ABSTRACT
Legislative and judicial practice sometimes proves crucial in the institution and the circulation of negative imaginings of group identities, and hence of markers of race. Three examples serve to illustrate this point. As the first example of this, we may take the discriminatory concept of citizenship established during the period of the formulation of the Constitution in the United States of America. This became the source of an ongoing judicial, administrative, and civil struggle over the meaning of “personhood” whose effects continue to be felt up to the present time.
