Whiteness as Property
Author(s): Cheryl I. Harris
Source: Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 8 (Jun., 1993), pp. 1707-1791
Published by: The Harvard Law Review Association
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VOLUME 106 JUNE 1993 NUMBER 8
HARVARD LAW REVIEW
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
CherylI. Harris
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION........................................................... 1710
II. THE CONSTRUCTIONOF RACE AND THE EMERGENCEOF WHITENESS AS
PROPERTY .................. ............................................. 1715
A. Forms of Racialized Property: Relationships Between Slavery, Race, and
Property ......... ................................................... 1716
I. The Convergence of Racial and Legal Status ........................... 1716
2. Implications for Property ............................................ I718
B. Forms of Racialized Property: Relationships Between Native American Land
Seizure, Race, and Property ... ........................................ 1721
C. Critical Characteristics of Property and Whiteness ......................... 1724
I. Whiteness as a Traditional Form of Property ........................... 1725
2. Modern Views of Property as Defining Social Relations . ................ 728
3. Property and Expectations ........................................... I729
4. The Property Functions of Whiteness .................................. I73I
(a) Rights of Disposition ............................................ 173
(b) Right to Use and Enjoyment ..................................... 1734
(c) Reputation and Status Property ................................... 1734
(d) The Absolute Right to Exclude .................................... 1736
D. White Legal Identity: The Law's Acceptance and Legitimation of Whiteness as
Property ........................................ ...................... 1737
i. Whiteness as Racialized Privilege ..................................... I74I
2. Whiteness, Rights, and National Identity .............................. 1744
III. BOUND BY LAW: THE PROPERTYINTEREST IN WHITENESS AS LEGAL DOCTRINE
IN PLESSY AND BROWN ................................................... I745
A. Plessy ................................................................ 1746
B. Brown I .............................................................. I750
C. Brown II ............................................................. 1754
D. Brown's Mixed Legacy ................................................. 1756
IV. THE PERSISTENCEOF WHITENESS AS PROPERTY ............................. 1757
A. The Persistence of Whiteness as Valued Social Identity . ..... .............. 758
B. Subordination Through Denial of Group Identity .......................... 176I
C. Subjugation Through AffirmativeAction Doctrine .......................... 1766
i. Bakke ............................................................. 769
1707
1708 HARVARD LAWREVIEW [Vol. Io6:I707
2. Croson ............................................................ 1773
3. Wygant .......................................... ................. I776
V. DE-LEGITIMATING THE PROPERTYINTEREST IN WHITENESS THROUGH
AFFIRMATIVEACTION..................................................... 1777
A. Corrective Justice, Sin, and Whiteness as Property ........................ I78I
B. AffirmativeAction: A New Form of Status Property? ....................... 1784
C. What AffirmativeAction Has Been; What AffirmativeAction Might Become .. 1787
VI. CONCLUSION............................................................. 1791
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
ARTICLES
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
CherylI. Harris*
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 privilege - a type of status in which white racial identity provided
the basisfor 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
affirmativeaction doctrine can only be addressed by confrontingand 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 alma1
* Assistant Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology;
B.A. 1973, Wellesley College; J.D. I978, Northwestern University. My thanks for comments
and support to members of the Third Midwestern People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference
to whom I first presented this paper and to members of the Third and Fourth Critical Race
Theory Workshops whose work and discussion inspired me to pursue this project. I especially
must thank Lisa Ikemoto and Leland Ware who provided very thoughtful comments on earlier
drafts. The support of Joan Steinman, Marty Malin, Steve Heyman, A. Dan Tarlock, and all
the members of the faculty who provided input was most helpful. I also appreciate the
encouragement offered by Gerald Torres and Linda Greene. The research assistance provided
by Terry Lewis, Britt Shawver, Ron Haywood, and Jordan Marsh was also invaluable, as was
the secretarial support offered by Carol Johnson and Inis Petties. This paper would not have
been possible without the work and support of Derrick Bell. Beyond all reasonable expectations,
Neil Gotanda has provided invaluable insights, support, and encouragement. For his contributions,
I thank him most sincerely. This paper was supported by the Marshall D. Ewell
Research Fund.
1Cheryl I. Harris, poem for alma (I990) (unpublished poem, on file at the Harvard Law
School Library).
I993] 1709
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
[P]etitioner was a citizen of the United States and a resident of the
state of Louisiana of mixed descent, in the proportionof seven eighths
Caucasian and one eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored
blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every
recognition, right, privilege and immunity secured to the citizens of
the United States of the white race by its Constitution and laws . . .
and thereupon entered a passenger train and took possession of a
vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were
accommodated.
Plessy v. Ferguson2
I. INTRODUCTION
n the 1930s, some years after my mother's family became part of
the great river of Black3 migration that flowed north,4 my Mississippi-born
grandmother was confronted with the harsh matter of economic
survival for herself and her two daughters. Having separated
from my grandfather, who himself was trapped on the fringes of
economic marginality, she took one long hard look at her choices and
presented herself for employment at a major retail store in Chicago's
central business district. This decision would have been unremarkable
for a white woman in similar circumstances, but for my grandmother,
it was an act of both great daring and self-denial, for in so doing she
was presenting herself as a white woman. In the parlance of racist
America, she was "passing."
Her fair skin, straight hair, and aquiline features had not spared
her from the life of sharecropping into which she had been born in
2 I63 U.S. 537, 538 (I896).
3 I use the term "Black" throughout the paper for the reasons articulated by Professor
Kimberle Crenshaw. I share her view that "Blacks, like Asians, Latinos, and other 'minorities,'
constitute a specific cultural group and, as such, requiredenotation as a propernoun." Kimberle
W. Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformationand Legitimation in Antidiscrimination
Law, Ioi HARV. L. REV. 1331, I332 n.2 (I988). According to W.E.B. DuBois,
"[t]heword 'Negro' was used for the first time in the world's history to tie color to race and
blackness to slavery and degradation." W.E. BURGHARDTDu BOIS, THE WORLD AND AFRICA
20 (1965). The usage of the lower case "N"in "negro"was part of the construction of an inferior
image of Blacks that provided justification for and a defense of slavery. See W.E.B. Du BOIs,
That Capital "N," in 2 THE SEVENTH SON 12, 13 (Julius Lester ed., I97I). Thus, the use of
the upper case and lower case in reference to racial identity has a particular political history.
Although "white"and "Black"have been defined oppositionally, they are not functional opposites.
"White"has incorporated Black subordination; "Black"is not based on domination. See discussion
infra p. 1785. "Black"is naming that is part of counterhegemonic practice.
4 The Great Migration of Blacks from the rural South to urban centers between I9IO and
I940 doubled the percentage of Blacks living in the North and West. See I GUNNAR MYRDAL,
AN AMERICAN DILEMMA 183 (I944). The second major wave of Black migration, during the
I940s, increased the Black population in Northern cities. For example, in Chicago, it increased
by over 70 percent. See NICHOLAS LEMANN, THE PROMISEDLAND 70 (1991).
I7Io [Vol. IO6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
anywhere/nowhere, Mississippi - the outskirts of Yazoo City. But
in the burgeoning landscape of urban America, anonymity was possible
for a Black person with "white"features. She was transgressing
boundaries, crossing borders, spinning on margins, traveling between
dualities of Manichean space, rigidly bifurcated into light/dark, good/
bad, white/Black. No longer immediately identifiable as "Lula's
daughter," she could thus enter the white world, albeit on a false
passport, not merely passing, but trespassing.
Every day my grandmother rose from her bed in her house in a
Black enclave on the south side of Chicago, sent her children off to
a Black school, boarded a bus full of Black passengers, and rode to
work. No one at her job ever asked if she was Black; the question
was unthinkable. By virtue of the employment practices of the "fine
establishment" in which she worked, she could not have been. Catering
to the upper-middle class, understated tastes required that
Blacks not be allowed.
She quietly went about her clerical tasks, not once revealing her
true identity. She listened to the women with whom she worked
discuss their worries - their children's illnesses, their husbands' disappointments,
their boyfriends' infidelities - all of the mundane yet
critical things that made up their lives. She came to know them but
they did not know her, for my grandmother occupied a completely
different place. That place - where white supremacy and economic
domination meet - was unknown turf to her white co-workers. They
remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds that existed just beyond
the edge of their awareness and yet were present in their very
midst.
Each evening, my grandmother, tired and worn, retraced her steps
home, laid aside her mask, and reentered herself. Day in and day
out, she made herself invisible, then visible again, for a price too
inconsequential to do more than barely sustain her family and at a
cost too precious to conceive. She left the job some years later, finding
the strain too much to bear.
