Secularized deracialization still leaves lingering theological traces in social relations.

Evidence

Like the Constitutions of the ANC and its key constituent organizations such as the Youth and Women’s Leagues, the Freedom Charter represents what could be called the secularization of government, if not of South African society, as a key consideration in governmental deracialization. The grip of racial theology on the governing architecture and institutional arrangements of the society is prised loose, de-emphasized, and discarded to the garbage heap of history. But as with secularization generally, theological traces nevertheless linger, as I’ll return to reveal, the shadow effects of race continuing to cloud social conditions and relations, if informally. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1541

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the general theory of secularization as leaving residual religious traces, comparable to how capitalism’s formal rationality conceals inherited norms — parallel to Weber’s iron cage.