How Categories Securitize: Race, Records, and Power

This article centers on categorizations as authoritative acts that sort persons and places, showing how category design itself functions as a mechanism of securitization. Using race as an illustrative case, it demonstrates how people and spaces are marked as risky and made subject to scrutiny even when race is not explicitly named. Drawing on Brubaker’s distinction between categorizations and self-understandings, the article examines how U.S. racial status has been historically constructed through layered institutional authorities deploying shifting classificatory techniques that persist into the present. Methodologically, it employs interpretive documentary analysis, triangulating statutes, court opinions, administrative records, census standards, and sentinel cases to trace how race has migrated from explicit legal categories into forms, proxies, and administrative records. These seemingly technical devices continue to route access, attention, and sanction, shaping lived experience without overt racial language. The article’s core contribution is a portable analytical framework that links category design to administrative practice and everyday self-understandings. It clarifies why legal thresholds can change without bodies changing, and why formally “race-blind” systems continue to generate durable racialized outcomes.