From time to time, as I later sat with her, she would recollect that
period, and the cloud of some painful memory would pass across her
face. Her voice would remain subdued, as if to contain the still
remembered tension. On rare occasions she would wince, recalling
some particularly racist comment made in her presence because of her
presumed, shared group affiliation. Whatever retort might have been
called for had been suppressed long before it reached her lips, for the
price of her family's well-being was her silence. Accepting the risk of
self-annihilation was the only way to survive.
Although she never would have stated it this way, the clear and
ringing denunciations of racism she delivered from her chair when
advanced arthritis had rendered her unable to work were informed
by those experiences. The fact that self-denial had been a logical
1993] I7II
HARVARD LAW REVIEW
choice and had made her complicit in her own oppression at times
fed the fire in her eyes when she confronted some daily outrage
inflicted on Black people. Later, these painful memories forged her
total identification with the civil rights movement. Learning about
the world at her knee as I did, these experiences also came to inform
my outlook and my understanding of the world.
My grandmother's story is far from unique. Indeed, there are
many who crossed the color line never to return. Passing is wellknown
among Black people in the United States5 and is a feature of
race subordination in all societies structured on white supremacy.6
Notwithstanding the purported benefits of Black heritage in an era of
5 When I began to relate the subject matter of my research to Black friends and colleagues,
in nearly every instance I was told, "I had an uncle .... I had a great aunt .... My
grandfather's brother left Alabama to go North as a white man and we never saw or heard
from him again" or other similar stories. See also PATRICIAJ. WILLIAMS,On Being the Object
of Property, in THE ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS 216, 223 (I99I) (recounting the story of
Marjorie, Williams's godmother, who was given away by her mother at the age of six in order
that her mother could "pass"and marry a white man); Gregory H. Williams, Neither Black
Nor White: A Childhood on the Color Line 8 (I99I) (unpublished manuscript, on file at the
Harvard Law School Library) (describing the childhood of a law professor whose father passed
for white, a fact unknown to his son until the age of ten).
Gunnar Myrdal's discussion of the phenomenon of "passing" in his I944 study of race
illuminates the social context of my grandmother'sstory and the stories of many like her.
"[P]assing"means that a Negro becomes a white man, that is, moves from the lower to
the higher caste. In the American caste order, this can be accomplished only by the
deception of the white people with whom the passer comes to associate and by a
conspiracy of silence on the part of other Negroes who might know about it. ... In the
Northern and Border states it seems to be relatively common for light-skinned Negroes
to "pass professionally"but preserve a Negro social life. Negro girls have practically no
chance of getting employment as stenographers or secretaries, salesclerks in department
stores, telephone operators, outside the establishments run by Negroes for Negroes. In
most communities their chances are slight even to become regularteachers, social workers,
or the like, if they do not conceal their Negro ancestry. . . . Not only in these female
middle class occupations but in all male and female trades where Negroes are excluded,
there must be a similar incentive to attempt to "pass professionally.". . . In view of the
advantages to be had by passing, it is not difficult to explain why Negroes pass, professionally
or completely. It is more difficult, however, to explain why Negroes do not pass
over to the white race more often than they actually do.
MYRDAL,supra note 4, at 683-86 (I944).
6 Because of the relative privileges of whites, the principal incentive is for Blacks to pass as
whites, not vice versa. See Marvin Harris, Referential Ambiguity in the Calculus of Brazilian
Racial Identity, in AFRO-AMERICANANTHROPOLOGY:CONTEMPORARYPERSPECTIVES75, 75-
76 (Norman E. Whitten, Jr. & John F. Szwed eds., I970) (describing the more fluid racial
classification systems of the Caribbean, Brazil, and other parts of Latin America that, unlike
the U.S. model that denotes as Black anyone with any known Black heritage, admits of
intermediate categories of mixed blood, but still holds that "money whitens," thereby equating
"white" with higher class position and reflecting that white is preferred and dominant). See
generally MARVINHARRIS,PATTERNSOFRACEIN THEAMERICAS39-40, 56-59 (1964) (describing
the phenomena of Indians "passing"in Mexico, and the complex racial system of Brazil).
However, there have been recent accounts of "reversepassing," that is, whites attempting to be
reclassified as Black or Hispanic for purposes of affirmative action programs. See infra note
319.
[Vol. Io6:1707I712
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
affirmative action, passing is not an obsolete phenomenon that has
slipped into history.7
The persistence of passing is related to the historical and continuing
pattern of white racial domination and economic exploitation that
has given passing a certain economic logic.8 It was a given to my
grandmother that being white automatically ensured higher economic
returns in the short term, as well as greater economic, political, and
social security in the long run. Becoming white meant gaining access
to a whole set of public and private privileges that materially and
permanently guaranteed basic subsistence needs and, therefore, survival.
Becoming white increased the possibility of controlling critical
aspects of one's life rather than being the object of others' domination.
My grandmother's story illustrates the valorization of whiteness as
treasured property in a society structured on racial caste. In ways so
embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges,
and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become
a valuable asset that whites sought to protect and that those who
passed sought to attain - by fraud if necessary. Whites have come
to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations
have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law. Even
though the law is neither uniform nor explicit in all instances, in
protecting settled expectations based on white privilege, American law
has recognized a property interest in whiteness9 that, although unack-
7 See, e.g., Doe v. State of Louisiana, 479 So.2d 369, 371 (La. Ct. App. 1985) (rejecting the
attempt by a family whose parents had been classified as "colored"to be reclassified as white).
8 See WILLIAMS,supra note 5, at 8 (theorizing that the author's father's masquerade as a
white man was motivated by the belief that passing brought "greaterjob opportunities").
One recurrent image of Blacks in cinema was the "tragic mulatto" who assassinated her
Black origins in order to attain a better life in the white world. Although many of the cinematic
versions of this tale have been cautionary morality plays illustrative of the tragic consequences
of self-denial, the underlying economic rationale for the hero(ine) to pass was so self-evident as
never to be challenged nor even explicitly stated. See generally DONALDBOGLE,TOMS,COONS,
MULATTOES, MAMMIES, AND BUCKS: AN INTERPRETIVEHISTORY OF BLACKS IN AMERICAN
FILMS9 (I989) (discussing film images of the "tragicmulatto").
9 My exploration of this concept began in March, 1991, when I participated in a conference
on "Constitution Making in a New South Africa," held at the University of the Western Cape
in South Africa. (The conference was jointly sponsored by the National Conference of Black
Lawyers, the National Lawyers Guild and the National Association of Democratic Lawyers in
South Africa.) My paper argued that American law had implicitly recognized a property interest
in whiteness. The concept resonated in the South African context because of the similar and
even more extreme patterns of white domination evident there.
As I later discovered, the concept of a "propertyinterest in whiteness" is one that has been
recognized in modern legal theory. Professor Bell in his chronicle, "Xerces and the Affirmative
Action Myth," noted the argument advanced in Plessy v. Ferguson, I63 U.S. 537 (1896),
regarding the property interest in whiteness and the extent to which affirmative action policies
are seen as a threat to "propertyinterests of identifiable whites." Derrick Bell, Xerces and the
Affirmative Action Myth, 57 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1595, I602, I6o8 (I989). Finding that
Professor Bell, to whom I am deeply indebted intellectually, had identified this concept before
me only served to confirm my belief that further exploration of this idea is a worthwhile project.
1993] I7I3
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
nowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes
are framed, argued, and adjudicated.
My Article investigates the relationships between concepts of race
and property and reflects on how rights in property are contingent
on, intertwined with, and conflated with race. Through this entangled
relationship between race and property, historical forms of domination
have evolved to reproduce subordination in the present. In Part II,
I examine the emergence of whiteness as property and trace the evolution
of whiteness from color to race to status to property as a
progression historically rooted in white supremacy10 and economic
hegemony over Black and Native American peoples. The origins of
whiteness as property lie 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. I further argue that
whiteness shares the critical characteristics of property even as the
meaning of property has changed over time. In particular, whiteness
and property share a common premise - a conceptual nucleus - of
a right to exclude. This conceptual nucleus has proven to be a powerful
center around which whiteness as property has taken shape.
Following the period of slavery and conquest, white identity became
the basis of racialized privilege that was ratified and legitimated in
law as a type of status property. After legalized segregation was
overturned, whiteness as property evolved into a more modern form
through the law's ratification of the settled expectations of relative
white privilege as a legitimate and natural baseline.
Part III examines the two forms of whiteness as property- status
property and modern property - that are the submerged text of two
paradigmatic cases on the race question in American law, Plessy v.
Ferguson"l and Brown v. Board of Education.12 As legal history, they
illustrate an important transition from old to new forms of whiteness
as property. Although these cases take opposite interpretive stances
regarding the constitutional legitimacy of legalized racial segregation,
the property interest in whiteness was transformed, but not discarded,
in the Court's new equal protection jurisprudence.
