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∞ D Racial Disciplinarity In the age of Reconstruction America, where slavery had been abolished and a new era of racial politics supposedly embarked upon, the presiding Judge in Scott v. Georgia (1869) emphatically declared that ‘‘the laws of civilization demand that the races be kept apart in this country.’’∞ He recited, here, the insistent historical desire within dominant American racial ideology to maintain unequivocal distinctions between disparate races. And he called upon the very ‘laws of civilization’ as the origin of and justification for these apparently immutable divisions drawn along the lines of race. Echoing this call, the opinion delivered in Kinney v. Commonwealth (Va. 1878) stated: The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization, under which two distinct races are to work out and accomplish the destiny to which the Almighty has assigned them on this continent—all require that they should be kept distinct and separate, and that connection and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.≤ Divisions deemed to be ordained by God were to be unhampered by human intervention, and the very well-being and future of the cultural dominion meant adhering to this supposed natural and omnipotent law. For, ‘‘[a] sound philanthropy , looking at the public peace and the happiness of both [the white and black] races would regard any e√ort to intermerge the individuality of the races as a calamity full of the saddest and gloomiest portent to the generations that are 16 racial imperatives to come after us.’’≥ This individuality (marking that which is supposedly separate ) speaks to the fundamental principle upon which the notion of race rests: more than simply describing physiological di√erences, race has been used to denote absolute distinctions between ‘types’ of humans who have been figured as intellectually, psychically, emotionally, and culturally incommensurate. Physiological markers were seen to be simply the external manifestation of these internal racial di√erences, di√erences that rendered racial groups as discreet in that they were seen to possess distinguishable and independent traits and characteristics . Though di√erences existed between racial types, individuals within these types were seen as generally homogenous in their shared attributes. It was these attributes that were used, retroactively, to continually reenforce racial lines, positioning race as that which signifies a resolute and unalterable boundary that cannot be traversed. Despite producing powerful and distinct lived experiences, race is a social fiction. As Haney López (1996, 14) notes, race ‘‘can be understood as the historically contingent social systems of meaning that attach to elements of morphology and ancestry.’’ This historical contingency can be seen in the various and often contradictory distinctions that have been made between ‘types’ of humans in di√erent temporal and spatial contexts. Between the earliest notions of modern racial ideology, where human types were hierarchically organized (between the Creator and all other living beings) within the ‘Great Chain of Being,’∂ to contemporary formulations of race, what constitutes di√erent racial groups and what race means has undergone radical revision. Even though racial meaning has been disparate in content as well as context, the very force of race as a signifier has derived from this disparity, leading David Goldberg (1992, 558) to claim that the power of race ‘‘has consisted in its adaptive capacity to define population groups, and by extension social agents, as self and other at various historical moments.’’ The possession of certain traits or characteristics have, accordingly, been (temporarily) stabilized as denoting one’s belonging or nonbelonging to a particular racial group. Yet ‘‘[t]o be capable of this, race itself must be almost but not quite empty in its own connotative capacity, able to signify not so much in itself as by adopting and giving naturalized form to prevailing conceptions of social group formation at di√erent times’’ (Goldberg 1992, 558). While race classifies individuals in a system of inclusion and exclusion , it must be understood as more than simply categorization. Race is a practice: it is a system of meanings deployed in the racing of individuals and, as a concept, race must be maintained in order to survive. The categories accepted as natural and inevitable must be consistently reiterated in discourse in order for these categories to be sustained. They must constantly be called upon, called forth if you will, for without possessing ontological grounding...

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