Transcription
Welcome back, Party People! Mike here with the social life of language, and today we are dealing with one of the most important critical race theory articles ever written. And of course, I'm talking about Cheryl Harris's article "Whiteness as Property."
Now, to set up this discussion, let's start with a blunt question: Does whiteness have value, specifically economic value? Let me begin with a parable told to a group of white students who were essentially asked to put a price tag on whiteness.
Now, while Harris herself wasn't the one that facilitated this discussion, it did actually happen, and it went a little something like this:
"Imagine you hear a knock on your door, and it's a federal agent. Good afternoon, sir! I'm Agent Billy Bear Bottom. Now, according to our records, you were supposed to have been born black. Of course, this is no fault of your own, but at midnight, you will be turning black.
We’re talking everything: you know, hair, body, all of it. This is not your fault; it's our fault, our error. The government of the United States is willing to offer to pay for the damages. So, how much do you want, or how much is your whiteness worth?"
"Wait, well let me get this straight. At midnight, I'm going to turn black, magically? Yeah, I'm just going to turn. That's correct. How much... how much is your whiteness worth? What do y'all think? What do you think we should charge?"
"Okay, um, we decided... we think 50 is fair."
"50 what? 50 thousand per year?"
"I don't think we're prepared to— no, no, no, no... not 50 thousand. 50 million!"
"So that's one million per year. 50 million?"
"50 million."
"What? I'm sure. Why not? I mean, we think it's fair. Sounds fair to us."
So this group of white students agreed that one million dollars per year for 50 years should cover the loss of whiteness.
Now, clearly like any piece of property, white identity is imagined to have economic value. Actually, there's a real-life version of this story that happened in the late 2010s. A police officer traced their heritage, their DNA, using one of those DNA websites like Ancestry.com, and he discovered that within his DNA, he was 18% African.
He thought it would be fun to tell his fellow police co-workers. His police officer is suing the chief and city leaders there. The officer, who recently discovered he's 18% black, it all began when an ancestry research site answered a lingering question Hastings police Sergeant Cleanne Brown had about his lineage.
Not everyone at Hastings PD shared in his pride—claims of fist pumps and whispers of "Black Lives Matter" from fellow officers as they passed Brown decorations, including Santa figurines with the names of each officer. Brown's Santa was black, with 18 percent written on the beard.
So this officer sued the police department for racism. Or another way to think about this is that he was angry that his white privilege was partially taken away from him. So he sued the police department and walked away with a sixty-five-thousand-dollar settlement.
Apparently, to the courts in this case, whiteness actually does have a literal economic value. But does that mean whiteness can be a form of property? Let's find out.
First, some notes on the goals of this video. This article is almost 90 pages long, divided into four huge sections that could essentially be their own video. So nothing can replace actually reading the original text. In this video, we're going to focus on section two, which is titled "The Construction of Race and the Emergence of Whiteness as Property."
Now, to make this article easier to understand, we need to pay close attention to the way Harris is using the legal definitions of property and of whiteness. These legal definitions are very different from pop culture definitions. I think by the end of this video, you're going to see that just applying the legal definitions actually makes the phrase "whiteness as property" make way more sense.
So, as usual, let's approach each keyword separately, and then we'll bring them together to make the phrase "whiteness as property." Finally, we're going to go over some modern-day examples.
Okay, so let's start with a blunt question: Can racial identity or racialized persons be property? Immediately, we can think of slavery, so yes, at a very basic level, racialized persons have been conceptualized as material property. But there is some really deep stuff going on here, and to understand, we gotta go back in time to the way American institutions conceived or conceptualized the word property.
We also need to think about how property law emerged with and from white supremacist ideologies. As Harris says, "the origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination." Even in the early years of the country, it was not the concept of race alone that operated to oppress blacks and Indians. Rather, it was the interaction between conceptions of race and property that played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination.
So throughout this video, we're going to see this a lot: white supremacist formulations of race overlapping with how we imagine the concept of property. For example, a human can be property if they are black, while a human can own property if they are white. So clearly, the early definitions of property were filtered through white supremacist ideologies.
Now here's the thing, and this is the reason why I think this article is so complicated and difficult to follow. When you have overlap between conceptual definitions, a lot of times they become a circular logic, almost like a feedback loop. For example, I'm going to make a series of statements, and listen to how each of the following statements creates a feedback loop:
The law says white men can own property.
The law says black men are not fully men (the word "men" means "human").
Therefore, black men cannot own property.
And since black men are not technically fully men, fully human, they can become property.
Therefore, it is legal for white men to own black men as property.
And since white men themselves cannot be property, that implies that white men cannot be enslaved.
Therefore, what is further implied is that whiteness is a form of protection from slavery.
