Racial secularization removes absolutist racial rule without ending race’s social force

Evidence

Post-apartheid secularized race purged the terms of its convictions much as modernity was supposed to have done for religious order and governmentality more broadly. Secularization in the case of race has been carried by a critical oppositional disposition towards any mode of racial absolutization. Dispositional mobilization may assume a wide range of expressions, consonant with the absolutized expression from which it seeks to take leave. Racial secularization has come to mean that there is no Heavenly City, that all South Africans are compelled to negotiate the earthly cities of its landscape with all their complexities, contradictions, and class distinctions. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1612

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘racial secularization’ and ‘racial absolutization’ mean: the post-apartheid shift from rigid racial rule to negotiated racial complexity.
• XREF: Echoes the general secularization thesis in the reader’s soundscape/silence reading on modernity’s reorganization, and the distinction between sacred and profane order. — connects to: Race gained social hegemony as religion declined, becoming a secularized civic theology — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1345; Racial secularization displaces sovereign control from state to privatized economic forces — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1628