Race naturalizes the state’s power, making its constructions appear sacred and unchallengeable.

Evidence

Race is an especially convenient form of conceptual social cement here. For just as the state is an expression of power, so it is possible to reconceptualize race in terms of power. Race covers over the “magical” nature of the modern state, making its fetishistic characteristics appear all too readily as naturally given, as sacred and so unchallengeable (Taussig, 1997). Thus even the historicist conceptions of race appear naturalized. Race is conceived as a container or receptacle of power, a medium through and in the name of which power is expressed. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1737

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Echoes Taussig on state fetishism and connects to the reader’s ADDENDUM article on sacrifice as a stabilizer of stratified societies — both treat ideology as sacred cover for hierarchy.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that race serves as ‘conceptual social cement’ naturalizing state power is a dense, paradigm-level insight about why racial hierarchies prove so durable and resistant to challenge.

Related

• Race naturalizes state power by disguising its constructed character as sacred and given. (similarity 0.94)
• Race naturalizes state power by presenting created hierarchies as given order (similarity 0.88)
• Race itself is not a rationalization but the embodiment of power relations. (similarity 0.84)
• Race naturalizes state power by presenting created social order as given and teleological (similarity 0.83)
• Race is a modern construct disguised as ancient, not a premodern condition (similarity 0.81)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state from its emergence (similarity 0.81)
• Race was once understood as a fixed natural essence, not a social construct. (similarity 0.80)
• Race structures the modern state through theological categories (similarity 0.80)
• Race is simultaneously discovered and constructed, natural and legal. (similarity 0.79)
• A racially conceived state can only express itself in racial terms (similarity 0.79)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state, not incidental to it. (similarity 0.79)
• Race is a social reduction to sheer force, not a natural trait (similarity 0.79)
• Race both drives and expresses violence, property, profit, and power (similarity 0.79)
• Race’s apparent naturalness conceals the labor that reproduces racial arrangements (similarity 0.78)
• Extreme racial states come to make race stand for everything (similarity 0.78)