Racial states speak through law yet can only institute racial arrangements brutally

Evidence

Modern states - and here racial states once more are the norm of modern statehood, not the exception - speak through the law, in legal codes and terms. The institutionalization of race in and through the state is a form of legal reasoning (Goldberg 2001: ch. 6). It consists in the claim to displace brutish custom, to substitute for the idiosyncrasy and variability of everyday practice the systematicity and normativity of written codicils, and the assertion of atemporal order. Yet the extermination of all the brutes in the name of the law, and the project to institute racial arrangements through law, can only be effected brutally. In seeking to exterminate brutishness - the self-professed racial project par excellence - the state necessarily reveals at once its racial conception and becomes nothing short of brutal. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1730

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the modern racial state as a genus of legal reasoning that normalizes race by law but reveals brutality in doing so.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that the racial state’s civilizing legal project of exterminating ‘brutishness’ necessarily makes the state itself brutal is dense and paradigm-shifting; worth sitting with.