The Statutes of Kilkenny are rightly identified by scholars as racial law – legislating “a racial moment,” as Kathy Biddick puts it (“Cut” 453), in “the language of racism,” as James Lydon puts it (“Nation and Race” 106). Yet, issuing centuries after initial colonization, this edict merely ratifies rather than enacts race-making ab origo: “[t]he famously discriminatory 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny … merely codify a policy long pursued” (Hoffman 7).
