In liberal political and scholarly thought, it is largely accepted that whiteness is a privilege wielded by white people. White people are privileged to have whiteness. This use of the word “have” implies an ownership of one’s own whiteness, as if it were an object or property. Such is the premise of Cheryl Harris’ “Whiteness As Property,” an article in the Harvard Law Review which argues that whiteness has historically been a form of property excluding Black and Native American peoples from property rights and overall equality. What’s more, as a remedy for the future, Harris suggests that affirmative action is an essential key to achieving equality.
For centuries in the Western world, whiteness was the legal key to property. Even after black people could legally possess property, whiteness was still a social key to owning property. This key, as Harris asserts, is also the property of white people. She explains that whiteness became property once explicitly or implicitly defined in law to yield certain benefits, which then begs the question: if being male also was defined in law to yield certain privileges, can maleness also be considered property? Is one’s status as an adult, which allows a person the right to vote, also property? A closer look at history’s laws is needed to fully dissect how different identities have been woven into law and how they vary or converge with whiteness.
Harris also delves into how whiteness even shaped “natural” property law. Harris references European theorists like Locke and Blackstone, who both agreed that if land was not being explicitly used and still in its natural state, then it was free to be picked up, labored upon, and owned by anyone. Although Harris does not explicitly say she disagrees with the way in which white property theory was wielded against natives, she describes how under Lockean theory, the natives’ uncultivated use of land would be considered “waste” and “not true,” due to the fact that it was not legitimated by white property ideas. Even use of the phrase “Lockean labor theory” rather than “Locke’s labor theory” suggests how much of a hegemony this white property concept has had over history. This shows how ideas can build up and gain followers throughout history until it becomes dogma, much like how the white accrual of property overtime has snowballed into economic, political, and social inequality among different races and ethnicities.
In one area, however, Harris would seem to agree with Blackstone: redistribution of property. Harris describes this as affirmative action and that property has been assigned to whiteness unfairly in the past, which has led to modern socioeconomic inequality. Similarly, Blackstone would likely argue for redistribution of property, as he believed that “All property should therefore cease upon death.” White people have been passing on their property fortunes to their offspring for generations; it is precisely how whiteness has sustained power even past the removal of explicitly racist laws from legal code. So, although whiteness has accrued gross fortunes overtime based off the principles of white philosophers, there may be room for modern, progressive theorists like Harris and the dead white men (DWM) like Blackstone to find common ground on where property rights went wrong and how it may be presently corrected through affirmative action.
Good summary. I also thought about the ways in which the American legal system, which is still so embedded in the traditions of English common law, is not just co-constructed with race, but already laden with patriarchy. The concept of property as the product of labor, as we know from reading Genesis, could even be said to rely on the domination of women since woman was created to be man’s “help-meet.” (You should read more about what “help-meet” means — it has a lot of interpretations too!) I suppose all constructions must require some exclusion, but I also think Harris’s advice to de-center our views of law, ethics, science, medicine, etc. from “whiteness” as natural is useful. We do need to do that with regard to gender too. Be careful with your quotation of Blackstone. If you read the next few sentences, he argues that this idea of property interest ceasing with death would never work in civil society, which is why we have inheritance laws. However, you might be interested in this idea of jubillee, which lots of Christian and non-Christian Leftists are starting to embrace: http://www.jubilee-centre.org/the-divine-economy-by-paul-mills/