Articulating progress through IPR is a white dream that codes the future through racial enthymematic capitalism

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 51-53, 2020

Because the values of patent law and human progress also underpin understandings of the American Dream, the latter is laced with racialized understandings of meritocratic achievement.120 The figure of the citizen creator was not an incidental or identity-neutral element of the American narrative but an essential and raced one. Inventorship, the American Dream, and economic prosperity were mythically co-created, in order to shape and manage the desires and anxieties of the nation and its citizens. The values of the American Dream—inventiveness, rugged individualism, self-reliance, hard work, honesty, and perseverance—were associated with a particular kind of whiteness, that was intertwined with masculinity, progress, and nation-building. Inventorship thus became the exclusive domain of white men, who were imagined to be the economic and technological engines of the nation.

For James Truslow Adams, who in 1931 became the first to invoke the phrase, “[t]hat American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank, which is the greatest contribution we have made to the thought and welfare of the world”121 was one of the most important unifying ideologies of the United States. The American Dream is just that, though, an ideology. It is a myth of nation and citizenship grounded in ambiguity and uncertainty—and therefore anxiety.122 Agency, Adams continues, is “the idea that individuals have control over the course of their lives . . . the bedrock premise upon which all else depends.”123 Agency renders that ambiguity, uncertainty, and anxiety, as well as human life, bearable. Robert Rowland and John Jones describe the American Dream as “a progressive myth in which the heroes are ordinary, rather than extraordinary.”124

Those who best embody the American Dream, however, are the people who already benefit from its meritocratically allocated spoils. Those who do not succeed never possessed the skill to do so—and more importantly, they are an existential threat to those who do. The American Dream is, accordingly, a powerful ideological tool that serves “axiological, epistemological, and identity functions,”125 particularly around race. The American Dream unavoidably made and makes, in George Lipsitz’s terms, a “possessive investment in whiteness,”126 while coding those who are not white as threats to the desires of (white) American citizens. Even when people of color are narrativized as having achieved the American Dream, their success is frequently linked with their exceptional hard work and assimilation into the greatest nation in the world, not with the capacity for knowledge production and full membership in the nation.127

Within this context, articulations of “progress and the useful arts” functioned as a means of creating and confirming an imagined trajectory of white development, including using the language of the American Dream.128 The concept of scientific progress implicitly set up a narrative of race in which white persons performed the heroic task of civilizing non-white nonpersons.129 In the syllogistic logic that developed around invention, patented inventions contributed to human progress, progress was the domain of inventive (white) persons, and therefore inventive (white) persons could create progress. This set up, as countless scholars have demonstrated, an organizing schema for what could be “discovered” and transformed into scientific progress and who could do the “discovering.” This organizing schema, subsequently evolved into the complex technological nature/science distinctions of later eras.

More specifically, the continuity of racial scripts about nature/science over time created an enthymematic whiteness in which the identity category could be unstated yet always inferred. In short, the narrative of progress as white is an “argument . . . drawn from premises that do not need to be stated ‘since the hearer supplies them.’”130 Racial scripts about the American Dream and human progress operated as stand-ins for language about race. They were deeply associated with the racializing ideologies of this era but modernized in ways that came to be coded as colorblind and postracial. Neither conceptions of human progress nor the American Dream became more racially inclusive over time, despite the nation’s deeply held beliefs to the contrary.

Perhaps no spaces better exemplified the promise and peril of the American Dream, as well as its connections to inventorship, citizenship, and economic prosperity, than the nation’s World’s Fairs.131 From 1851 to 1940, the World’s Fairs became “‘great new rituals of self-congratulation,’ celebrating economic and industrial triumphs.”132 These monuments to American innovativeness showcased white masculine creatorship while Otherizing people of color in ways that reinforced settler colonialist narratives of inventorship. The World’s Fairs represented racist taxonomic classifications, with “a neat ordering of the world according to classes, types, and hierarchies—a system inherited from the Enlightenment.”133 Further, the World’s Fairs in the United States operated as platforms for scientizing racism itself, through the work of racist anthropologists, sociologists, evolutionary biologists, and eugenicists invested in American Empire.

More often than not, groundbreaking technologies were displayed alongside “exotic” humans in a manner that reinforced binary distinctions between creators and non-creators, civilized and uncivilized cultures, and citizens and non-citizens of the United States. These narratives operated through the heroic depictions of white male invention.134 Yet the ambient feelings of the World’s Fairs—that is to say the atmospheric sentiments that flowed through the event—were excitement, triumph, and possibility, for the nation’s (white) citizens.