Law, Classification, and the Making of Race in Colonial America

This course examines how legal systems in colonial America actively produced racial categories and hierarchies. Through critical race theory, legal history, and archival analysis, you’ll trace how law functioned as a technology of classification shaping land ownership, labor, citizenship, and social belonging.

Rather than treating race as a static identity, the course shows how it emerged through legal decisions, administrative practices, and colonial power structures—and how those foundations continue to shape modern legal and social systems.

What you’ll get

• How law operated as a racial classification system in colonial America

• The relationship between conquest, crisis, and legal authority

• How archives, records, and “neutral” documentation encode power

• Race as a legal technology tied to land, labor, and civil status

• Comparative colonial legal systems and their afterlives today

Course format

• Modular, lecture-based structure

• Critical readings and archival analysis

• Discussion prompts and applied practice labs

• Assessments and final exam

Who is this for:

• Students of law, history, sociology, and critical race theory

• Educators and researchers examining race, power, and legal systems

• Anyone seeking a rigorous, historical understanding of how race was legally made—not naturally given

To understand race, you must study the systems that produced it.
This course gives you the legal and historical tools to do exactly that.