Racial theory rationalized conquest only after the founding violence was complete.

Evidence

Only after conquest was assured and slave-trading was an established transnational business, inthe 17th and 18th centuries, did “enlightened” debates take place among whites as to the nature and humanity of the native and the African. Kant and Hegel, Locke and Hume, Voltaire and Jefferson (see Count, ed. 1950; Eze, ed. 1997; Bernasconi and Lott, eds. 2000), all the great thinkers in fact, made preposterous claims about race.* It was only after the founding genocides were established historical facts— the mines of Potosi, the liquidation of the Arawak, the Angolan “way of death” (Miller 1996 )— that rationalization became necessary: “Sure there were terrible brutalities, but these backward peoples had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world,” and so on. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 234

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general claim that ideology follows material practice — similar to how reputational institutions in economic sociology emerged only after trade demands made them necessary.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the book’s core thesis that racial ‘enlightenment’ thought was retroactive rationalization, not the origin, of racial hierarchy.