David Theo Goldberg — The Racial State

128 published claims from this book.

• A racially conceived state can only express itself in racial terms
• A world without whiteness could exist without historical racism.
• American courts restricted miscegenation between whites and Asian Americans.
• American Indian children were forcibly re-racialized as white by removal and assimilation
• Anti-racist politics that centers race tends to reinscribe the very exclusions it opposes
• Apartheid’s 1951 white definition shifted from descent to appearance and social acceptance.
• Applied racial science was not a retreat from but a continuation of racism
• Being unnamed by a state’s administrative lexicon places one outside legal protection
• Both racist models grant whites agency while denying it to the colonized
• Brazil’s myth of racial democracy rested on romanticized slavery apologetics
• Britain deployed overwhelming naval force to punish a disobedient regent
• British colonial rule operated through law rather than direct despotism
• Capitalist states regulate migration, demography, and crime in racial terms
• Citizenship’s static territorial model excludes those who move
• Classic citizenship privileges settlement and frames mobility as exceptional
• Classical liberalism historically promoted racial reasoning as central to modern moral sense.
• Colonial officials prosecuted interracial intimacy under charges of social nuisance
• Colonial settings elevated the European proletariat into whiteness
• Colonial universalism disguised European Christian values as transcendent truths
• Colonialism advanced state formation by racially ordering the colonized exterior
• Colonialism assigned distinct reproductive roles to white women by class
• Colonialism functioned as an all-male training ground for masculinity
• Colorblind measures reinforce existing racial privilege despite egalitarian intent
• Congo rubber extraction enriched Leopold while killing millions of Congolese
• Counterfactual questions about a raceless history conceal denial
• Courts legally confirmed unbounded colonial power over native populations
• Courts nullified segregation statutes when blood quantum fell short
• Creolized language threatens colonizers by enabling resistance in their presence
• Critical racial theory has lapsed into a reflexively repeated clichéd vocabulary.
• Critiques of contract theory’s racial basis predate Charles Mills
• Defenders of neutral science still hold open the possibility of real racial difference.
• Deracializing the state means pluralizing governance rather than merely ending segregation.
• Diverse candidate pools shield colorblind picks that favor white men
• Economic shifts toward industrial and mineral extraction drove new racial conceptions
• Efficiency is treated as uncontestable truth rather than a contestable value
• Eighteenth-century state theory framed statelessness as irrational and insecure
• English is accepted globally because it became detached from British and American identity
• English serves as the carrier medium of cultural and linguistic imperialism in globalization
• Enslaved black women were valued for labor, reproduction, and resale
• Extreme racial states come to make race stand for everything
• Historicist racial argumentation is harder to dismiss than biologized racism
• Historicist racial thought fueled abolition while naturalism underpinned slavery
• Historicist racism grants colonized peoples only potential, not actual, universal agency
• Historicist regimes govern race by constituting it through law itself
• Historicist rule imposed through education while naturalism used brutal force
• Hybridity anxiety reveals the underlying powerlessness of racial elites
• Hybridity discourse expressed white anxiety over the fragility of dominance
• Hypodescent operated pragmatically and unevenly rather than as absolute rule
• Indirect rule made customary law into an administrative tool of colonial control
• Institutions inherently operate by reproducing homogeneity rather than diversity
• Inverting democracy’s formula exposes self-regulation at governance’s core.
• Late nineteenth-century racial rule became rule through law rather than raw force
• Law both authorizes identities and is itself vulnerable to transgressive redefinition by subjects.
• Law converts difference into sameness to enable formal equal treatment
• Law’s universal formalism requires customization to address race, gender, and class.
