Race versus ethnicity is a colonial legal construction

Evidence

What is important to consider, therefore, is the history whereby the distinction between race and ethnicity is here primarily a legal distinction by means of which a population is both included (ruled by Western law) and excluded (deemed to be exterior to the law by the law) and falling under a different set oflaws named “customary.” The colonial state and Western law produced political differences within the colonized, but it also naturalized these political differences as cultural, and indeed ethnic. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 42

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Speaks directly to debates on the social construction of race and ethnicity in postcolonial theory and critical race studies.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that the race/ethnicity distinction is not a scholarly taxonomy but a legal instrument of colonial governance.
• SEED: Essay angle: the race-versus-ethnicity debate as itself a colonial artifact — how the very categories scholars argue about were invented by colonial law.

Related

• Race-ethnicity distinctions legally include and exclude colonized populations simultaneously (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial law transmuted cultural communities into political ones (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial rule produces binary political identities where none had rigidly existed. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial states ruled colonized populations chiefly through Western law and race (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial rule manufactured political identities that it then naturalized as culture (similarity 0.81)
• Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial rule transformed fluid ethnic distinctions into rigid binary identities. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial rule installed subject races as agents within colonial machinery (similarity 0.79)
• Ancient notions of race as biology do not match reality (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial race-thinking substitutes ethnological difference for kinship with non-whites (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial-era differentiation of Muslims preceded and enabled present-day racialization. (similarity 0.78)