Racial exclusion operates as purification of a sacred social body

Evidence

Pariahs are those who are seen to have invaded the Heavenly City of the elected community, to have soiled it by their presence. They are considered threatening by their very presence, by who they are, what they are taken to stand for, by the threat of polluting mixture they represent. They threaten, in short, to reduce the City of God to that of earthly sins, of pollution, of the fall from Eden, to the heterodox carnivality – the profanity – of Jericho. They must therefore be expelled or expired so as to secure the familial in their chosen, their self-elevated status. The history of race, it could be said, is the history of that securitization against the dirt of the non-belonging and -believing. The history of racial theo-politics is the legacy of disposability. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1350

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Mary Douglas’s pollution/purity framework invoked just above; also connects to the reader’s interests in ritual sacrifice and scapegoating logic.