ABSTRACT
Over the 350-year history of America as a concept, from the colonies, to the American Revolution, to the Civil War, and beyond, there has been a rather persistent debate about the nature of race: is it biological, or is it cultural? The semiotic description of the debate masks the truth of its purpose. As described in depth below, conversations about the biological nature of race are meant to question whether or not black people are intellectually capable of being white.1 This belief reveals that the oppression and injuries blacks have suffered throughout the history of the United States are not oppression and injury at all. It is doing with your property as you see fit. In contrast, debates about the cultural construction of race are meant to thwart the biological position, but they do so in a manner that suggests that racial formation was autopoietic, as if racial distinctions occurred as a natural response to slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, etc. Moreover, theories of the cultural construction of race tend to consider race an object that, potentially, exists removed from bodies. This is not to suggest that cultural formation theorists devalue the position of race in terms of its power and persistence, just that they singularize race as a linguistic phenomenon that can be overcome if only our will is strong enough. And while there are certainly semiotic associations derived from racial positioning, those are a product of the way race was designed, not the other way around. Race and racism did not occur because the early colonists created linguistic distinctions between black and white: they created linguistic distinctions because they created race and racism. The institutions and policies that have been created since, however more or less intentional, were in response to the introduction and infiltration of black people into the American democratic system. If we follow history and historians and make the claim that Jim Crow was a response to Reconstruction, and mass incarceration was the response to the end of Jim Crow, then what we find is that with every step black people make towards agency, the response from white supremacy is violence. This violence has not merely been utilized to terrorize black people, but has constructed the ontological difference between blackness and whiteness. What the cultural construction theory of race often misses is that racial formation was not a product of the culture; the culture was a product of racial formation.2
