Whiteness is a manufactured legal and cultural status, not a biological condition

Evidence

Racial states employ physical force, violence, coercion, manipulation, deceit, cajoling, incentives, law(s), taxes, penalties, surveillance, military force, repressive apparatuses, ideological mechanisms and media - in short, all the means at a state’s disposal - ultimately to the ends of racial rule (Comaroff, 1998:324-6), which is to say, to the ends of reproducing the racial order and so representing for the most part the interests of the racial ruling class. This entails in the history of fabricated racial configuration that racial rule by definition serves the interests of those conceived as white. “Whiteness” then is not some natural condition, phenotypically indicative of blood or genetic or intellectual superiority but the manufactured outcome of cultural and legal definition and political and economic identification with rulership and privilege. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1696

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly defines ‘racial state’ and ‘whiteness’ as fabricated, which sharpens racialization definitions used across the vault.
• XREF: Connects to Omi & Winant’s racial formation theory and whiteness-as-invention literature elsewhere in the vault. — connects to: Whiteness was defined as exclusion from black occupation, not skin or work — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 399; Courts admitted Arabs to whiteness via cultural contribution discourse, not religion — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 169; No American can actually prove they are white because whiteness is a fiction — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 63
• QUESTION: The passage opens a question the next paragraphs answer: is the racial state necessarily racist?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1696