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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the semiotic ideologies of race, focusing on the role of iconicity and retroductive logic in ‘racial profiling’. This paper also addresses the indexical and symbolic aspects of ‘race’, what Frantz Fanon called ‘The Fact of Blackness’.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the semiotic ideologies of race, and the role of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolic relations in racial reckoning. Race can be described as a hierarchical taxonomy of biophysical metaphors representing relative social power. And iconicity is one of the main semiotic forms through which the 'logic' of race works. And in Peircean semiotic terms, metaphors are 'iconic Thirds'. While much attention has been given to understanding how race operates as a discursive form through which power is exercised, less analysis has been done on the 'logic' of racial reckoning, and more specifically, on the semiosis of race. How do semiotic ideologies of race reproduce social hierarchies and even persistent social inequalities? This paper examines one particular practice - 'racial profiling' - and how in a contemporary context it contributes to the ideological aspects and sociocultural effects of race. The paper also examines the inferential form of logic called 'retroduction' (or 'abduction'), and how this, along with misapplications of conditional probabilities and the ground of iconicity, contributes to the practice of racial profiling. And this paper takes up the indexical and symbolic aspects of 'race' - what Frantz Fanon called 'The Fact of Blackness'.