Racial demarcation answers modern fragmentation by bounding who counts as civilized.

Evidence

Conjuring lines of social connectivity threatened by their privatized fading, race quickly came to outline the bounds of civilization, casting the shadows at rationality’s limits. Euro-modernity’s fragmentation of the social, ironically, claimed resolution through the naturalizing artifice of newly abstracting and fragmenting racial connection and dislocation. The longing to connect, to be part of a civil order, came to be conjured, among other modalities, through racially driven lines of demarcation. Those continuing to fall outside the more or less strictly bounded demarcations of racial connection, civility and civilization, and rational contour have been marked variously if more or less invariably as aliens, strangers without and within, exploitable labor, criminals, infidels, enemies as such and enemies of freedom, destroyers of democracy or more recently and assertively as terrorists. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 224

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that race simultaneously fragments and reconnects social life, plus the telescoping from ‘aliens and infidels’ to ‘terrorists,’ is dense and paradigm-shifting in one passage.
• SEED: The continuity running from ‘enemies of freedom’ through ‘destroyers of democracy’ to ‘terrorists’ is a crisp essay on how racial othering vocabularies track political threats.