Part IV considers the persistence of whiteness as property. I first
examine how subordination is reinstituted through modern conceptions
10I adopt here the definition of white supremacy utilized by Frances Lee Ansley:
By "white supremacy"I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white
supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in
which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious
ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of
white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array
of institutions and social settings.
Frances L. Ansley, Stirring the Ashes: Race, Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship,
74 CORNELLL. REV. 993, 1024 n.129 (I989).
1 I63 U.S. 537 (I896).
12347 U.S. 483 (I954).
[Vol. IO6:I707I714
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
of race and identity embraced in law. Whiteness as property has
taken on more subtle forms, but retains its core characteristic - the
legal legitimation of expectations of power and control that enshrine
the status quo as a neutral baseline, while masking the maintenance
of white privilege and domination. I further identify the property
interest in whiteness as the unspoken center of current polarities
around the issue of affirmative action. As a legacy of slavery and de
jure and de facto race segregation, the concept of a protectable property
interest in whiteness permeates affirmative action doctrine in a
manner illustrated by the reasoning of three important affirmative
action cases - Regents of the University of California v. Bakke,13
City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson & Co.,14 and Wygant v. Jackson
Board of Education.15
Finally, in Part V, I offer preliminary thoughts on a way out of
the conundrum created by protecting whiteness as a property interest.
I suggest that affirmative action, properly conceived and reconstructed,
would de-legitimate the property interest in whiteness. I do
not offer here a complete reformulation of affirmative action, but
suggest that focusing on the distortions created by the propertyinterest
in whiteness would provoke different questions and open alternative
perspectives on the affirmative action debate. The inability to see
affirmative action as more than a search for the "blameworthy"among
"innocent"individuals is tied to the inability to see the property interest
in whiteness. Thus reconstructed, affirmative action would
challenge the characterization of the unfettered right to exclude as a
legitimate aspect of identity and property.
II. THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE AND THE EMERGENCE OF
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
The racialization of identity and the racial subordination of Blacks
and Native Americans provided the ideological basis for slavery and
conquest.16 Although the systems of oppression of Blacks and Native
Americans differed in form - the former involving the seizure and
appropriation of labor, the latter entailing the seizure and appropriation
of land - undergirding both was a racialized conception of
property implemented by force and ratified by law.
13 438 U.S. 265 (I978).
14488 U.S. 469 (1989).
15 476 U.S. 267 (1986).
16 See RONALD TAKAKI, IRON CAGES: RACE AND CULTURE IN I9TH-CENTURY AMERICA II
(1990) (describing how English definitions of Blacks and Native Americans as "savage" and
"instinctual""encouraged English immigrants to appropriate Indian land and black labor as
they settled and set up production in the New World, and enabled white colonists to justify the
actions they had committed against both peoples").
I993] I715
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in
racial domination.17 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.
The hyper-exploitation of Black labor was accomplished by treating
Black people themselves as objects of property. Race and property
were thus conflated by establishing a form of property contingent on
race - only Blacks were subjugated as slaves and treated as property.
Similarly, the conquest, removal, and extermination of Native American
life and culture were ratified by conferring and acknowledging
the property rights of whites in Native American land. Only white
possession and occupation of land was validated and therefore privileged
as a basis for property rights. These distinct forms of exploitation
each contributed in varying ways to the construction of whiteness
as property.
A. Forms of Racialized Property: Relationships Between Slavery,
Race, and Property
i. The Convergence of Racial and Legal Status. - Although the
early colonists were cognizant of race,18 racial lines were neither
consistently nor sharply delineated among or within all social groups.19
Captured Africans sold in the Americas were distinguished from the
population of indentured or bond servants - "unfree"white labor
but it was not an irrebuttable presumption that all Africans were
17In reviewing ROBERTWILLIAMS, THE AMERICANINDIAN IN WESTERN LEGALTHOUGHT:
THEDISCOURSEOFCONQUEST(1990), an eloquent and meticulous work on the American Indian
in Western legal doctrine, Joseph William Singer draws out the organic connections between
property rights and race as the pattern of conquest of native lands exemplified:
[P]ropertyand sovereignty in the United States have a racial basis. The land was taken
by force by white people from peoples of color thought by the conquerors to be racially
inferior. The close relation of native peoples to the land was held to be no relation at
all. To the conquerors, the land was "vacant." Yet it required trickery and force to
wrest it from its occupants. This means that the title of every single parcel of property
in the United States can be traced to a system of racial violence.
Joseph W. Singer, The Continuing Conquest: American Indian Nations, Property Law, and
Gunsmoke, I RECONSTRUCTION97, Io2 (I991); see Frances L. Ansley, Race and the Core
Curriculum in Legal Education, 79 CAL. L. REV. 1511, 1523 (1991) (citing the history of
discovery and conquest of American Indian land to be illustrative of the fact that "race is at
the heart of American property law").
18See WINTHROP D. JORDAN, WHITE OVER BLACK: AMERICANATTITUDES TOWARD THE
NEGRO,I550-I812, at 3-43 (1968) (describing early colonial racism).
19Indeed, between I607 and I800, racial lines among the lower classes were quite blurred;
not only were social activities between Blacks and lower class whites sometimes racially integrated,
but also political resistance in the form of urban slave revolts sometimes included whites.
See DAVID ROEDIGER, THE WAGES OF WHITENESS 24 (I99I).
I716 [Vol. Io6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
"slaves" or that slavery was the only appropriate status for them.20
The distinction between African and white indentured labor grew,
however, as decreasing terms of service were introduced for white
bond servants.21 Simultaneously, the demand for labor intensified,
resulting in a greater reliance on African labor and a rapid increase
in the number of Africans imported into the colonies.22
The construction of white identity and the ideology of racial hierarchy
also were intimately tied to the evolution and expansion of
the system of chattel slavery. The further entrenchment of plantation
slavery was in part an answer to a social crisis produced by the
eroding capacity of the landed class to control the white labor population.23
The dominant paradigm of social relations, however, was
that, although not all Africans were slaves, virtually all slaves were
not white. It was their racial otherness that came to justify the
subordinated status of Blacks.24 The result was a classification system
that "key[ed] official rules of descent to national origin" so that
"[m]embership in the new social category of 'Negro' became itself
sufficient justification for enslaveability."25 Although the cause of the
increasing gap between the status of African and white labor is contested
by historians,26 it is clear that "[t]he economic and political
20 According to John Hope Franklin, "thereis no doubt that the earliest Negroes in Virginia
occupied a position similar to that of the white servants in the colony." JOHNH. FRANKLIN,
U.S. COMM'NONCIVILRIGHTS,FREEDOMTOTHEFREE71 (I963), cited in A. LEONHIGGINBOTHAM,
JR., IN THE MATTER OF COLOR: RACE AND THE AMERICAN LEGAL PROCESS 21
(1978). The legal disabilities imposed on Blacks were not dissimilar to those imposed on nonEnglish
servants of European descent, as the principal line of demarcation was between Christian
and non-Christian servants. See Raymond T. Diamond & Robert J. Cottrol, Codifying Caste:
Louisiana's Racial Classification Scheme and the Fourteenth Amendment, 29 LoY. L. REV. 255,
259 n. I9 (1983). Indeed, "theword slave had no meaning in English law." THOMASF. GOSSETT,
RACE:THE HISTORYOFAN IDEAIN AMERICA29 (I963). Later statutory provisions prohibited
Blacks who were slaves from attaining their freedom by converting to Christianity. See, e.g.,
HIGGINBOTHAM, supra, at 200 (citing a South Carolina statute of I690 that declared "no slave
shall be free by becoming a christian").
21See GOSSETT, supranote 20, at 30.
22 See id.
23See EDMUNDS. MORGAN,AMERICANSLAVERY,AMERICANFREEDOM:THE ORDEALOF
COLONIALVIRGINIA295-300 (I975).
24 See Neil Gotanda, A Critique of "OurConstitution is Colorblind," 44 STAN.L. REV I,
34 (I99I).
25 Id.; see also Christopher Lasch, THE WORLDOF NATIONSI7 (1974) (asserting that the
concept of "Negro"emerged from "related . . . concepts of African, heathen and savage - at
the very point in time when large numbers of men and women were beginning to question the
moral legitimacy of slavery"). The implications are that, as the system of chattel slavery came
under fire, it was rationalized by an ideology of race that further differentiated between white
and Black.
26 CompareGOSSETT, supranote 20, at 29-30 (arguing that the terms of service for white
workers were decreased in order to attract white labor in the colonies) with HIGGINBOTHAM,
supra note 20, at 26 (citing masters' fears of a potential alliance between white indentured
servants and the rapidly expanding African population). See generally DAVIDW. GALENSON,
1993] I7I7
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
interests defending Black slavery were far more powerful than those
defending indentured servitude."27
By the i66os, the especially degraded status of Blacks as chattel
slaves was recognized by law.28 Between i680 and 1682, the first
slave codes appeared, codifying the extreme deprivations of liberty
already existing in social practice. Many laws parceled out differential
treatment based on racial categories: Blacks were not permitted to
travel without permits, to own property, to assemble publicly, or to
own weapons; nor were they to be educated.29 Racial identity was
further merged with stratified social and legal status: "Black"racial
identity marked who was subject to enslavement; "white"racial identity
marked who was "free"or, at minimum, not a slave.30 The
ideological and rhetorical move from "slave"and "free"to "Black"and
"white" as polar constructs marked an important step in the social
construction of race.
