Their examples miss the forest for the trees – the doctrines themselves presuppose racial scripts even if individual cases do not

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 7-8, 2020

I argue that the outcome of individual legal cases involving creators of color is less important than how doctrinal standards were forged through epistemically raced conceptions of citizenship. The coalescence of intellectual property and citizenship produced doctrinal language that continues to systematically privilege whiteness even today. More specifically, America’s racial episteme is “the strategic apparatus which permits separating out from among the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within.”24 Understanding citizenship as a “strategic rhetoric of whiteness,”25 in the words of Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, transforms the object of study from the racial outcome in individual cases to the racial logics of doctrine itself. Though the race of the plaintiffs and defendants in intellectual property cases is helpful in locating moments of racial crisis, it is not dispositive in thinking about how race works in those moments.

The concept of intellectual property citizenship, as I have intimated through the binary of the good citizen/bad citizen, presupposes an actor, i.e., the intellectual property citizen. The remainder of the book contemplates how American public culture tends to imagine and implicitly invoke idealized intellectual property citizens as actors in narratives about the nation and its well-being. The good intellectual property citizen is shaped by invisible Euro-American norms of white masculinity and constructed in contrast to the bad intellectual property citizen. Familiar binaries of self/ Other and good/evil transform intellectual property rhetoric into a tool for reinforcing structural inequality domestically and internationally.