Race operates as a political theology underpinning sacrifice of groups

Evidence

In ordering and sustaining conviction, in seeking to determine and delineate nature, race even in its erasure, its muting, thus is a political theology. It underpins sacrifice both in the sense of what social beings can be sacrificed and who take themselves to be making sacrifice. It offers (up) a porous social prophylaxis, condomizing society as much against itself as against its constitutive outsides. So race conjures a group theology, a theology of groups. It sets out in religious registers at the outset but increasingly takes on secularized and lately individualizing articulation though in still apocalyptic terms. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1883

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘On Sacrifice’ article: race as a social prophylaxis dictating who can be sacrificed and who takes themselves to be making sacrifice.
• DEEPTHINKING: Race as ‘condomizing society’ against both itself and its outsides, evolving from religious to secular-apocalyptic registers, is a dense reframing worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Race gained social hegemony as religion declined, becoming a secularized civic theology — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1345; Sacralized politics racializes others to make their rights violatable — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 107; Defending a Christian nation has meant defending the racial order — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 476