Race is integral to the emergence, development, and transformations (conceptually, philosophically, materially) of the modern nation-state. Race marks and orders the modern nation-state, and so state projects, more or less from its point of conceptual and institutional emergence. The apparatuses and technologies employed by modern states have served variously to fashion, modify, and reify the terms of racial expression, as well as racist exclusions and subjugation. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1651

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the section’s challenge of Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory — race as constitutive rather than discrete from the state.
• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-level claim: race is not a property a state acquires but integral to the state’s very conceptual and material emergence.

Related

• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state, not incidental to it. (similarity 0.92)
• Race is a modern construct disguised as ancient, not a premodern condition (similarity 0.89)
• The state and race are not conceptually discrete phenomena (similarity 0.88)
• Race is a modern construct that states adopt to become modern (similarity 0.87)
• The racial state is normal, not exceptional, to modernity (similarity 0.87)
• Race is a modern condition masquerading as ancient (similarity 0.87)
• Race is a modern concept barely existing before the Enlightenment (similarity 0.86)
• Race is a contemporary, evolving formation rather than a premodern leftover (similarity 0.86)
• Race is a modern concept tied to early global capitalism and colonial conquest. (similarity 0.86)
• Race is a distinctly modern construct central to globalization (similarity 0.85)
• The modern nation-state is constitutively ordered through racial configuration (similarity 0.84)
• Race itself is not a rationalization but the embodiment of power relations. (similarity 0.84)
• The modern state has been centrally shaped by racial formation and exclusion. (similarity 0.84)
• A racially conceived state can only express itself in racial terms (similarity 0.83)
• Extreme racial states come to make race stand for everything (similarity 0.83)