Trademark protections are made for the white creators and reinforce the image of white expertise.
Vats, 22 – Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law (Anjali Vats, “INTRODUCTION: Creating Intellectual Property, Creating Americans,” The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans, ISBN: 9781503610965, 1-11-2022, Accessed:7-24-24)//ILake-EO
Other moves toward trademark maximalism—for instance the passage of the Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984—operated to set up and parallel dilution law by criminalizing trademark infringement and reinforcing racial ized constructions of counterfeiters. Together with the racialized rhetorics of the Sampling Wars—and even evolving linkages between whiteness and expertise—intellectual property law in this era replicated its racial invest ments through the language of morality and criminality. The collision of numerous social wars reflected and constructed an increasingly militarized and racialized way of thinking about racial capitalism and consumer goods while maintaining an appearance of race neutrality.
In short, intellectual property law, a site for the simultaneous projection and creation of anxieties about race, national identity, economic prosperity, personhood, and morality, continued to invoke racial scripts and racial feel ings that denigrated creatorship by people of color and elevated creatorship by whites in the race liberal era. In the postracial era, intellectual properties continued to operate as deeply racialized spaces, increasingly through the revival of rhetorics of individual self-determination.