BioCom Industries

To: All Employees of BioCom Marketing Division

From: Central Planning Board

Re: Framing Race and Ethnicity in Marketing New Reproductive Technologies, Products, and Procedures

As you are all aware, BioCom has focused its efforts on producing a line of products designed to make totalizing medical mediation in reproductive processes acceptable and legitimized in the lives of the general population. In this way, specific gene pools stratified by political and economic variables can be managed to produce workers/consumers better adapted to and fit for the current economy. These new citizens will be able to face the rigors of labor intensification and extreme economic pressure in the age of the anti-welfare state. To be sure, the bottom line in BioCom's policy has consistently been to implement a eugenic plan based on the market demands of global capitalism. BioCom continues to stand by this policy; however, the Central Planning Board has concluded that marketing our products solely through the promise of a "better adjusted citizen" is not enough. We must also market our products and processes using retrograde (albeit functionally meaningful) colonial narratives of race and ethnicity. This support strategy will provide a multi-bladed tool that will cut through a variety of political predispositions, and allow us to establish a variety of "fashion" trends in regard to the human engineering market.

Economic globalization has initiated a mutated continuance of the hybridization (see fact 54) faced by imperial capitalists over the last two centuries. Since miscegenation and hybridization are impossible to stop, we must ask how this trend can be exploited in order to further BioCom's market policies and the values of global capitalism in general. To construct a representational model to manage this situation, we have been reexamining colonial myths and representations in order to build an exploitable knowledge base. Based on this study, we have discovered two generalized models. The first, the British model, suggests that all racial/ethnic categories can be divided into three primary sets: White, black, and alien. Each primary category contains no subsets.

This model is too limiting. Successful marketing strategies require maximum differentiation to appeal to as many specific target groups as possible. While this model works well to maintain a useful bipolar social and economic structure (master/servants) in an economy of scarcity, it is of little use in an economy of desire that demands the invention of diverse products aimed at specific consumer populations. Instead, the Board suggests the use of the Spanish model in which there are numerous intermediate categories between master and servant. This visionary model gives us the best of both worlds. On the one hand, we can construct a variety of differentiated markets with competing aesthetic trends with regularly shifting points of market domination (much as fashion trends in body fat or hair color are most profitable when the dominant style changes regularly). For example, our most recent marketing tactics have begun a trend in which American organic products (sperm, eggs, etc.) are the most sought after by people in Europe simply because the "American look" is currently fashionable. On the other hand, we can construct a generalized spectacle of humanistic thinking in regard to organic engineering by creating the perception that we understand and support the liberal concept of "one world, one people," and that BioCom's products and services are for all people, regardless of race or ethnicity. This public relations tactic could have a pay-off as big as being "environmentally friendly."

Our resources for capturing public attention and designing racial/ethnic typologies are threefold:

• Use all available eugenic knowledge regarding race and ethnicity.
• Subtly reinforce stereotypes and folk wisdom regarding racial characteristics and predispositions.
• Aggressively restore and maintain anachronistic and mythic notions of hard-core genetic determinism.

General study of these research areas has already begun. The Board would like to acknowledge the Pioneer Foundation for its generous financial support in this matter. The following comments on the potential use of the casta model (originally employed during the colonization of Latin America) provide a base for what could become an up-to-date media blitz that will entice the public into desiring medical intervention for the purposes of engineering children that are both instrumentally and aesthetically superior.

While the categories used in this study must be reconstructed to suit current markets and prejudices, the potential marketing principles that this model suggests are sound. We are unable to present the full spectrum of castas, because there are so many permutations. This indeed is one of the characteristics that we are looking for--a model that can be endlessly refined and developed. Consider the following examples: