Whiteness as Property?

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I read Part II of this essay with a lot of skepticism. Though you should never judge a book by its cover, this work's title alone is enough to raise some eyebrows. After doing such a deep dive into Locke's account of property, it was hard to imagine how whiteness could be considered property. While I agreed with the general claims made in the introduction and the first couple of sections of Part II, I couldn't accept that whiteness could be interpreted as property. After Harris's dissection of antebellum America and the slave trade, it was clear to me how whiteness—and non-whiteness—evolved from just a concept to something that had real weight. Harris did a really good job explaining how race became conjoined with legal status. As she says, there was a "move from 'slave' and 'free' to 'Black' and 'white' as polar constructs marked an important step in the social construction of race" (1718). At this point, I understood that whiteness could keep yourself from becoming property, but I didn't think that was enough to consider whiteness itself as property. Similarly, when Harris talks about colonization and how white colonizers didn't view Native Americans' claims to land as valid because it had been left in its natural state (very similar to Locke's understanding of property and the commons), I wondered, how are we defining property? Is it simply a possession? In which case, can we possess our race, or is it just a characteristic we apply to ourselves? Is it something that's valuable? I felt that Harris had made a compelling case that whiteness is a prerequisite for having property in a caste system where white people are at the top, but if something is a prerequisite for owning property, that isn't necessarily property in and of itself. Plus, I was unsure if it is whiteness itself that made the colonists view the Native Americans's claims to land invalid, or if it was because they had two drastically different understandings of what constituted property rights. Harris argues that because the  colonists were in a position of power, their status quo/understanding of property forcibly overrode that of the Natives, thus, "Only particular forms of possession—those that were characteristic of white settlement—would be recognized and legitimated" (1722). In light of this, maybe we should shift our definition of whiteness to contain the things that come along with it—which Harris does—like privileges under the law. Harris writes, "[Whiteness's being a precondition for property rights] infused whiteness with significance and value" (1724). But even if this is the case, just because property rights necessitate whiteness it does not follow that whiteness itself would have to be a form of property, even if only a few people would be able to meet this condition. 

I maintained this opinion until Harris contrasted classical understandings of property (like Locke's) with modern understandings (Reich) which argue that "property is not a natural right" but rather a social construct and can be both tangible and intangible (1729). With this premise, she moved on to Bentham's argument that not only is property a social construct, but it is a social construct that is only applied to something when the expectation of that thing is deemed legitimate by the legal system (1729). At first I was opposed to this view because I believed (as Locke did) that the legal system is just the way that we can protect rights and settle disputes over rights in a way that we all have a say in (i.e., by comparing situations to existing statutes or creating new ones). But once I realized that since Locke's understanding of property doesn't really apply much anymore—after all, if I inherit a house from my parents, that wouldn't really be a representation of my labor—I understood that the law isn't just a system of protecting rights, but rather the law is a system of protecting rights and creating them. What really legitimized Harris's claim of whiteness as property was Section 4 of Part II where she explains the "property functions of whiteness." I loved how she took a step out of abstract understandings of what property is and instead decided to look at what characteristics property has (e.g., rights of disposition, right to use and enjoyment, and the right to exclude) and compare it to how whiteness has been used in American society. This was the point where I conceded her point.

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