The term racialization smuggles in an unargued critical judgment behind neutral description.

Evidence

The usage of “racialization” so broadly in the literature is at the very least ambiguous, and may sometimes be vacuous. One cannot always tell, either explicitly or contextually, whether it is being invoked as a merely descriptive term or with deeper normative, critical thrust. Quite often it is put to work simply to suggest race-inflected social situations, those informed or marked by racial characterization. But lurking beneath the descriptive is more often than not an implicit, unexplained, and almost invariably theoretically unmotivated critical rejection of the normative insinuation in the seemingly neutral description of the social arrangements being characterized as racial or in racial terms. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Goldberg’s pointed refusal to use ‘racialization’ analytically: it conflates description with criticism.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when did ‘racialization’ become the default academic term, and who first used it with a critical thrust?
• XREF: Connects to critiques of other floating analytic signifiers, like ‘coloniality’ or ‘neoliberal racism’ itself, when used as vague catch-alls.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 351