Philosophy, Summer 2026

My dissertation addresses what I call the riddle of racial second nature. Racialized hierarchies continue to organize vulnerability, wealth disparity, and premature death with the apparent solidity of natural law, even after decades of scholarship demonstrating the historical contingency of race and despite formal legal equality. If race is socially constructed, what accounts for the fact that racial categories exercise a coercive power exceeding subjects’ ability to refuse or revise them? I argue that capitalism’s objective social forms produce racialization as a necessary effect. The social relation that is value and its concomitant institutional form of the law operate as mutually mediating moments that transform human beings into reified categories while systematically obscuring this historical process as natural fact. I attempt to show how capitalist racialization achieves what Theodor W. Adorno termed second nature: historically produced social relations that confront individuals as external necessity, appearing with the solidity of nature while remaining transformable.