2. Implications for Property. - The social relations that produced
racial identity as a justification for slavery also had implications for
the conceptualization of property. This result was predictable, as the
institution of slavery, lying at the very core of economic relations,
was bound up with the idea of property. Through slavery, race and
economic domination were fused.31
Slavery produced a peculiar, mixed category of property and humanity
- a hybrid possessing inherent instabilities that were reflected
in its treatment and ratification by the law. The dual and contradictory
character of slaves as property and persons was exemplified in
the Representation Clause of the Constitution. Representation in the
WHITESERVITUDEIN COLONIALAMERICA:AN ECONOMICANALYSIS159-60 (I98I) (arguing
that the increased demand for skilled labor, a limited pool of low-cost, skilled white labor, and
the decline in the cost of training for the slave population that was increasingly born in the
Americas, combined to make slave labor more economically attractive); Diamond & Cottrol,
supra note 20, at 260 (advancing an argument in accord with Higginbotham).
27ROEDIGER,supra note 19, at 32.
28In I66i, the Maryland legislature enacted a bill providing that "'All Negroes and other
slaves shall serve Durante Vita [for life]."' GOSSETT,supra note 20, at 30.
29See HIGGINBOTHAM,supra note 20, at 39-40.
30For a catalogue of pre-Civil War cases articulating the general rule that a Black person
was presumed to be a slave, see CHARLESS. MANGUM,JR., THE LEGALSTATUSOF THE
NEGRO2 n.2 (1940).
31The system of racial oppression grounded in slavery was driven in large measure (although
by no means exclusively) by economic concerns. See MORGAN,supra note 23, at 295-315;
LESLIEH. OWENS,THIS SPECIESOFPROPERTYpassim (I976). Whether from the perspective
of Southern slave owners or early Northern capitalists, the slave trade, slave labor, and the
direct and indirect profitsthat flowed from it were central to an economic structurethat benefited
the nation. Thus, the tension over the issue of slavery ultimately resulted in the now welldocumented
set of constitutional compromises that subordinated the humanity of Black people
to the economic and political interests of the white, propertied class. See DERRICKBELL, AND
WE ARENOT SAVED34 (1987).
I718 [Vol. IO6:1707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
House of Representatives was apportioned on the basis of population
computed by counting all persons and "three-fifthsof all other persons"
-slaves.32 Gouveneur Morris's remarks before the Constitutional
Convention posed the essential question: "Upon what principle is it
that slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men?
Then make them Citizens & let them vote? Are they property? Why
then is no other property included?"33
The cruel tension between property and humanity was also reflected
in the law's legitimation of the use of Blackwomen's34 bodies
as a means of increasing property.35 In 1662, the Virginia colonial
assembly provided that "[c]hildren got by an Englishman upon a
Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the
mother . . .."36 In reversing the usual common law presumption
that the status of the child was determined by the father, the rule
facilitated the reproduction of one's own labor force.37 Because the
children of Blackwomen assumed the status of their mother, slaves
were bred through Blackwomen's bodies. The economic significance
of this form of exploitation of female slaves should not be underestimated.
Despite Thomas Jefferson's belief that slavery should be abol-
32U.S. CONST.art. I, ? 2, cl. 3.
332 THE RECORDSOF THE FEDERALCONVENTIONOF 1787, at 222 (Max Farrand ed.,
I9II).
34My use of the term "Blackwomen" is an effort to use language that more clearly reflects
the unity of identity as "Black" and "woman," with neither aspect primary or subordinate to
the other. It is an attempt to realize in practice what has been identified in theory - that, as
Kimberle Crenshaw notes, Blackwomen exist "at the crossroads of gender and race hierarchies."
Kimberle Crenshaw, Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of
Anita Hill, in RACE-INGJUSTICE,EN-GENDERINGPOWER:ESSAYSONANITAHILL, CLARENCE
THOMAS,AND THECONSTRUCTIONOF SOCIALREALITY402, 403 (Toni Morrison ed., 1992).
Indeed, this essay projects a powerful and complex vision of blackwomen that forms the
foundation of my construction of this term:
The particular experience of black women in the dominant cultural ideology of American
society can be conceptualized as intersectional. Intersectionality captures the way in
which the particular location of black women in dominant American social relations is
unique and in some senses unassimilable into the discursive paradigms of gender and
race domination.
Id. at 404.
35This use of slave women made them a type of sexual property, and particularly subject
to the control of white males. See Margaret Burnham, An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and
Family Law, 5 LAW& INEQ.J. I87, 197-99 (I987).
36HIGGINBOTHAM,supra note 20, at 43. By the late i6oos and early I7oos, the legislatures
of various colonies adopted similar rules of classification. See, e.g., id. at I28 (citing a 1706
New York statute); id. at 252 (citing a 1755 Georgia law).
37See id. at 44. According to Paula Giddings, the Virginia statute completed "[t]hecircle
of denigration . . . [in] combin[ing] racism, sexism, greed, and piety" in that it "laid women
open to the most vicious exploitation." She noted that "a master could save the cost of buying
new slaves by impregnating his own slave, or for that matter having anyone impregnate her."
PAULAGIDDINGS,WHEN AND WHEREI ENTER:THE IMPACTOF BLACKWOMENON RACE
ANDSEXIN AMERICA37 (I984).
1993] I719
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
ished, like other slaveholders, he viewed slaves as economic assets,
noting that their value could be realized more efficiently from breeding
than from labor. A letter he wrote in I805 stated: "I consider the
labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every
2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man."38
Even though there was some unease in slave law, reflective of the
mixed status of slaves as humans and property, the critical nature of
social relations under slavery was the commodification of human
beings. Productive relations in early American society included varying
forms of sale of labor capacity, many of which were highly oppressive;
but slavery was distinguished from other forms of labor
servitude by its permanency and the total commodification attendant
to the status of the slave. Slavery as a legal institution treated slaves
as property that could be transferred, assigned, inherited, or posted
as collateral.39 For example, in Johnson v. Butler,40the plaintiff sued
the defendant for failing to pay a debt of $496 on a specified date.
Because the covenant had called for payment of the debt in "money
or negroes," the plaintiff contended that the defendant's tender of one
negro only, although valued by the parties at an amount equivalent
to the debt, could not discharge the debt. The court agreed with
the plaintiff.41 This use of Africans as a stand-in for actual currency
highlights the degree to which slavery "propertized"human life.
Because the "presumption of freedom [arose] from color [white]"
and the "black color of the race [raised]the presumption of slavery,"42
whiteness became a shield from slavery, a highly volatile and unstable
form of property. In the form adopted in the United States, slavery
made human beings market-alienable and in so doing, subjected human
life and personhood - that which is most valuable - to the
ultimate devaluation. Because whites could not be enslaved or held
as slaves,43 the racial line between white and Black was extremely
38 Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Jordan (Dec. 21, I805), cited in TAKAKI, supra
note i6, at 44.
39By I705, Virginia had classified slaves as real property. See HIGGINBOTHAM,supra note
20, at 52. In Massachusetts and South Carolina, slaves were identified as chattel. See id. at
78, 2II.
40 4 Ky. (i Bibb) 97 (I8I5).
41 Id. at 98. The court held that the defendant was not entitled to judgment on the demurrer
for three reasons, including the following:
The defendant, under the terms of the covenant, no doubt had his election to pay either
in money or negroes; but in case of his choosing the latter alternative, as the covenant
requires the payment to be made in negroes, in the plural number, the plaintiff could
not be compelled to receive one only. The tender therefore, of a single negro, though of
value equal to the amount to be paid, could not discharge the covenant.
Id.
42 I THOMAS R.R. COBB, AN INQUIRYINTO THE LAW OF NEGRO SLAVERYIN THE UNITED
STATES ?? 68-69, at 66-67 (I858).
43See id. ? 68, at 66.
I720 [Vol. 106:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
critical; it became a line of protection and demarcation from the
potential threat of commodification, and it determined the allocation
of the benefits and burdens of this form of property. White identity
and whiteness were sources of privilege and protection; their absence
meant being the object of property.
Slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white
identity and property. Because the system of slavery was contingent
on and conflated with racial identity, it became crucial to be "white,"
to be identified as white, to have the property of being white.44
Whiteness was the characteristic, the attribute, the property of free
human beings.
