Barbed Wire Dialectics

          Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford amalgamates race and class by producing whiteness as a fetishized commodity whose ownership demarcates the boundary between bare life and exceptional subjecthood. The Court installs whiteness as the de facto standard of national belonging by granting its possessors citizenship, protected property rights, and expansive spatio-temporal freedom. In turn, the decision marks Blackness as criminal, deviant, and captive. Extending Marx’s claim that “value … transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic” (Marx 167), and drawing on Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick, Taney’s effort to bind citizenship, property, and geography together reveals the Court’s project: to fetishize whiteness as a valuable commodity while rendering Blackness disposable. What is at stake, then, is a method of historicizing the decision through McKittrick’s notion of geography— what blind spots emerge when the opinion is read as terrain for producing a legal and political nomos?

Taney reduces Dred Scott to non-citizenship, a move that fetishizes whiteness while positioning Blackness as unfit for inclusion in the social, political, and national fabric. He begins by insisting that naturalization laws restrict the legal term “citizen” to the “free white person” (Taney 26). To support this claim, he turns to the genealogy of antimiscegenation statutes, constructing a racial and classed barrier between citizens and non-citizens. Citing Maryland laws criminalizing marriage between enslaved people and whites, Taney concludes that the Constitution erected “a perpetual and impossible barrier” between the white race and those “reduced to slavery,” such that interracial intimacy was deemed “unnatural and immoral” and punished accordingly (Taney 20). Through this reasoning, Taney claims that Black people were “not intended to be included” in the nation (Taney 19). Whiteness is imbued with metaphysical qualities—purity, civility, desirability—while the state assumes responsibility for preserving its value against contamination. The biopolitical obsession with blood and hygiene renders Blackness the dialectical opposite of whiteness, reinforcing the Court’s investment in protecting the latter while pathologizing the former. Taney’s observation that violations of antimiscegenation law subjected the accused to imprisonment (Taney 20) further reveals how, at the moment whiteness is protected by law, Blackness is yoked to criminality. As Hartman writes, this fixation on imagined sexual trespass exposes how deeply the security of whiteness depends upon Black subordination (Hartman 327). By leveraging antimiscegenation law to exclude Blackness from citizenship, Taney reveals the Court’s commitment to safeguarding whiteness as a metaphysical and commodified form of value.

Taney further fetishizes whiteness through property relations by reducing the enslaved to fungible merchandise. He insists that the enslaved were “never thought of or spoken of except as property,” considered only when the owner’s claims or profits required protection (Taney 21). Beginning from the premise that the enslaved had no stake in the human, Taney reconstructs Blackness as exchangeable commodity rather than personhood. The state, he suggests, exists to protect this arrangement. Referencing a Connecticut statute, Taney concludes that “the right of property in the master was to be protected,” framing abolition not as justice but as a policy choice to avoid inconvenience to whites (Taney 23). This posture reveals the state’s investment in preserving relations of mastery and subordination because whiteness—and property ownership—was treated as inherently valuable. As Hartman observes, captive bodies functioned as “the sign and surrogate” of the master’s power (Hartman 328). By vouchsafing the master’s dominion, the state affirms whiteness as constitutive of sovereignty and authority. Whiteness becomes fetishized through its entanglement with property, while Blackness is reduced to bare life, excluded from the body politic. The propertied white subject thus emerges as the Court’s privileged figure, positioned as the engine of economic and national progress.

Beyond citizenship and property, Taney also mobilizes land, geography, and spatial control to maintain whiteness’s dominance. He describes how Black individuals—enslaved and free—were prohibited from traveling without written passes and subject to seizure if found outside prescribed locations (Taney 23). These spatial restrictions function to criminalize Black mobility and cast transgression as evidence of deviance. The Black body is treated as a figurative terra nullius, an unruly terrain requiring regulation and containment, while the master remains positioned as its fixed endpoint. At the same time, Taney affirms the white subject’s entitlement to territorial expansion, asserting that “the right to govern may be the inevitable consequence of the right to acquire territory” (Taney 38). If governance is reserved for white citizens, then land acquisition becomes a mechanism for legitimizing colonial expansion and national progress. White mobility is encouraged and celebrated; Black mobility is policed and punished. As McKittrick argues, beneath the official map of U.S. geography lies a deeper investment in settler expansion and Black subjugation—an investment produced through the fetishization of whiteness as superior value.

At the scene of Dred Scott’s exclusion, a dense network of value calculations works to subjugate Blackness and exalt whiteness. Through citizenship, property, and geography, Taney constructs an argument in which Scott’s inclusion would threaten the prestige of whiteness itself. Whiteness is inscribed with metaphysical exceptionalism, while Blackness is positioned as its contaminant. Drawing on Hartman, Marx, and McKittrick, the decision reveals whiteness as a fetishized commodity whose ownership exposes the raced and classed divisions the state relies upon to justify surveillance, violence, and exclusion. Those denied ownership of whiteness are relegated to the margins, governed by extrajudicial codes whose violation produces them as criminal. Ultimately, the decision demands a historicized reading of the legal archive—one attentive to how foundational texts continue to shape quotidian practices of containment and the ongoing production of disposability within the nation-state.