Racial logic shapes state founding myths and national memory

Evidence

Racial definition of modern states is elaborated with the “voyages of discovery” (the very concept bears racial significance) and the debate in the 1550s between Las Casas and Sepulveda over Indian enslavement, through the second “planetary modernity” (Dussel, 1998:1 Iff.) from the seventeenth century … It accordingly marks contemporary population shifts via extensive migration, policy debates, and legal decisions revolving around color blindness, the emergence of “fortress Europe” and the American “prison industrial complex.” Indeed, racial configuration fashions the terms of the founding myth, the fabrication of historical memory, necessary (as Charles Tilly insists) to both the discursive production and ideological rationalization of modern state power (Tilly, 1994b). But it is also the case, especially since the racial project and racist exclusions became obvious in the eighteenth century, that the figure of the racial state - and of particular racist states - was fashioned in part by the resistant response of those it most directly and viscerally affected, namely, the racially characterized, marginalized, exploited, and excluded. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1653

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that racist states were ‘fashioned in part by the resistant response’ of the excluded is a rich, underdeveloped thread — how exactly did resistance shape state form?
• XREF: connects to: Founding myths silently bury inconvenient facts of shared ancestry — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 73