B. Forms of Racialized Property: Relationships Between Native
American Land Seizure, Race, and Property
Slavery linked the privilege of whites to the subordination of
Blacks through a legal regime that attempted the conversion of Blacks
into objects of property. Similarly, the settlement and seizure of Native
American land supported white privilege through a system of
property rights in land in which the "race"of the Native Americans
rendered their first possession rights invisible and justified conquest.
This racist formulation embedded the fact of white privilege into the
very definition of property, marking another stage in the evolution of
the property interest in whiteness. Possession - the act necessary to
lay the basis for rights in property - was defined to include only the
cultural practices of whites. This definition laid the foundation for
the idea that whiteness - that which whites alone possess - is
valuable and is property.
Although the Indians were the first occupants and possessors of
the land of the New World, their racial and cultural otherness45
allowed this fact to be reinterpreted and ultimately erased as a basis
for asserting rights in land. Because the land had been left in its
natural state, untilled and unmarked by human hands, it was "waste"
44Kenneth Minogue states that property performs the critical function of identification:
"[P]ropertyis the concept by which we find order in things. The world is a bundle of things,
and things are recognized in terms of their attributes or properties." Kenneth R. Minogue, The
Concept of Property and Its ContemporarySignificance, in NOMOS XXII: PROPERTY3, II (J.
Roland Pennock & John W. Chapman eds., I980). Indeed, he suggests that it is impossible to
identify anyone or anything except by reference to their properties. See id. at I2.
45Takaki describes the construction of Native Americans as savages through political doctrine
and cultural imagery - what Herman Melville called the "metaphysics of Indian hating"
- as an ideology that facilitated the removal and extermination of Native Americans. See
TAKAKI, supra note 16, at 8i (citation omitted). The "savage Indian" also served as the
referential opposite by which whites defined themselves to be civilized. See generally id. at 56
(stating that Jefferson's efforts to civilize the Indians affirmed a definition of civilization and
progress measured by distance from the savagery of the Indian); id. at 176-80 (describing
George Custer's view of the "heathen and savage" Indians as "counterpoint[s]to civilization").
I72I1993]
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
and, therefore,the appropriateobject of settlementand appropriation.46Thus,
the possessionmaintainedby theIndianswas not "true"
possessionand could safely be ignored.47This interpretationof the
ruleof firstpossessioneffectivelyrenderedthe rightsof firstpossessors
contingenton the race of the possessor.48Only particularforms of
possession- those that were characteristicof white settlementwould
be recognizedand legitimated.49Indian forms of possession
were perceivedto be too ambiguousand unclear.
46 Thus, the Indians' claim as first possessors was said to rest on a "questionablefoundation,"
according to John Quincy Adams, because the right of the hunter could not preempt and provide
the basis for an exclusive claim for a "few hundreds" against the needs of "millions." His
argument reflected a widely held consensus. GOSSETT,supra note 20, at 230 (citations omitted).
The land that lay in the common, left "whollyto nature,"was the propersubject of appropriation
by one's labor because these "greattracts of ground . .. [that] lie waste . . . are more than the
people who dwell on it do, or can make use of." JOHNLOCKE,Two TREATISESOFGOVERNMENT137,
139 (photo. reprint I990) (W.S. Carpenter ed., I924) (3d ed. I698). The forms of
land use typical of Native American peoples were fluid and communal in nature. The American
courts have held that governmental seizures of Indian property held under original Indian title
do not offend the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Courts have reasoned that Indian
property rights were not protected by the constitutional prohibition against taking private
property without just compensation because the property rights of Native Americans were
communal and inhered in the tribe rather than an individual. Secondly, courts have contended
that Native American people had not established possession of the lands they claimed for.
Although they had hunted and fished on the land, they had never enclosed it and allotted the
land to individuals. See Joseph W. Singer, Sovereignty and Property, 86 Nw. U. L. REV. i,
I7-I8 (I99I).
47
According to Carol Rose, the common law made a "choice among audiences"in refusing
to dismiss legal claims to Indian land based on the assertion that "the Indians . . . had never
done acts on the land sufficient to establish property in it .... [T]he Indians had never really
undertaken those acts of possession that give rise to a propertyright." Carol M. Rose, Possession
as the Origin of Property, 52 U. CHI. L. REV. 73, 85-86 (I985). She states:
"[I]ndefining the acts of possession that make up a claim to property, the law not only
rewards the author of the 'text'; it also puts an imprimatur on a particular symbolic
system and on the audience that uses this system. Audiences that do not understand or
accept the symbols are out of luck."
Id. at 85.
48 See Joseph W. Singer, Re-reading Property, 27 NEW ENG. L. REV. 7II, 720 (I992).
49 This redefinition of possession and occupancy at the theoretical level was accompanied at
the practical level by massive land dispossession that restricted Indians to reservations and
designated hunting areas, established lines of demarcation by treaty that were later violated,
effected land "sales"through fraud, trickery, or coercion, and led ultimately to campaigns of
forced removals. See GOSSETT,supra note 20, at 228. Jefferson's Indian policy, for example,
had the stated goal of "civilizing"the Indians, which resulted in their land being taken by whites
for development. The objective of making the Indians "willing to sell" was achieved by the
threat of force and encouraging the exchange of lands for goods pushed on them through trading
houses. See TAKAKI,supra noteI6, at 60-62. Andrew Jackson's campaign to dissolve the
tribes, through both the forced removal of entire tribes and the land allotment program, was
an attempt to make the Indians "citizens"and to coerce them to get rid of their lands. Under
the land allotment program, Indians, as a condition of remaining on the land, were required to
accept individual land grants that later were seized by land speculators through fraud or by
creditors for debts. See id. at 92-107; see also ROBERTA. WILLIAMS,JR., THE AMERICAN
I722 [Vol. I6:170o7
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
The conquest and occupation of Indian land was wrapped in the
rule of law.50 The law provided not only a defense of conquest and
colonization, but also a naturalized regime of rights and disabilities,
power and disadvantage that flowed from it, so that no further justifications
or rationalizations were required.51 A key decision defending
the right of conquest was Johnson and Graham'sLessee v. M'Intosh,52
in which both parties to the action claimed the same land
through title descendant from different Indian tribes. The issue specifically
presented was not merely whether Indians had the power to
convey title, but to whom the conveyance could be made - to individuals
or to the government that "discovered"land.53 In holding
that Indians could only convey to the latter, the Court reasoned that
Indian title was subordinate to the absolute title of the sovereign that
was achieved by conquest because "[c]onquestgives a title which the
Courts of the conqueror cannot deny . . .."54 If property is underINDIANIN
WESTERNLEGALTHOUGHT:THE DISCOURSESOFCONQUEST274 (1990) (describing
the "time-honored"policy of "waging war on the Indians in order to force a land cession").
50In Alexis de Tocqueville's words, "the United States ha[s] accomplished this twofold
purpose [of extermination of Indians and deprivation of rights] . . . legally, philanthropically,
. . .and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is
impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity." i ALEXISDETOCQUEVILLE,DEMOCRACYIN
AMERICA355 (Phillips Bradley ed. & Henry Reeve trans., I945) (1835).
As Rennard Strickland argues, these acts by the United States constituted genocide-at-law. See
Rennard Strickland, Genocide-at-law: An Historic and ContemporaryView of the Native American
Experience, 34 KAN. L. REV. 713, 714-15 (1986).
51 See WILLIAMS, supra note 49, at 8.
52 2i U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (I823).
53 See id. at 563. Milner Ball's reinterpretation of Johnson rejects the traditional reading
that all rights held by American Indian nations were lost in conquest. Instead, he argues that
the case held only that, by conquest, Indians lost the right to convey title to any country other
than the United States. See Milner S. Ball, Constitution, Court, Indian Tribes, I987 AM. B.
FOUND. RES. J. I, 29.
54Johnson, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) at 588-89. According to Robert Williams, in rendering this
decision, the Court "merelyformalized the outcome of a political contest that the Founders had
fought and resolved among themselves some forty years earlier." WILLIAMS,supra note 49, at
231. Before Independence, radical colonists of the "landless"states - those without Crown
charters specifying the territory available for settlement under the authority of the Crown asserted
the Indians' natural law right to alienate their land to whomever they chose, without
regard to approval of the sovereign. See id. at 229-30. On the other hand, colonists of the
"landed"states, those who held original Crown charters, argued that the colonial charters, as
expressions of the will of the sovereign, granted them rights to the land specified and, under
the frequently broad language of the grant, rights to control the land extending to the frontier.
See id. at 230.
