Race naturalizes state power by presenting created social order as given and teleological

Evidence

That race is a marker, an expression, indeed, constitutive of modern relations of power makes it especially amenable to the expression of state power, one might say, to the central defining condition of modern statehood per se. Through race there is displaced from the modern state, covered over, the raw expression of state power. Such power, nothing more than created, is projected through racial terms as the given order of things, seemingly intractable and so established by natural or teleological law. The consensual rationalization of modern statehood acquires the anchor of racial naturalization; and the givenness of race, its teleology, becomes legitimated - reinforced - through the veneer of consensual agreement of citizens to the state and state fabrication. Those rendered racially inferior or different are locked in and away. The almost conceptual vacuity of race (Stoler, 1997) enables configuration of transnational extrastate identities - for example, “the white race” or diasporic Pan-Africanism - as well as the reification and magnification of local, intrastate racial exclusions (cf. Balibar, 1990). These two movements do not simply pull away from each other. Rather, the elasticity of race pulls them back as they stretch apart into a taut, mutually reinforcing racial order. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1740

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘raw state power covered over by racial naturalization’ strongly echoes the reader’s material on ideology as masking (Communication as Culture), and on the stabilization of stratified societies from the On Sacrifice article. — connects to: Racecraft naturalizes hierarchy so the subordinated consent to their own subordination — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 461; Woodrow Wilson grounded self-government in a hierarchy of stronger and nobler races; Race both drives and expresses violence, property, profit, and power — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 71 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that race’s conceptual vacuity enables BOTH transnational solidarity AND local exclusion simultaneously — pulling apart yet mutually reinforcing — is a genuinely dense paradox worth sitting with.
• SEED: Could form an essay angle: how ‘elastic’ empty signifiers enable both universalist and exclusionist politics at once, using race as the test case.