Racial ideology constituted the labor regime rather than merely rationalizing it after the fact

Evidence

Religious conversion could serve as supplement, to be sure, regulating subjects once in place. But it was ultimately racial rule and repression that produced and sustained the hierarchical regularities of the labor supply. The political theology of race was not simply an ex post facto rationalization of an already and anyway repressive regime of labor supply. It was constitutive of that regime, determining and delivering who the masters and madams and who the mine-workers, manufacturing labor, the farmworkers, gardeners, and domestics. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1448

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive, paradigm-shifting point that ideology does not rationalize material repression but actively constitutes who fills each labor slot — resists one-sentence summary and reframes how ideology and political economy relate.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader thesis on racial neoliberalism and to Milgrom-style institutional accounts where ideology/enforcement do constitutive rather than merely justificatory work. — connects to: Racial ideology constitutes labor hierarchy rather than merely justifying it. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1448; Racial ideology actively constitutes labor regimes rather than merely justifying them — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1448; Group-based racial rule outcompetes individualizing ideology for cheap labor supply — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1447
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1448