Harris "Whiteness as Property," Noah: Consistency Within Discrimination

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 Throughout Whiteness as Property, Harris makes many compelling arguments about the historical preservation of whiteness as a means of maintaining exclusive rights and privileges. Her points connecting white identification to white supremacy within our expectations of white racial identity as “pure” and “without contamination,” alongside her examination of Brown II’s shortcomings: “selecting desegregation as the sole remedy was the consequence of defining the injury solely as racial separation,” were sobering and eye-opening. 

Another claim that I found insightful but debatable was that “whiteness as the the basis for a valid claim… is a further legitimation of whiteness as identity, status, and property.  Treating white identity as no different from any other group identity when, at its core, whiteness is based on the racial subordination ratifies existing white privilege by making it the referential base line.”

While I agree that only viewing issues from a universal assumption of equal privilege is absolutely problematic in general life, I find it has other considerations when applying to law. In Wygant, Harris brings up how—in her opinion—seniority unfairly trumped union protection in maintaining white teachers’ jobs and that the case should have considered historical discrimination that allowed white teachers to secure employment earlier than the recently hired black unionized ones. 

In a perfect world, every case would have all context of the teachers' history of being discriminated. We would know the position they would find themselves if not for historical, systemic, and personal oppression. Then, we could accurately asses which teachers should be fairly let-go as part of their personal merit unaltered by external measures.

But in our world, it’s not that easy. Factors like disability, familial status, place of birth, family income, also add variables in this equation of calculating discrimination—and make assessing disadvantage more impossible than it already is. If we are to incorporate the racial discrimination as a result of historical injustice, I find it equally acceptable to incorporate these other matters which can afflict individuals just as much. Opening the door to interpreting historical racial exclusion opens the door to cycling through discriminated identities/conditions to determine objectively fair outcomes. There needs to be a baseline of treatment for everyone assuming an accurate way to measure the vast oppressing forces of life are incalculable, and I'm not sure it can maintain consistency if we account for racial injustice but stop there.


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