So you see how each of those statements kind of feeds back into the logic or offers support to the next statement and the statement before.
So basically, if you separate all of these premises into individual statements, you can see that when we were first conceptualizing the legal concept of property, we were always using ideologies about race. This also means that the way race was conceptualized had to refer to property laws.
So in this article, Harris is basically going to separate all these premises for us so that we can see what's going on, and then she's gonna walk us through that logic.
So let's start by defining what Harris means by the concept of property in the legal sense, not in the popular sense. Harris says, "Although by popular usage property describes things owned by persons or the rights of persons with respect to a thing, the concept of property prevalent among most theorists even prior to the 20th century is that property may consist of rights and things that are intangible or whose existence is a matter of legal definition. Property is thus said to be a right, not a thing, characterized as a metaphysical, not physical."
So Harris is telling us right out in this article we are far less concerned with the popular definition of property as things someone can possess. Instead, we are thinking of property as a set of rights or a bundle of rights.
Now, I don't think I can overstate this: thinking of property as a bundle of rights is the first step you've got to make in your head to understand this article.
Okay, right here I think we need to talk this through using an example because the bundle of rights are actually extremely complex. So let's use a piece of property that I own. So this is a Spider-Man figure, and I can choose what I want to do with it because I am the owner.
Now, I've already bought it, but I could sell it, I could destroy it, and importantly, I can say that this is mine, not yours. And not only is this toy mine; all the rights connected to this toy are mine. I exclude you as being the owner of this toy, which also means I exclude you from using the property rights that I own.
Because I own this toy, that's called the "right to exclude," and we're going to come back and talk about that a lot. But let's get more abstract and more complex.
While I own this Spider-Man action figure, somebody else owns the concept we call Spider-Man. I do not own that, meaning just because I bought this Spider-Man action figure, that doesn't give me the right to produce my own Spider-Man action figures and sell them. Marvel Comics owns the property rights to the concept Spider-Man.
So Marvel Comics has the right to exclude me from producing Spider-Man action figures again—it's that "right to exclude."
So to be clear, property does not need a material form. Just think of something like college degrees. We imagine that we own our degrees, which we kind of pay like forty, fifty, a hundred thousand dollars for, and because we imagine that we own it, we have the exclusive rights to use that degree.
So to emphasize the point one more time: when we see the word "property," what we're really focusing on is the bundle of rights that come attached to whatever we claim to own. One of the main things that this article does for us is analyze moments when the concept of whiteness operates or is made to operate as if it were property or made to operate specifically as a bundle of rights.
In fact, we could even modify the title of this paper to be something like "When Whiteness Operates as a Bundle of Property Rights."
So we need to move past the idea that we're mainly talking about material things or material items. For example, a material form of whiteness, like skin color or a perceived white body, those things are important, but we're really focusing on the rights connected to those things more so than anything else.
And to be clear, Harris is not making this super abstract for the sake of being theoretical. The idea of property has literally always been this abstract. For example, James Madison said, "Property embraces everything to which a man may attach value and have a right," which he was referring to all of a person's rights.
So far, we've been hinting at how whiteness is treated and protected as though it were a piece of property, and since the definitions of property are so abstract, even those protections can become a form of property. Those rights are part of the property, or as Harris says, "Whiteness—the right to white identity as embraced by the law—is property if by property one means all of a person's legal rights."
Notice again—last time I'm going to say this—we are focusing on the bundle of rights itself as the form of property.
Okay, up next, we're gonna go to a crucial subsection where Harris compares the abstractness of whiteness to similarly abstract things that often fall into the category of property. This subsection is titled "The Property Functions of Whiteness."
Harris identifies four characteristics or functions that most theorists might agree upon when it comes to the concept of property. The first one is called the "rights of disposition." This essentially means that a person has the right to possess, sell, exchange, and/or transfer property.
Now, in order to do all of these different actions, there is an assumption that whatever piece of property we are talking about can be separated from its owner and then transferred to someone else. Now, the technical term used to describe this is whether or not a piece of property is "alienable" or "inalienable," or the ability to be separated from.
But what about whiteness? Is whiteness alienable? Well, at this point, Harris reminds us, "Actually, there are a lot of common forms of property that are inalienable." For example, college degrees, licenses, and government entitlements are all recognized legally as forms of property.
So the alienability or lack thereof should not or rather does not disqualify whiteness from being a form of property. In fact, you could kind of argue in the opposite direction: the fact that whiteness is perceived as inalienable is exactly one of the factors that makes it such an exclusive form of property, which makes it perceived as limited or rare.
And it's that rareness that makes whiteness more valuable because it is perceived to be a limited resource.
