Racial categories are built into Western liberal-democratic ideology itself.

Evidence

Here it is worth noting that one of the most important and controversial claims of recent critical scholarship on whiteness is that liberal-democratic political ideologies are themselves inherently racialized owing to the inevitable social limitations (or contradictions) of their claims to abstract, universal citizenship. Racial categories are, in other words, built into the cultural structure of Western nationalism and liberal democracy. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2767

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that colorblind universal citizenship is itself a racial construction - that racism isn’t a bug of liberalism but its founding condition - is dense, paradigm-level material worth sitting with.
• QUESTION: Whether liberal-democratic universalism is necessarily racialized or only historically contingent in the West is a live question worth chasing.
• XREF: connects to: Liberalism historically promoted racial reasoning and racist exclusions as central to state formation. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1654