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This essay engages Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as a salient intervention into modern political theory. I analyze the work as a cipher for the tensions inhabiting Euro-modernity's stitched together fictions of racial determinism and racial dynamism legible in slavery, assimilationist projects and White fears reverberating throughout. Adapting the mythical ancient Prometheus as one who steals fire from the gods to create humans and civilization, Frankenstein dramatizes the risks and monstrous results of White imperial masculinity as a Euro-colonial Promethean project of subject formation and race-making. Viewed through the prism of the Modern Prometheus, modernity in general and liberal humanism in particular are recast as monster-making projects. The European "discovery" of Indigenous peoples amplified Promethean aspirations to create subjects through civilizational processes of religious conversion, the infusion of Enlightenment rationality, and assimilation into whiteness. Politically, the Promethean capacity to engineer humans and proto-humans using Native peoples as raw material allowed progressives to argue against outright extermination in favor of cultural genocide. Seeking to create a subserviant species, Victor Frankenstein confronts a revolting insurrection of his own making—a Creature who refuses slavery, claims mastery over his creator and demands a female companion. Yet Frankenstein's fear of creating "a race of devils" betrays a terror of what Whites know, but refuse to acknowledge, about themselves and racial others.

Previous studies have found a race-of-interviewer effect on survey questions dealing with racial issues. This effect has been found in both personal interviews & on questionnaires filled out in the presence of an interviewer. Examined here is whether a race-of-interviewer effect is also present in telephone interviews. Data from 548 telephone interviews with Ala adults show that a race-of-interviewer effect does occur in telephone interviews on racial questions. 1 Table. Modified AA.

The present article attempts to overcome some of the problems involved in estimating race-of-interviewer effects in a nonexperimental national survey. Individual items as well as scales were examined, using General Social Survey (GSS) data. Race-of-interviewer effects large enough to justify the practice of matching interviewer and respondent race for interviews on racial topics were found for both black and white respondents. A few such effects were found for nonracial items among blacks, but the range of items involved is smaller than what has been reported in previous studies. The impact of race-of-interviewer effects on mean estimates in the GSS appears to be small for white respondents, due to the small proportion of cross-race interviews. The proportion of cross-race interviews among blacks is larger and more variable over the years, and the impact of race-of-interviewer effects should be considered when analyzing items which show these effects.

In this digitally saturated age, the cultural influence of technology has seeped into all areas of social, political, and individual life. At the same time, discourses of technology have long proceeded as if matters of social, political, and individual identity are incidental to technological development. Specifically, themes of technology and themes of race have long been understood as separate and unrelated. I contest this understanding through a sustained examination of the occluded, repressed, and otherwise forgotten truth that American technology arose in a society in which some people were once legally—formally—things, and that these legal forms are nothing other than race. To that end, I read broadly across American cultural production, examining canonical fiction, genre science fiction, and a wide range of ephemera to argue that the culture of the machine age, including the emergence of genre science fiction, was always already a racial project. This dissertation begins by theorizing the racial history of the human. It builds on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten, who have explored the way modernity depends on blackness for coherence and power, and applies these approaches to the intersection of science, technology, and fiction, putting these scholars in conversation with scholars of speculative fiction and cultures of technology like Leo Marx, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Seltzer and John Rieder. The first chapter, "The Machine in the Garden was Black," for instance, focuses on the place of slavery in Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden, reappraising many of Marx's own sources to expose a foundational conflation of slavery and machines in early American culture. Later chapters focus on the figure of the Steam Man, on racial passing in early pulp science fiction, on the emerging post-racial ideologies of John W. Campbell, and on the critiques and anxieties of agency that followed. The dissertation ends with an epilogue posing the question: what if science fiction was always black? This epilogue reframes what came before, dwelling in the Alternative, aiming to clear some ground for a newer set of genres—genres of science fiction and the human alike.