Racial naturalism joined with religiosity to unify South African whites into a ruling class

Evidence

Here, then, the resurrection in the nineteenth century of racial naturalism became foundational, assuming an insistent inherent inferiority, over time inscribing an arm’s-length segregationist polity joined to securing a cheap and guaranteed labor economy and proscribed intercourse. Entangled with an intense religiosity, polygenesis and later eugenics took on their own populist expressions at the outer limits of settler colonialism, seeding the early lineaments of a novel political theology of race. Within emergent South Africa, an elaborating racial theo-politics began to unify white coherence across these differences into the ruling racial class. If the missionary mode was to convert to belief and culture one soul at a time, the messianic was invested in group salvation all at once. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1435

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1435
• XREF: connects to: Apartheid unified all whites as beneficiaries, not just Afrikaners, beyond mere demographic expediency — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1491; Racial theology of group salvation unifies previously divided whites into a ruling class — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1435