Race structures the modern state through theological categories

Evidence

Race, I have insisted, is a structuring conception of the modern state. Modern states become modern in and through the various technological apparatuses of race. Race takes on and embeds in its onto-logical conception some of the key contributing elements of theological conception – of belonging and othering, friend and enemy; of the familial and familiar, the exogenous and strange; of origins and differentiation, the distinct and demonized; and so too of sacralization and sacrifice. It looks to schemes both to differentiate and divide the wanted from the unwanted, the qualified from the disabled, the productive from the dependent, the healthy from the diseased and polluting. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1823

Race, I have insisted, is a structuring conception of the modern state. Modern states become modern in and through the various technological apparatuses of race. Race takes on and embeds in its onto-logical conception some of the key contributing elements of theological conception – of belonging and othering, friend and enemy; of the familial and familiar, the exogenous and strange; of origins and differentiation, the distinct and demonized; and so too of sacralization and sacrifice. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1823

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out how racial onto-logic borrows theological binaries like friend/enemy and sacred/profane to justify state categorization.
• XREF: Resonates with the friend/enemy distinction from Carl Schmitt and with Goldberg’s earlier chapters on racial formation. — connects to: Post-apartheid reconciliation inverted the theological frame of apartheid rule — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1573; A governor won office on a theology that God ordained segregation — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 118; the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the sacrifice article: race’s sacralization-and-sacrifice structure parallels the ritual-sacrifice reading of state formation.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1823