The second characteristic or function is "the right to use" and "the right to enjoyment." I think Harris explains it really clearly, so here's an extended quote:
"Whiteness can move from being a passive characteristic as an aspect of identity to an active entity that, like other types of property, is used to fulfill the will and exercise power. Thus, a white person used and enjoyed whiteness whenever she took advantage of the privileges accorded white people simply by virtue of their whiteness. Whiteness, as the embodiment of white privilege, transcended mere belief or preference; it became usable property, the subject of the law's regard and protection. In this respect, whiteness as an active property has been used and enjoyed."
So there we go—that is the right to use and the right to enjoyment.
The third feature deals with reputation and status—property or the idea that reputation and status can become property and even have an economic value that is usable in the marketplace. And because reputation has value and can be used and enjoyed and imagined to be owned by individuals, it can be protected by property laws.
And if it is protected by property laws, it has just become a form of property. Here's a quick example: In 2023, we had a lawsuit filed against Fox News for 1.6 billion dollars. Allegedly, Fox News damaged the reputation of this voting machine company so badly that it can no longer practice as a voting machine company.
So in this lawsuit, we are imagining Fox to have infringed upon property rights—specifically, Fox damaged the status property or the reputation property of that company. And Fox does not hold the rights to do that. Only owners can use their status, whether it be to enhance it, to enjoy it, or even to destroy it if they wanted to.
Now the question here: Can whiteness be a form of status property? The answer is of course; for example, back in the day, a white person could sue someone if that person called them black. However, a black person could not sue for being called white.
What this reveals is that whiteness itself is a form of status property, and this status property is assumed to carry social value. It's assumed to carry access and privilege.
Finally, the fourth characteristic or the last feature Harris mentions is "the absolute right to exclude." On a basic level, this is saying that the bundle of rights that come with ownership are mine and not yours.
Again, Harris says it best here: "The possessors of whiteness were granted the legal right to exclude others from the privileges inhering in whiteness. Whiteness became an exclusive club whose membership was closely and grudgingly guarded. The courts played an active role in enforcing this right to exclude, determining who was or was not white enough to enjoy the privileges accompanying whiteness."
In that sense, the courts protected whiteness as any other form of property.
Now if you ask, can whiteness be considered property? Or can it act like property? Or can it be used like property? Or protected like property? The answer is yes! Yep, definitely.
And because remember, we are thinking of property as first and foremost a bundle of rights. And during the founding of the United States, when we were debating about all these laws that had to do with slavery and ownership, what made whiteness so real and so privileged and so powerful was precisely because it was treated as an exclusive bundle of rights.
And that bundle of rights would come to be protected as an exclusive form of property that only some folks have, while others do not.
Okay, thus far we have covered the theoretical foundations of the argument. Up next, Harris analyzes the court case Plessy v. Ferguson—that famous court case that legalized separate but equal.
Plessy was a white-passing man who was removed from a train car reserved for whites. His legal claim went as follows: "The brief filed on Plessy's behalf advanced as its first argument that because the reputation of belonging to the dominant race is property in the same sense that a right of action or inheritance is property, empowering a train employee to arbitrarily take property away from her passenger violated due process guarantees."
So this was a legal case about race and property, specifically if Plessy had the legal right to own and use whiteness. He's making the claim to be mixed with whiteness, therefore he is white.
If he is seen as not white, according to the lawyers, he would lose the expectation of privileges linked with whiteness, and those expectations are part of the rights of whiteness as property.
Don't worry—this is going to make sense in a couple of minutes. Plessy's lawyer says, "Indeed, is whiteness not the most valuable sort of property, being the master key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity?"
Okay, so the end result of Plessy v. Ferguson was legal support for separate but equal. But another way to think about this is that the court protected whiteness by framing it as property, meaning the expectation of access and privilege counted as status property.
But since Plessy was mixed, according to the courts, he was excluded from the use of white property rights. In other words, in this court decision, the expectation of white privileges is acknowledged to be a form of white property.
Okay, let me explain that better, and this brings us to one more super important aspect of property—and that's the word "expectation." Specifically, the idea that we expect to be able to freely draw from or extract value from any piece of property that we own. We expect those rights to be there.
That is the social norm of today. We not only want or desire a piece of property; we feel entitled to and indeed expect all the rights that are connected to that property.
Now once again, listen to this series of statements and look for the feedback loop:
When we expect rights to be there, then the expectation itself becomes part of the value of a piece of property.
Therefore, the expectation itself operates as if it were one of the rights within the bundle of rights that create a piece of property.
Therefore, because we are thinking of the expectation as a right, that means the expectation itself can be a form of property—the expect-right.
Okay, let me explain that better just using an example because I got really confused with all that white nonsense.
