States build durable categories that tie unequal rights to separated groups.

Evidence

South African authorities sought to answer both questions with a series of efforts at category-building. The most general categorical cut divided Europeans from Natives, matching to those categories unequal and separate territories, protections, and rights of citizenship. At first, European settlers homogenized on both sides of the line, justifying a system of indirect rule in which co-opted African chiefs spoke for their own territorial segments of a presumably unitary Native population. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 553

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s South Asia asymmetry test: here apartheid categories legitimated dominant-group rule while suppressing subordinate mobilization - the inverse mirror of the reader’s constitutional-rights question. — connects to: State-imposed categories become available identity bases for subsequent political entrepreneurs. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 574; A state’s own inclusionary categories become the vehicles of its dissolution — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1255; The state institutionally elevates some interests by excluding and devaluing others. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1736 (+5 more)
• SEED: Category-building as the shared mechanism linking apartheid homelands to settler-colonial reserve systems and caste categories - angle on how states fabricate the very groups they then oppress.

Broader Connections

• State apparatuses actively fashion and reify racial categories rather than merely reflect them #corroborates (0.90)
• The state institutionally elevates some interests by excluding and devaluing others. #corroborates (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1736
• Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories #corroborates (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 76
• Majorities differ from minorities by claiming the state as their own #expands (0.80)
• A stable state’s need for them kept Jews a separate protected group #exemplifies (0.80)
• Minorities are outsiders who choose to retain their otherness within a state. #expands (0.72)