Segregationist legislation was justified in the language of property rights and liberty
Evidence
Thus, by the 1890s the Rhodes administration was formally restricting skilled apprenticeships to white workers only, and legislatively was producing increasingly robust and rigid segregation in the cities. The 1894 Glen Grey Act Rhodes shepherded through the Cape Parliament was designed not only to prompt blacks off the land to earn cash wages, thus securing a steady labor supply for mining and industrialization. It also limited the size and scope of individualized native landholdings beneath a ceiling it set too low to qualify for the electoral roll on property-ownership grounds. In a single legislative flourish, the Cape administration thus reduced black landholdings in the name of securing black property rights, radically circumscribed the size of the black electorate in the name of a free and open franchise, and maximized both the unskilled labor pool and wage tax base in the name of freedom to work. Racial commitment produced as much as rationalized segregation, exploitation, and political restriction. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1468
Categorization
- XREF: The inverted-motive legislative move parallels ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s account of Dido’s self-immolation (destruction rationalized as civic devotion); also resonates with White Noise’s critique of how systems articulate their own self-serving rationales. — connects to: Racial legislation could reduce rights while invoking freedoms; Treating liberty as alienable property historically legitimated slavery and absolutism; Rights theory arose in slave-trading states and could justify slavery (+12 more)
Broader Connections
- Racial legislation could reduce rights while invoking freedoms
#expands(0.90) - Embedded race thinking makes suspension of rights look like law
#corroborates(0.85) - Treating liberty as alienable property historically legitimated slavery and absolutism
#expands(0.82) - Rights theory arose in slave-trading states and could justify slavery
#expands(0.80) - Rights to property and speech double as markers of racial incapacity.
#expands(0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 79 - Locke’s liberalism and the American Constitution embedded racial hierarchy in their foundations
#expands(0.78) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 400 - Liberal rights discourse has historically justified rather than opposed empire
#expands(0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 72 - Colonial dominion was justified as the natural right of those capable of ruling
#expands(0.75) - Totalitarian theory derived authority from racial right rather than universal law
#expands(0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 425