How Ingrained Racism Became Invisible

Race as Phenomena, ed. Emily Lee, 2019

In her landmark essay, “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl Harris shows how whiteness functions as a kind of property that protects those who pass as white from occupying the very bottom of a social hierarchy. This chapter explores the perceptual practices and sociogenic structure of whiteness as property through an engagement with Fanon’s account of the lived experience of blackness in a white world, which is structured by the corporeal schema, the historico-racial schema, and the racial epidermal schema. Drawing on Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony, as well as critical literature on race and policing, I argue that a possessive investment in whiteness produces and intensifies security apparatuses that serve and protect some people while exposing others to both mundane and spectacular forms of state violence. This double investment in property and security drives the perceptual practice of suspicious surveillance, or “seeing like a cop,” as well as the spatial politics of gentrification.

The U.S. Constitution, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states that no person shall be denied the equal protection of the law. Despite this Constitutional protection, however, the United States remains structured by deep racial inequality. Human rights advocates have suggested that this contradiction stems from unwillingness on the part of the U.S. government to go beyond equal protection of the law and provide state protection for a broader scope of human rights such as economic and cultural rights. Although this criticism of U.S. law and policy is warranted, I suggest even the notion of U.S. commitment to equal protection of the law must be critically interrogated given this country’s history of white racial domination. Through an explication of the equal protection jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court, I illustrate how the Court has embedded within the equal protection legal frame a postcivil rights racial logic, particularly tropes of black criminality and white innocence. In doing so, the Court has constructed a substantive legal definition of equal protection of the law that naturalizes and supports contemporary mechanisms and structures of white racial domination.

1993

Issues regarding race and racial identity as well as questions pertaining to property rights and ownership have been prominent in much public discourse in the United States. In this article, Professor Harris contributes to this discussion by positing that racial identity and property are deeply interrelated concepts. Professor Harris examines how whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law. Professor Harris traces the origins of whiteness as property in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property and property rights. Following the period of slavery and conquest, whiteness became the basis of racialized privilegea type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for allocating societal benefits both private and public in character. These arrangements were ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property. Even as legal segregation was overturned, whiteness as property continued to serve as a barrier to effective change as the system of racial classification operated to protect entrenched-power. Next, Professor Harris examines how the concept of whiteness as property persists in current perceptions of racial identity, in the law's misperception of group identity and in the Court's reasoning and decisions in the arena of affirmative action. Professor Harris concludes by arguing that distortions in affirmative action doctrine can only be addressed by confronting and exposing the property interest in whiteness and by acknowledging the distributive justification and function of affirmative action as central to that task. she walked into forbidden worlds impaled on the weapon of her own pale skin she was a sentinel at impromptu planning sessions of her own destruction .... Cheryl I. Harris, poem for alma'

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2004

DePaul Journal for Social Justice, 2018

Recent events have upended this "post-racial" narrative. In the wake of the racially charged election of Donald J. Trump and the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, race generally and white supremacy specifically are again taking center stage. 4 For many, the reemergence of the kind of overt manifestations of white supremacy that were unveiled in Charlottesville was particularly jarring. It forced many people to grapple with the reality that white supremacy, a phenomenon that many believed had been relegated to a historical footnote, still exists and is stronger than ever. Yet those such as myself who examine race critically have long been aware that the fissures caused by race generally and white supremacy specifically, never went anywhere, notwithstanding the election of the country's first self-identified African-American president. 5 Race generally and white supremacy specifically are embedded into the framework of most American social institutions. As a result, now more than ever, it is imperative that we critically examine all forms and manifestations of white supremacy. This paper focuses on a very important part of white supremacy-the legal foundations of white supremacy. The central thesis of this paper is that American law has historically played a vital 2

2017

THIS COLLECTION ESPOUSES a rhetorical lens for employing theories and methods of whiteness studies to analyze twenty-first-century texts and contexts; as such, it argues for the continued relevancy of whiteness studies in the twenty-first century. In particular, this collection identifies new sites for analyses of racialized whiteness, such as digitized representations of whiteness on the web and implicit representations of racialized whiteness in educational policies and politics. In the process, this collection exposes how seemingly progressive gains made in representing nonwhites in various cultural sites often reify a normative, racialized whiteness. Our attempt to revivify whiteness studies from its demise during the first decade of the twenty-first century is necessary because, in the words of one anonymous reviewer of this manuscript, whiteness studies had become "exhausted. Stagnant. Its momentum stalled in the wake of post-racial self-congratulations. Tedious. .. Critical Race Theory in whiteface. Insular and self-congratulatory. Mattering mostly only in the academy with little impact on or a relationship to social policy or to those outside of the academy." To counter such a demise, our collection offers broadly engaging analyses that inform academic readers interested in rhetoric, social media, whiteness studies, cultural studies, critical ethnic studies, communication studies, and critical race theory in both upper division and graduate classes as well as general readers interested in social media, film, school testing, and technology. Provocative in tone and argument, our collection invites these audiences into further discussions and actions that interrupt racialized whiteness in twenty-first-century culture; as such, our collection promotes rhetorical analyses as a productive means of fostering such discussions and actions. We three coeditors of Rhetorics of Whiteness also coedited a 2004 special edition of Rhetoric Review that focused on whiteness studies as an important site for developing antiracist and antiwhiteness tactics. But our scholarly call resulted in only a few scholarly projects, such as Jennifer Trainor's Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School. One result of our collaboration, however, is that we periodically chat about the state of whiteness in U.S. culture. Recently we noted two seemingly contradictory cultural trends that intrigue us: the momentum of whiteness studies as an active research field has waned during the past decade even as the two elections of President Barack Obama have rendered white an operative term in mainstream discourses. Given this emergence of white in mainstream discourses, the need for whiteness studies as a means for theorizing, analyzing, interpreting, and challenging racialized whiteness seems more urgent than ever. So we decided to create this edited collection, Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in

Transforming Anthropology, 2015

The stakes of being a raced body are high, in certain places at certain times they are tangible, even deadly. Responses to race and racism in the U.S. often rely on structures and frameworks for interpretation, converting events and experiences into local examples. But the reality on the ground demands a closer look. This study expands on structural interpretations by detailing experiences and events, both past and present, which include the local landscape as a key player within White Supremacy. I argue that racism does not simply happen in a general way, but that racism lingers in a landscape, and contributes to the visibility of certain raced bodies and the invisibility of others, while making itself appear in a moment, felt in and on the skin. It is from the skin and in the landscape that White supremacy can be understood anew, and that possibility can be re-imagined.