Race is simultaneously discovered and constructed, natural and legal.
Evidence
Thus the “constructedness” of race, about which so much has been made in recent racial theorizing, is more complex than most contemporary analyses all too glibly make out. For modern racial order, as I have outlined its conditions of possibility here, is as much “discovered” as it is (reyproduced; it is as deeply the “product” of some presumed laws of nature as the outcome of law’s imperiousness. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 53
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Dissolves the standard nature-vs-construction debate by showing racial order is both discovered and reproduced at once — a genuinely non-obvious synthesis.
Related
- Race was once understood as a fixed natural essence, not a social construct. (similarity 0.81)
- Race’s apparent naturalness conceals the labor that reproduces racial arrangements (similarity 0.81)
- Race is a social reduction to sheer force, not a natural trait (similarity 0.81)
- Race naturalizes state power by disguising its constructed character as sacred and given. (similarity 0.81)
- Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories (similarity 0.80)
- Race naturalizes state power by presenting created hierarchies as given order (similarity 0.80)
- Race is an unstable, fully-fledged social fact like class or gender (similarity 0.80)
- Naturalist law legitimizes repression while historicist law constitutes racial order (similarity 0.80)
- Race is both biological and social because bodies are shaped by social practices (similarity 0.80)
- Race and ethnicity are socially constructed rather than natural categories. (similarity 0.80)
- Race is actively constructed through the ongoing act of defining groups. (similarity 0.80)
- Racial historicism makes racial structures invisible and absolves individuals of responsibility for them (similarity 0.79)
- Historicist regimes govern race by constituting it through law itself (similarity 0.79)
- Racism emerges where race discourse meets the state (similarity 0.79)
- Race is a modern construct disguised as ancient, not a premodern condition (similarity 0.79)