In Whiteness as Property, Cheryl Harris claims that whiteness and property rights are historically linked to one another via legal claims. This claim on the surface is unsurprising, considering that on average blacks have one-tenth the assets that whites have, a largely structural and intergenerational phenomenon. Institutional access is certainly critical in this. Take Harris’ initial example of her grandmother, who, during the 1930s, took a job at a department store by passing as white, after separating from her husband. Whiteness (or in this case proximity for whiteness) became the tool for access to a standard of living, by in large inaccessible to blacks. Simultaneously, this is a story of intergenerational wealth and poverty, as her grandmother was from a family of sharecroppers, who had systematically been locked out of accumulating wealth (Harris 1710-1). This pushed her to leave the south and pretend to have a different identity. Because of the racialization of poverty, she unable to accumulate the wealth necessary to provide in times of hardship and because of her current identity, she was largely barred from passing it on to her children.
Yet, Harris’ argument goes beyond the continued historical inaccess to property for blacks and Native Americans and the inequality between them and whites, although these are central to her claims. Harris adds that racialization takes liberalism’s individual property rights, as opposed to group or collective rights, as foundational (Harris 1761). For Locke property was rendered individual once one’s labor was mixed with nature. This is the case for land, which once cultivated became an individual right (Locke 15).
This is in particular conflict with Native Americans and other indigenous people, who did not have individual property rights and were colonized by liberalist Europeans. We can see how whiteness is privileged in the courts through these contrasting understandings of property in the Mashpee Tribe v. Town of Mashpee court case. In this case, the Mashpee tribe sued to recover land that had been transferred to whites not in accordance with and without approval from the federal government. Yet, they were denied group claims to this land because they could not racially prove to be a tribe since their lineages were now largely mixed (Harris 1764). In this obfuscation of group and individual rights, the white individual rights of the land now held won out over the group rights of the tribe. Beyond this, it was done by denying the racialized group rights of the tribe. Because they of a mixed racial lineage, they were denied group status. In this regard, “passing” into white society was the act of not having group legal protections. This does not mean that the group is barred from discrimination, just as the Mashpee land continued to be withheld and Harris’ grandmother was still denied the intergeneration wealth typically provided to whites. Passing, in this legal definition, becomes the act of being fully subsumed in the liberal understanding of property without group protections.
Hanks, Angela, et al. “Systematic Inequality.” Center for American Progress, 21 Feb. 2018, www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-inequality/.
Your discussion is a nice segue into the readings for the following week on the commons and how one might be able to develop a system of common ownership and cooperation, even within the often inflexible (in terms of race, particularly) restrictions of the American legal system. Indeed, as we may discuss in a couple of weeks, the first community land trust in the United States was established by Black former sharecroppers who transformed their “shares” into a communal ownership structure that eliminated the landlord/foreperson. When Harris refers to Locke, I think her primary point is that, while his theory may appear rational in terms of labor=possession, it is unevenly applied to people of color, specifically Blacks and Native Americans. In other words, a person’s labor on the land is followed by possession and ownership UNLESS that person is Black and his/her status is a mixture of personhood and property itself. And, again, a person’s labor on the land is followed by possession and ownership UNLESS that labor is unrecognized as such because of the qualities of its practice. Thus, foraging in a field is not labor in this case, but mowing the field for agriculture is. Ultimately, it seems to me, that Harris is not so much critiquing liberalism as she is the fact that liberalism itself has been exclusive. Otherwise, I wonder why she would make the case for affirmative action or distributive justice if she thought justice in the system was already doomed?
I think the final line of this entry is so powerful: “Passing, in this legal definition, becomes the act of being fully subsumed in the liberal understanding of property without group protections.” When Americans think of racial passing, the image that normally comes to mind is Plessy seeking to partake in white privilege by sitting in a “Whites Only” car. However, this entry makes clear that passing, if accomplished, is still manipulated by a white-supremacist capitalism system to result in an erasure of minority rights and recognition that nonetheless ensures their continued discrimination and disenfranchisement. Similarly, as Professor Amato points out in her comment above, the Lockean right to property through processes of labor is manipulated in the case of the indigenous possessor, whose labor is “unrecognized as such because of the qualities of its practice.” The issue at stake here, it seems to me, is one of outsider recognition. The Mashpee Tribe were denied their rights because of a tradition of hypo-descent that attempts to substantiate the concept of “race” through pseudoscientific understandings of one’s blood and genealogy. This tradition of hypo-descent appears throughout history, in the Spanish colonies where it was known as “Limpieza de sangre” or “the purity of blood” and in the United States’ “one-drop rule.” In the Mashpee case, there was never any consideration for the tribe’s own conceputalizations of identity, which were never based in concepts of race or hypo-descent. When outside forces choose to recognize a group or practice according to their own definition, they deny that group the right to self-determination. In Harris’s text, these examples highlight a large irony of liberalism in the United States. If liberalism is truly intended to protect the inalienable rights of an individual, it should perhaps begin with an acknowledgment that an individual person or group has the right to assert their own selfhood.