However, the coherence of the views between the settlers was far more significant than their
differences. Ultimately, the conflict was resolved through a political compromise reached by the
Founders that allowed for frontier claims held by the landed states to be ceded to a federal
sovereign that could then assert exclusive rights to eradicate Indian occupancy claims by conquest
or purchase and to undertake reallocation. See Johnson, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) at 585-88. Notwithstanding
the differences between the opposing settler groups, their shared assumptions were
I993] I723
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
stood as a delegation of sovereign power - the product of the power
of the state55 - then a fair reading of history reveals the racial
oppression of Indians inherent in the American regime of property.56
In Johnson and similar cases, courts established whiteness as a
prerequisiteto the exercise of enforceable propertyrights. Not all first
possession or labor gave rise to property rights; rather, the rules of
first possession and labor as a basis for property rights were qualified
by race.57 This fact infused whiteness with significance and value
because it was solely through being white that property could be
acquired and secured under law. Only whites possessed whiteness, a
highly valued and exclusive form of property.
C. Critical Characteristics of Property and Whiteness
The legal legacy of slavery and of the seizure of land from Native
American peoples is not merely a regime of property law that is
(mis)informedby racist and ethnocentric themes. Rather, the law has
established and protected an actual property interest in whiteness
itself, which shares the critical characteristicsof property and accords
with the many and varied theoretical descriptions of property.
Although by popular usage property describes "things"owned by
persons, or the rights of persons with respect to a thing,58the concept
that the Indians' rights to land as first possessors were subordinate to European claims, and
that therefore conquest and occupation could give rise to a right.
55 See Joseph W. Singer, The Reliance Interest in Property, 40 STAN.L. REV. 611, 650-52
(1988).
56 See generally Joseph W. Singer, Sovereignty and Property, 86 Nw. U. L. REV. i, I-8
(I99I) (exploring the deleterious effects of the Supreme Court's formulation of tribal property
rights). Parallel to the colonization of the Americas and the removal of the indigenous peoples
from the land was the colonization of Africa and the removal of Africans from the continent.
European conquest effected a horrific paradigm: as Europeans took Africans from the land,
control of the land was taken from the Africans who remained. The result was that Africans
who were removed from the continent became people without a country, and Africans on the
continent became people without the legal capacity to control the land they occupied or to reap
the benefits of the land they worked. The objective of capturing and enslaving Africans was
to convert Africans and their descendants into property, or more accurately, into objects of
property. The land dispossession of Africans on the continent, which was a central feature of
colonialization, was accompanied by the introduction of regimes of property law that ratified
the results of conquest and domination. See generally WALTERRODNEY,How EUROPEUNDERDEVELOPEDAFRICApassim
(I972) (offering a historical account of the origins and impact of the
slave trade and European imperialism on African development). Thus, both here and on the
African continent, race domination, imperialist conquest, and property rights were organically
linked.
57See Singer, supra note 48, at 7I3.
58 See C.B. Macpherson, The Meaning of Property, in PROPERTY:MAINSTREAMANDCRITICALPOSITIONSI,
3 (C.B. Macpherson ed., 1978) [hereinafter PROPERTY].Stephen Munzer
characterizes the idea of property-as-"thing"as the popular conception and property-as-relations
as "the sophisticated version of property." STEPHENR. MUNZER,A THEORYOFPROPERTY16
(1990).
I724 [Vol. Io6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
of property prevalent among most theorists, even prior to the twentieth
century, is that property may "consist[]of rights in 'things' that
are intangible, or whose existence is a matter of legal definition."59
Property is thus said to be a right, not a thing, characterized as
metaphysical, not physical.60 The theoretical bases and conceptual
descriptions of property rights are varied, ranging from first possessor
rules,61to creation of value,62 to Lockean labor theory, to personality
theory, to utilitarian theory.63 However disparate, these formulations
of property clearly illustrate the extent to which property rights and
interests embrace much more than land and personalty. Thus, the
fact that whiteness is not a "physical"entity does not remove it from
the realm of property.
Whiteness is not simply and solely a legally recognized property
interest. It is simultaneously an aspect of self-identity and of personhood,
and its relation to the law of property is complex. Whiteness
has functioned as self-identity in the domain of the intrinsic, personal,
and psychological; as reputation in the interstices between internal
and external identity; and, as property in the extrinsic, public, and
legal realms. According whiteness actual legal status converted an
aspect of identity into an external object of property, moving whiteness
from privileged identity to a vested interest. The law's construction
of whiteness defined and affirmed critical aspects of identity (who is
white); of privilege (what benefits accrue to that status); and, of property
(what legal entitlements arise from that status). Whiteness at
various times signifies and is deployed as identity, status, and property,
sometimes singularly, sometimes in tandem.
I. Whiteness as a Traditional Form of Property. - Whiteness fits
the broad historical concept of property described by classical theo-
59 Frederick G. Whelan, Property as Artifice: Hume and Blackstone, in NOMOS XXII:
PROPERTY,supra note 44, at ioI, Io4. Whelan argues that even Blackstone was aware that
property rights may pertain to things that may themselves be creations of law. See id. at 21I-
22. Thus, for example, Whelan notes that Blackstone described property in incorporeal hereditaments,
which issue out of a "thing"but have "mentalexistence." Id. at 121. The distinction
between property as things and property as rights, then, is not so clear.
60See JEREMYBENTHAM,THE THEORYOFLEGISLATION111-13 (Richard Hildreth trans.,
I93I).
61See Richard A. Epstein, Possession as the Root of Title, 13 GA. L. REV. 122I, 122I-22
(I979).
62See Wendy J. Gordon, On Owning Information: Intellectual Property and the Restitutionary
Impulse, 78 VA. L. REV. 149, 178 (I992).
63Margaret Radin ascribes these concepts as the principal basis for liberal property theories
propounded by John Locke, Georg W. Friedrich Hegel, and Jeremy Bentham respectively. See
Margaret J. Radin, Property and Personhood, 34 STAN.L. REV. 957, 958 n.3 (I982). Munzer
describes the multiplicity of definitions of property as inviting the despairing conclusion that
"any overarching normative theory of property is impossible." MUNZER, supra note 58, at 17;
see Thomas C. Grey, The Disintegration of Property, in NOMOS XXII: PROPERTY,supra note
44, at 69, 69-82.
1993] I725
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
rists. In James Madison's view, for example, property "embraces
every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right,"64
referring to all of a person's legal rights.65 Property as conceived in
the founding era
included not only external objects and people's relationships to them,
but also all of those human rights, liberties, powers, and immunities
that are important for human well-being, including: freedom of expression,
freedom of conscience, freedom from bodily harm, and free
and equal opportunities to use personal faculties.66
Whiteness defined the legal status of a person as slave or free. White
identity conferred tangible and economically valuable benefits and was
jealously guarded as a valued possession, allowed only to those who
met a strict standard of proof.67 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.
Other traditional theories of property emphasize that the "natural"
character of property is derivative of custom, contrary to the notion
that property is the product of a delegation of sovereign power. This
"bottom up" theory holds that the law of property merely codifies
existing customs and social relations.68 Under that view, government-
64 6 JAMES MADISON, THE WRITINGS OF JAMES MADISON IOI (Gaillard Hunt ed., I906)
(quoting James Madison, Property, NAT'LGAZETTE,Mar. 29, 1792, at I74).
65
According to Macpherson, the common seventeenth century usage was very broad:"[M]en
were said to have a property not only in land and goods and in claims on revenue from leases,
mortgages, patents, monopolies and so on, but also a property in their lives and persons."
Macpherson, supra note 58, at 7; see LAWRENCEBECKER,PROPERTYRIGHTS-PHILOSOPHIC
FOUNDATIONS120 n.II (1977) (describingthe use of the word "property"by Blackstone, Hobbes,
and Locke to be referring to all of a person's legal rights).
66 Laura S. Underkuffler, On Property: An Essay, Ioo YALEL.J. 127, 128-29 (1990).
67 See infra pp. I738-4I.
68 Epstein argues the case as follows:
In line with the theories of John Austin, law is regarded as a command of the sovereign
.... In opposition to Austin stands an alternative view that grounds property rights on
the traditions and common practices within a given community. On this view, property
comes from the bottom up and not from the top down. . . . [The state's] chief function
is to discover and reflect accurately what the community has customarily regarded as
binding social rules and then to enforce those rules in specific controversies.
Richard A. Epstein, International News Service v. Associated Press: Customand Law as Sources
of Property Rights in News, 78 VA. L. REV. 85, 85 (1992) (footnotes omitted) [hereinafter
Epstein, Custom and Law]. The customary rule recognized in common law was the primary
right of first possessors. See Richard A. Epstein, No New Property, 56 BROOK.L. REV. 747,
750 (1990) [hereinafter Epstein, No New Property);Rose, supra note 47, at 73-74.
