State structures shape which racial preferences people can express and act on

Evidence

Racial americanization thus proceeds not simply by reducing the social to the preferential, the state to (in)civil society. Preferences are not expressed, enacted, and experienced in a political and institutional vacuum. Rather, public spheres – and the state especially – structure the conditions of possibility in which choices are to be made, preferences pushed and indeed in some cases punished. State structures channel, shape, and mold both the boundaries and the terrain of choice-making and their implication; and preferences expressed and enacted reinforce existing state formation while inflecting and coloring them. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 392