Racial scripts of citizenship have been written into legal doctrine by the aff.

Intellectual property law shapes and is shaped by citizenship. Citizenship, as a category, is prefigured by racial scripts in ways that normalize some people as citizens and others as non-citizens, which, in turn, circumscribes the outcome in intellectual property cases. Racial scripts describe “how racialization processes extend across time and space and affect racial groups even when they do not cross paths.”31 Understanding racist rhetorics in this way highlights the simultaneous durability and flexibility of language and sentiment about race, in a manner that is consistent with theorizations of racial formation. The play in the joints of racial scripts protects white supremacy, often by racializing people of color using one or more sets of racist stereotypes in ways that provoke strong racial feelings. Historical uses of racial scripts prime audiences for accepting them again, in different contexts. 

According to Vincent Pham, racial scripts are “anchored in history''32 and “reoccur, interact, and work concomitantly to constitute our ideas about some racial groups in relation to other racial groups.”33 These racial scripts also often “reinforce a cultural logic of race as the basis of national belonging [and] legitimate citizenship.”34 As critical race studies scholars have consistently demonstrated, though formal equality may be a reality in contemporary American law, including intellectual property law, informal racism seeps into legal doctrine and the practice of law. Pinpointing the languab  ge that intellectual property law uses to invoke conceptions of citizenship and related racial scripts, particularly as they code for who has the capacity to create/infringe, reveals an underlying racial episteme, calcified in presidential trenchant judicial decisions. 

In following the movement of race and citizenship through legal cases over time, I show that intellectual property citizens are collectively constituted as creatives who exhibit “true imagination” in the context of copyright law, contributors to “human progress” in the context of patent law, and participants in the “consumer gaze” in the context of trademark law. These familiar clusters of intellectual property rhetorics are consistently articulated through the racialized language of citizenship, which is, in turn, linked to the myth of the American Dream. As Stuart Hall explains, “articulation”35 is the construction of chains of meaning that reinforce unspoken racist assumptions about particular groups, frequently inferentially. 

Imagination is articulated with such characteristics as creativity and originality, which identify those worthy of accessing the American Dream. Imagination is racialized through the invocation of racial scripts that label people of color as imitators who presumptively lack the capacity for groundbreaking thought. Similarly, human progress is articulated with such characteristics as innovation and   ingenuity, which are defining characteristics of the American Dream. Human progress is racialized through repeated racial scripts that label people of color as lazy thieves who are capable only of rote reproduction. The consumer gaze is articulated with such characteristics as authenticity and quality, which are also attached to the American Dream. The consumer gaze is racialized through racial scripts that label people of color as objects, not subjects, of consumption and therefore neither the producers nor the consumers that trademark law was intended to protect. Focusing on these categories over time shows how intellectual property doctrine is connected to larger, racialized themes about nation and citizenship. The notion that intellectual property law has become equitable, then, is a dangerous one that ignores the relative stability of the orientations of copyright, patent, and trademark law to whiteness/racial difference.