The argument that all American law and property relates to custom rests on assumptions
that second possessors were actually first, or that the land that had been "conquested"was
vacant. The idea that second possessors were first is apparently Epstein's assumption: "[A]s
inheritors of the Lockean tradition, the basic theory [in the United States] was that property
rights emerged from first possession, from first occupation, from homesteading, and not from
I726 [Vol. IO6:I707
I993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY I727
created rights such as social welfare payments cannot constitute legitimate
property interests because they are positivistic in nature.69
Other theorists have challenged this conception, and argued that even
the most basic of "customary" property rights - the rule of first
possession, for example - is dependent on its acceptance or rejection
in particular instances by the government.70 Citing custom as a source
of property law begs the central question: whose custom?
Rather than remaining within the bipolar confines of custom or
command, it is crucial to recognize the dynamic and multifaceted
relationship among custom, command, and law, as well as the extent
to which positionality71determines how each may be experienced and
understood. Indian custom was obliterated by force and replaced with
the regimes of common law that embodied the customs of the conquerors.
The assumption of American law as it related to Native
Americans was that conquest did give rise to sovereignty. Indians
experienced the property laws of the colonizers and the emergent
American nation as acts of violence perpetuated by the exercise of
power and ratified through the rule of law.72 At the same time, these
laws were perceived as custom and "common sense" by the colonizers.73
The Founders, for instance, so thoroughly embraced Lockean
state grant." Epstein, No New Property, supra, at 750. The notion of vacant land belongs to
Locke: the right to acquire property through labor as long as there was some "good left in
common for others" applied to the "inland vacant places of America." LOCKE,supra note 46,
at 130, I34. Neither of these two premises is tenable. See Singer, supra note 48, at 719 (arguing
that, "while Indian land was not built up, virtually all land in America was under tribal
sovereignty, so that the land was not vacant, but was taken from the first possessors"). The
apparent presumption, therefore, must be that, if the custom was conquest - that is, if the
acquisition of land through occupation, settlement, and conquest was customary - then the
state'sincorporationof customaryrulesinto the commonlaw is merelya ratificationof custom
- a bottomup, not a top downrelation.
69 See Epstein, No New Property, supra note 68, at 76I-62.
70See Rose, supranote 47, at 73 (arguingthat the law definesacts of possessionthat give
riseto a claimto property).
71I use "positionality"herein the senseemployedin feministlegaltheory. Positionalityis a
theoryof knowledge,a rejectionof objective,neutraltruthin favorof a truth"situatedand
partial[,]. . . emerg[ing]fromparticularinvolvementsand relationships. .. [that]definethe
individual'sperspectiveand providethe locationfor meaning,identity,and politicalcommitment."
Katharine T. Bartlett, Feminist Legal Methods, 103 HARV.L. REV. 829, 88o (I990).
72This relationbetweenlaw and power has long been noted:"[Bleneaththe veneer of
consensuson legalprinciples,a struggleof interestis goingon, andthelaw is seenas a weapon
in the handsof those who possessthe powerto use it for theirown ends." VilhelmAubert,
Introduction to SOCIOLOGYOFLAW9, ii (Vilhelm Aubert ed., 1969).
73Williamsarguesthat"Locke'sdiscourse. . . legitimatedthe appropriationof theAmerican
wildernessas a right,and even as an imperative,undernaturallaw." WILLIAMS,supranote
49, at 248. Locke'sideas were at the rootof the Declarationof Independence,a fact readily
concededby Jeffersonwho indicatedthat the documentwas perhaps"a compilationof commonplaces."Id.
at 246.
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
labor theory as the basis for a right of acquisition because it affirmed
the right of the New World settlers to settle on and acquire the
frontier. It confirmed and ratified their experience.74
The law's interpretation of those encounters between whites and
Native Americans not only inflicted vastly different results on them,
but also established a pattern - a custom - of valorizing whiteness.
As the forms of racialized property were perfected, the value and
protection extended to whiteness increased. Regardless of which theory
of property one adopts, the concept of whiteness - established
by centuries of custom (illegitimate custom, but custom nonetheless)
and codified by law - may be understood as a property interest.
2. Modern Views of Property as Defining Social Relations. Although
property in the classical sense refers to everything that is
valued and to which a person has a right, the modern concept of
property focuses on its function and the social relations reflected
therein. In this sense, modern property doctrine emphasizes the more
contingent nature of property and has been the basis for the argument
that property rights should be expanded.
Modern theories of property reject the assumption that property is
"objectively definable or identifiable, apart from social context."75
Charles Reich's ground-breaking work, The New Property,76was an
early effort to focus on the function of property and note the changing
social relations reflected and constructed by new forms of property
derived from the government.77 Property in this broader sense encompassed
jobs, entitlements, occupational licenses, contracts, subsidies,
and indeed a whole host of intangibles that are the product of
labor, time, and creativity, such as intellectual property, business
goodwill, and enhanced earning potential from graduate degrees.78
Notwithstanding the dilution of new propertysince Goldbergv. Kelly79
and its progeny80as well as continued attacks on the concept,81 the
legacy of new property infuses the concept of property with questions
74 See id. at 247.
75
Underkuffler, supra note 66, at I33.
76 Charles Reich, The New Property, 73 YALEL.J. 733 (I964).
77 See id. at 733.
78 The analysis derived from Reich's conception of "New Property"formed the basis of the
majority opinion in Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254 (1970). See generally Singer, supra note
48, at 723 (cataloguing the range of intangible interests described as property).
79397 U.S. 254 (I970).
80Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U.S. 593 (1972); Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471 (1972); Bell
v. Burson, 402 U.S. 535 (197I).
81 See Bishop v. Wood, 426 U.S. 341, 347 (1976) (holding that the plaintiff's discharge from
employment with the police department did not constitute a deprivation of a property interest);
Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 578 (I972) (holding that a non-tenured, one-year
university teaching position was not a property right); Epstein, No New Property, supra note
68, at 760-75; William Van Alstyne, Cracks in "TheNew Property":Adjudicative Due Process
and the Administrative State, 62 CORNELL L. REV.445, 457-70 (I977).
I728 [Vol. IO6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
of power, selection, and allocation. Reich's argument that property is
not a natural right but a construction by society82resonates in current
theories of property that describe the allocation of property rights as
a series of choices. This construction directs attention toward issues
of relative power and social relations inherent in any definition of
property.
3. Property and Expectations. - "Propertyis nothing but the basis
of expectation," according to Bentham, "consist[ing]in an established
expectation, in the persuasion of being able to draw such and such
advantage from the thing possessed."83 The relationship between expectations
and property remains highly significant,84 as the law "has
recognized and protected even the expectation of rights as actual legal
property."85 This theory does not suggest that all value86 or all expectations
give rise to property,87but those expectations in tangible
or intangible things that are valued and protected by the law are
property.
In fact, the difficulty lies not in identifying expectations as a part
of property, but in distinguishing which expectations are reasonable
and therefore merit the protection of the law as property.88 Although
82 See Reich, supra note 76, at 77I. The rejection of "new property"on the ground that it
is derived from the government rather than private sources is ultimately not persuasive, because
as Reich argues, all property is a creation of law. See id. at 778-79.
According to Singer, "the legal system makes constant choices about what interests to define
as property." Singer, supra note 56, at 47. Moreover, "[sitate power defines and allocates
property rights, and property rights, in turn, allocate power and vulnerability. Seemingly neutral
definitions of property rights by the courts distribute power and vulnerability in ways that
construct illegitimate hierarchies based on race, sex, class, disability and sexual orientation."
Id. at 8.
83 Jeremy Bentham, Security and Equality in Property, in PROPERTY, supra note 58, at 51-
52. Curiously, although Bentham argued strongly for the constructed nature of property, he
considered the absence of property - poverty - to be natural: "Poverty is not the work of the
laws; it is the primitive condition of the human race ...." Id. at 52-53.
A more modern formulation of the relation between property and expectations is advanced
by Macpherson, although from an opposing philosophical view. He argues that property is a
right or claim that one anticipates or expects will be enforced. See Macpherson, supra note 58,
at 3 ("What distinguishes property from mere momentary possession is that property is a claim
that will be enforced by society or the state, by custom or convention of law."). Munzer also
notes that "property, conceived as a legal structure of Hohfeldian normative modalities, makes
possible legal expectations with respect to things." MUNZER, supra note 58, at 29.
84 "Expectations are an important part of modern property theory." john a. powell, New
Property Disaggregated: A Model to Address Employment Discrimination, 24 U.S.F. L. REV.
363, 374 (I990).
85Id. at 366.
86
Wendy Gordon persuasively argues that the notion that property arises from value will
simply not hold up under examination and thus has little merit. See Gordon, supra note 62, at
178.
87 Munzer argues that property cannot be equated with expectations, but that expectations
are part of the psychological dimension of property. See MUNZER,supra note 58, at 30.
