Racialized societies compel even resistance into skin-based codes

Evidence

But this fixing, fixation, anchoring, and mediation are, if simply skin deep in imagination, depressingly more deeply cemented in the foundations of social architecture. A sociality of the skin paradoxically limits life and its social possibilities – most all that happens in life and at death – to the inflexibilities of the social surface, denying depth and relying on the policing of superficial relation, while grounding the social infrastructure all the way down on nothing but racial cement. A sociality of the skin disposes its subjects to seeing little else, to comprehending pretty much only in terms of its codes even in resistance, to living life largely if not exclusively on its terms. To sustain itself, the sociality of the skin can only fall back on and into a political theology of compulsion. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1502

Categorization

• QUESTION: Useful contrast to the reader’s in-text contact/institution split: does ‘coding even resistance’ constrain the contact case, where everyday interracial socializing coexists with the same codes?
• XREF: connects to: The skin functions as the governing signifier of racial states; Racial-skin societies police surface relations while building social structure on racial cement — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1502; The skin functions as the organizing referent of a political theology of race — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1501 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The skin functions as the governing signifier of racial states #expands (0.95)
• Racial-skin societies police surface relations while building social structure on racial cement #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1502
• The skin functions as the organizing referent of a political theology of race #corroborates (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1501
• Race functions as a naturalized line of difference, not merely skin color #expands (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1116