Racial rule becomes visible as crisis management when its routine obscuring breaks down

Evidence

In its visible assertibility racial rule developed into a form of crisis management. It is in moments of perceived crisis that the routinized obscuring of racial rule evaporates to leave evident behind it the force upon which it is necessarily predicated. It renders evident, in addition, the (threat of) violent physical enforcement that racial rule is driven to invoke so as to reinstate the threatened order. The Congo (and perhaps this is generally the case for naturalistically driven racial regimes) was perceived by the Belgians in its otherness as inherently threatening, as state crisis constantly under construction. The virtually ceaseless states of emergency under mature apartheid exemplify this notion of rule through racially fashioned crisis also. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1733

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that racial rule is normatively obscured and only becomes visible in self-declared states of crisis, where it reveals its reliance on force, is a powerful lens for reading state violence generally.
• XREF: Connects to the idea of permanent states of exception (Schmitt/Agamben) applied to racial governance specifically.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1733