• Legal reinforcement of racial distinctions worsens their harmful effects
• Leopold’s colonial state was a machine of random, licensed atrocity
• Leopold’s Congo initiated the twentieth century’s genocide pattern
• Locke justified colonial expropriation via labor theory, not natural racial inferiority
• Locke racialized only Africans, marking other non-Europeans regionally
• Marx considered Asiatic village communities foundations of Oriental despotism
• Marx saw colonialism as freeing non-Western societies from confining arrangements
• Mill borrowed Locke’s ‘Nonage’ term to justify colonial immaturity claims
• Mill justified colonization as tutelage ending in eventual self-governance
• Mixed-race offspring directly contradicted the polygenist claim that races are separate species
• Modern law manufactures the very uniformity it claims merely to recognize
• Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories
• Modern statehood is constitutively racial and gendered, not contingently so
• Modern states rest on a single source of law applied equally, unlike premodern states
• Naturalist law legitimizes repression while historicist law constitutes racial order
• Naturalist racism banned miscegenation while tolerating rape of black women
• Naturalist racism drew attack because it enabled extreme cruelty openly
• Nazi marriage loans rewarded reproduction to breed and control women
• Polygenist hybrid predictions kept failing and were revised until Darwinian theory displaced them
• Post-racist states must transformatively redress past racial exclusions.
• Post-Reconstruction lynching reasserted naturalist racial violence against legalist racial order.
• Privacy law enabled racial privilege to persist while formally denying it
• Producing sameness requires creating and externalizing difference
• Progressivism rested on an idealistic faith unmatched by other movements
• Race is a modern construct disguised as ancient, not a premodern condition
• Race is simultaneously discovered and constructed, natural and legal.
• Race was once understood as a fixed natural essence, not a social construct.
• Race-blindness works because racial order is already fully routinized
• Racelessness forms differ in their founding motives and effects
• Racelessness individualizes and personalizes what is actually structural racism
• Racelessness reassigns responsibility for racial outcome from state structures to individuals
• Racelessness still leaves citizens racially self-endowed through state media.
• Racial configurations both mask and mitigate class exploitation in unknowable ways
• Racial discourse actively produces exclusion, not just retroactive justification
• Racial erasure renders non-whites into an ignored natural backdrop.
• Racial fixity increases precisely as population heterogeneity grows
• Racial historicism and the rule of law co-evolved as instruments of dominance
• Racial historicism makes racial structures invisible and absolves individuals of responsibility for them
• Racial identification is reified even when one denies it
• Racial inclusivity and exclusivity are mutually constitutive in modern states
• Racial rule hides its reliance on force until crises expose it
• Racial states regulate labor and family to serve capital and gender order
• Racial-state assumptions made the colonial project conceivable in the first place
• Racialized warfare thrives precisely when its terms become unspeakable
• Racially marked others are simultaneously desired and denied in modern social orders
• Racism relocated from biology into culture after Darwinism lost legitimacy
• Racist collectivization denies individuality to colonized groups while sparing whites collective blame
• Recent migration politics center on who belongs as citizens.
• Refined and crude racism share the same presumptive core.
• Rights to property and speech double as markers of racial incapacity.
• South African racial classification was fourfold, not tripartite, from 1921.
• Spanish colonial law aimed to keep colonized peoples in perpetual legal minority
• State apparatuses actively fashion and reify racial categories rather than merely reflect them
• State form only loosely correlates with style of racial rule
• State law must actively refuse racist practice rather than claim colorblindness
• State power fuses hegemonic consent with coercive enforcement
• State sovereignty depends on manufacturing internal threats to justify homogeneity
• State-regulated consent is never complete because culture offers livelier alternatives
• States free capital mobility while restricting the movement of racialized people
• States that promote violence must escalate coercion to maintain rule
• States vary in how strongly racial classification penetrates their institutional apparatus
• Statistical graphics were consciously deployed to manage racial populations.
• Suppressed racism resurged in post-communist Europe after 1989
• The Christian civilizing mission presupposed racial progressivism in principle
• The freedom philosophy of Locke excluded non-Europeans from humanity
• The modern state has been centrally shaped by racial formation and exclusion.
• The state is constituted by power, not merely an instrument that wields it
• The state’s defining capacity to exclude is what enables racial formation
• Three hundred thirty-five Europeans administered a 20-million-person territory
• Twentieth-century racism shifted from rural to urban concerns
• Twentieth-century states claimed modernity by rendering their racial workings invisible
• Venue changes can engineer juries that acquit police of racial killings
• White supremacy arises from discursive diffusion, not any racial contract