Racial historicism replaced biological inferiority claims with cultural poverty excuses

Evidence

Third, while it may seem obvious in all three cases that antiracist struggle is also antiracial struggle, this connection in fact is not always so straightforward or clear. Consider the shift from racial naturalism to historicism, from the inherent inferiority claim fueling racial slavery and apartheid to the claim of historical immaturity and unskilled ineptitude, even if admitted moral equality, underpinning much of the white and bourgeois abolitionist movement, condescending anticolonialisms, and the less affirming expressions of the affirmative action debate. Or consider yet again and more recently the begrudging white ceding of political power in the face of apartheid’s demise. In the historicist and postapartheid instances, whites no longer bedeviled blacks by explicit insults of inherent ineptitude so much as they damned them to ongoing impoverishment by dismissals of their lingering lack of skill rationalized away by claims to cultural poverty. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 113

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the shift from racial naturalism to historicism as a distinct intellectual move in racism’s evolution.
• XREF: Connects to the arc in Things Fall Apart and postcolonial critiques of the ‘lazy native’ narrative; also resonates with how colonial administrators rationalized dispossession.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘cultural poverty’ as the modern face of racism — how the vocabulary of deficiency survives the death of scientific racism.