Okay, first example: these two cameras are almost exactly the same—all the electronics, all the image quality, exactly the same. But one is a regular camera, and the other is a cinema camera. The regular camera costs two thousand dollars, but the cinema camera costs four thousand dollars.
So why that massive markup in price if the differences are pretty much just cosmetic? Well, the people who use and buy cinema cameras expect to be able to charge more for their services because they use cinema cameras and not regular cameras.
So just the expectation of being able to access this more high-end clientele gives the cinema camera twice as much value in the marketplace.
It's these settled expectations, the differences between regular cameras and cinema cameras—it's these expectations where all the additional value is located. And we know that because these cameras are essentially identical except for the appearance.
I'll give you a super easy example of when settled expectations actually add value to a piece of property. A person might desire to be considered white because one expects that the social norms that privilege whiteness are intact, because historically, those privileges were put there by law.
Or as Harris says, "within the worlds of de jure and de facto segregation, whiteness has value. Whiteness is valued, and whiteness is expected to be valued in law." These advantages became institutionalized privileges, and ideologically they became part of the settled expectations of whites.
Okay, now finally let's move on to present-day examples of whiteness as property. Clearly, the easiest way to understand this stuff is by using real-life examples and when it comes to more modern or recent examples, I think that the idea of settled expectations is where a lot of the recent social strife is coming from.
Let's go back to that cop story I told at the very beginning of this video. So this cop was made fun of for claiming to be black, and then he sued when the co-workers made fun of him via anti-black racism.
Now let's think about this through the lens of whiteness as property. Okay, so first you have a white-identifying person who expects to be treated as a white person and not a black person, meaning this cop feels entitled to be treated as a white person free from racism.
We might call that a settled expectation, a social norm. Another way to think about this is that this cop owned white property rights as a white-identifying man but was unable to freely use and enjoy his whiteness because his co-workers, in their own way, excluded him from his own whiteness.
And that is not their right to do because property owners have exclusive rights to use and enjoy.
Now this sounds very familiar to the Plessy v. Ferguson argument. Plessy was claiming to be white and was suing because the train conductor infringed upon his rights to be able to freely use his whiteness.
Similarly, this police officer became unable to tap into the privileges of whiteness—to tap and use his white property. In this case, he was the one that was excluded from using his own whiteness as property.
So it appears then that the right to expect to never experience anti-black racism was worth 68 thousand dollars in damages.
Now, according to Harris, very generally, the courts in the United States have a really bad habit of coming in and re-establishing the settled expectations of whiteness as property or white privilege.
Okay, now one more modern example: Let's talk about the book banning movement that we're seeing across the United States.
Now, a majority of these books are by black and brown authors, and the rest of those books are imagined to either disturb the racial order or the status quo, or worse, it implies that white children get their privileged status from racism as opposed to, you know, merits or whatever.
So one of the books that was banned was a biography on Harriet Tubman, and the argument was that it should be banned because it potentially would hurt the psyche of white children. But you know, if you look at basically any Stephen King novel, he likes to use the n-word like on every other page, and for whatever reason, that is totally fine and acceptable to school districts.
But notice how the psyche of black children never comes up—like that doesn't matter to the courts.
And I think it's because racism towards black folks in the United States is a social norm; it is a settled expectation.
So when it comes to black children's psyche, according to this settled expectation type of logic, books that use the n-word aren't going to damage black children any more than they already are.
So to put it as clearly as possible, an attack on social norms threatens the power of whiteness by disrupting the settled expectations of whiteness.
And remember, the expectation itself can be a form of property. Also, those expectations have value.
So something like a school's curriculum or a school library as part of social norms and settled expectations— you can expect white parents and white politicians to fully, fully believe and expect that they are entitled to dictate what everyone needs.
After all, that's the way it's always been, so the story goes.
A different way to say this is that whiteness framed as status property is being damaged, and therefore all of the white children's status property rights are also being damaged or infringed upon.
Okay, so now let's start closing up. As a theoretical lens, "whiteness as property" helps to explain how whiteness becomes a valuable entity in both material and abstract forms.
I think nowadays when whiteness’s property is invoked in a debate, it very often looks like a battle over settled expectations or in the felt sense of entitlement to dictate social norms.
Now, I'd like to say that we've come a long way, but really, when we’re giving 68 thousand dollars to a white police officer for experiencing anti-black racism for like 10 minutes, well, maybe things haven't changed as much as we think.
And honestly, I think that this is exactly what Harris was implying all along. Sure, debates look different nowadays than they did two, three hundred years ago, but that circular logic—that feedback loop between the concept of race and the concept of property—that feedback loop is still there.
Well, that's all for today, folks! Don't forget to like and subscribe, and do donate to the Patreon. You can look up all my publications on academia.edu or MaestroMikeMana.com.
This is Mike with the social life of language, and we're done. [Music]