Racial inclusivity and exclusivity are mutually constitutive in modern states

Evidence

Most commentators have understood racial configurations and racist articulations in contemporary states as anomalous, and racist states such as Nazi Germany or South Africa as extreme exceptions (e.g., Mann 1984; Kershaw 1989; Burleigh and Wippermann 1991). Rogers Smith (1997; 18) helpfully shifts the grounds of analysis by contrasting with the exceptional thesis a more nuanced characterization of the American polity as embedding “multiple traditions,” both inclusivist and exclusivist. Both traditions, for Smith, are basic to ~ and competing for - American political foundations. Smith‘s revision importantly promotes a more nuanced critical theory of racial states in general, and of the US in particular. I have been insisting throughout, however, on a deeper if commected point. Given the modernity of states as racially premised, the traditions of racial inclusivity are interconstitutive with and codependent upon the traditions of exclusivity. Modern states have ordered and arranged their racial inclusivities on the necessity of racist exclusivities. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 137

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the contrast between exceptionalist and structural accounts of racism; connects to Rogers Smith’s ‘multiple traditions’ thesis and ongoing debates in critical race theory.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what evidence would disconfirm the claim that inclusivity depends on exclusivity rather than merely coexisting with it?

Related

• The racial state is normal, not exceptional, to modernity (similarity 0.83)
• The modern state has been centrally shaped by racial formation and exclusion. (similarity 0.82)
• The state’s defining capacity to exclude is what enables racial formation (similarity 0.82)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state, not incidental to it. (similarity 0.81)
• Modern statehood is constitutively racial and gendered, not contingently so (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-racist politics that centers race tends to reinscribe the very exclusions it opposes (similarity 0.81)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state from its emergence (similarity 0.80)
• States are racial by population-structuring but racist only when that structuring excludes (similarity 0.80)
• American racial exceptionalism is actually interdependent with other regimes (similarity 0.80)
• Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories (similarity 0.79)
• The modern nation-state is constitutively ordered through racial configuration (similarity 0.79)
• Scholarship has largely ignored the state’s role in reproducing racism (similarity 0.79)
• Racial statecraft is normal to modernity, not an aberration (similarity 0.79)
• Race is a modern construct that states adopt to become modern (similarity 0.79)
• Race is a distinctly modern construct central to globalization (similarity 0.78)