88 Joseph Sax asserts: "The essence of property law is respect for reasonable expectations.
I993] I729
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
the existence of certain property rights may seem self-evident and the
protection of certain expectations may seem essential for social stability,89
property is a legal construct by which selected private interests
are protected and upheld. In creating property"rights,"the law draws
boundaries and enforces or reordersexisting regimes of power.90 The
inequalities that are produced and reproduced are not givens or inevitabilities,
but rather are conscious selections regardingthe structuring
of social relations. In this sense, it is contended that property rights
and interests are not "natural,"but are "creation[s]of law."91
In a society structured on racial subordination, white privilege
became an expectation and, to apply MargaretRadin's concept, whiteness
became the quintessential property for personhood.92 The law
constructed "whiteness"as an objective fact, although in reality it is
an ideological proposition imposed through subordination. This move
is the central feature of "reification":"Its basis is that a relation
between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a
'phantom objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and
all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the
relation between people."93 Whiteness was an "object"over which
continued control was - and is - expected. The protection of these
expectations is central because, as Radin notes: "If an object you now
control is bound up in your future plans or in your anticipation of
your future self, and it is partly these plans for your own continuity
that make you a person, then your personhood depends on the realization
of these expectations."94
The idea of justice at the root of private property protection calls for identification of those
expectations which the legal system ought to recognize." Joseph L. Sax, Liberating the Public
Trust Doctrinefrom Its Historical Shackles, 14 U.C. DAVISL. REV.I85, 186-87 (1980) (footnote
omitted).
89 See, e.g., Epstein, supra note 6i, at 1241 ("In essence the first possession rule has been
the organizing principle of most social institutions, and the heavy burden of persuasion lies
upon those who wish to displace it.").
90Singer argues that, in deciding what contract and what property rights to enforce, the
state endorses the power of one party over the other or prevents one party from exercising
power to the detriment of the other. Thus, the state makes allocative decisions in all transactions,
public or private. See Singer, supra note 55, at 650-52.
91Justice Holmes's dissent in International News Service v. Associated Press stated that
"[p]roperty,a creation of law, does not arise from value .. .." International News Serv. v.
Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 246 (19I8) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
92 See Radin, supra note 63, at 959-61 (examining propertyas "aclass of objects or resources
necessary to be a person or whose absence would hinder the autonomy or liberty attributed to
a person").
93 GEORGLUKACS,HISTORYAND CLASSCONSCIOUSNESS83 (Rodney Livingstone trans.,
I971).
94 Radin, supra note 63, at 968. In this passage, Radin is not attempting to carry out
Bentham's project of providing overall justifications for property;rather, she is only considering
the role of expectations in personal property.
I730 [Vol. IO6:1707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
Because the law recognized and protected expectations grounded
in white privilege (albeit not explicitly in all instances), these expectations
became tantamount to property that could not permissibly be
intruded upon without consent. As the law explicitly ratified those
expectations in continued privilege or extended ongoing protection to
those illegitimate expectations by failing to expose or to radically
disturb them, the dominant and subordinate positions within the racial
hierarchy were reified in law.95 When the law recognizes, either
implicitly or explicitly, the settled expectations of whites built on the
privileges and benefits produced by white supremacy, it acknowledges
and reinforces a property interest in whiteness that reproduces Black
subordination.
4. The Property Functions of Whiteness. - In addition to the
theoretical descriptions of property, whiteness also meets the functional
criteria of property. Specifically, the law has accorded "holders"
of whiteness the same privileges and benefits accorded holders of other
types of property. The liberal view of property is that it includes the
exclusive rights of possession, use, and disposition.96 Its attributes
are the right to transfer or alienability, the right to use and enjoyment,
and the right to exclude others.97 Even when examined against this
limited view, whiteness conforms to the general contours of property.
It may be a "bad"form of property, but it is property nonetheless.
(a) Rights of Disposition. - Property rights are traditionally described
as fully alienable.98 Because fundamental personal rights are
commonly understood to be inalienable, it is problematic to view them
as property interests.99 However, as Margaret Radin notes, "inalienability"
is not a transparent term; it has multiple meanings that refer
to interests that are non-salable, non-transferable, or non-marketalienable.100
The common core of inalienability is the negation of the
possibility of separation of an entitlement, right, or attribute from its
holder. 101
Classical theories of property identified alienability as a requisite
aspect of property;102thus, that which is inalienable cannot be prop-
95See infra pp. 1745-57.
96See J.S. MILL, PRINCIPLESOF POLITICALECONOMYbk. II, ch. ii, at 218 (W. Ashley
ed., 1909).
97 See id.
98See Margaret Radin, Market-Inalienability, oo00HARV.L. REV. I849, 1854 n.I9 (I987).
99See id. at I85I.
100See id. at I852-53.
101See id. at I852.
102 See JOHN S. MILL, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 218 (photo. reprint I976)
(William Ashley ed., I909) (stating that "[t]heinstitution of property, when limited to its essential
elements"is a person's right to its "exclusive disposal"as well as the producer'sright to whatever
can be gotten for the goods in a fair market), quoted in Radin, supra note 98, at I889. Radin
notes that this position differs from one pluralist view, which states that some things can be
property without being fully alienable. See Radin, supra note 98, at I890.
I993] I73I
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
erty.103 As the major exponent of this view, Mill argued that public
offices, monopoly privileges, and human beings - all of which were
or should have been inalienable - should not be considered property
at all.104 Under this account, if inalienability inheres in the concept
of property, then whiteness, incapable of being transferred or alienated
either inside or outside the market, would fail to meet a criterion of
property. 105
As Radin notes, however, even under the classical view, alienability
of certain property was limited. Mill also advocated certain
restraints on alienation in connection with property rights in land and
probably other natural resources.106 In fact, the law has recognized
various kinds of inalienable property. For example, entitlements of
the regulatory and welfare states, such as transfer payments and
government licenses, are inalienable; yet they have been conceptualized
and treated as property by law. 107 Although this "new property"
has been criticized as being improper - that is, not appropriately
cast as property - the principal objection has been based on its
alleged lack of productive capacity, not its inalienability.108
103If property inherently includes the power of alienation, then property that is inalienable
is a logical contradiction. See Radin, supra note 98, at I889-90. The result is an inexorable
pull toward "universal commodification." Id. at 1890-91.
104See MILL, supranote I02, at 208, cited in Radin,supranote98, at I889-90.
105 There is one historical instance in which arguably whiteness was transferred. In Loving
v. Virginia, 388 U.S. i (I967), the Supreme Court invalidated Virginia's anti-miscegenation
statute that prohibited intermarriage between white persons and "coloredpersons"as violative
of the Equal Protection Clause. See id. at i2. Significantly, the statute did allow intermarriage
between whites and persons of white and American Indian descent. It further defined white
persons as those of exclusively Caucasian origin, but granted persons with less than one-sixteenth
American Indian blood the status of being white for the purposes of the statute. See VA. CODE
ANN. ? 20-54 (repealed 1968). In conferring the status of honorary white on persons of such
heritage, the statute was reflecting the "desire of all to recognize as an integral and honored
part of the white race the descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahantas." Bureau of Vital Statistics,
The New Family and Race Improvement, I7 VA. HEALTH BULL., Extra No. 12, at i8, 19, 26
(New Families Series No. 5, I925), cited in Walter Wadlington, The Loving Case: Virginia's
Anti-Miscegenation Statute in Historical Perspective, 52 VA. L. REV. II89, I202 (1966). In
one sense, the statute represented a legal conveyance of the property interest in whiteness to
those who were technically not white, possibly to ensure the stability of a social order in which
many who considered themselves white were not in fact white as defined by law.
106 See MILL, supranote I02, at 2I8, citedin Radin,supranote98, at I889-90. Millthus
argued that property included the power to bequest, but not the right to inherit and that
property rights in land carried limitations. See John S. Mill, Of Property, in PROPERTY,supra
note 58, at 77, 87, 95.
107 See Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 332 (1976) (holding that Social Security beneficiaries
possessed a qualified property interest); Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254, 264 (I970)
(holding that welfare benefits constituted propertyinterests and could not be taken away without
a pre-termination hearing); In re Ming, 469 F.2d 1352, 1355-56 (7th Cir. 1972) (holding that a
law license, as a form of property, may not be suspended without a hearing);Reich, supra note
76, at 733.
108
Epstein acknowledges that "the state can create new forms of property other than the
I732 [Vol. IO6:I707
I993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY I733
The law has also acknowledged forms of inalienable property derived
from nongovernmental sources. In the context of divorce, courts
have held that professional degrees or licenses held by one party and
financed by the labor of the other is marital property whose value is
subject to allocation by the court.109 A medical or law degree is not
alienable either in the market or by voluntary transfer. Nevertheless,
it is included as property when dissolving a legal relationship.
Indeed, Radin argues that, as a deterrent to the dehumanization
of universal commodification, market-inalienability may be justified
to protect property important to the person and to safeguard human
flourishing.110 She suggests that non-commodification or market-inalienability
of personal property1l or those things essential to human
flourishing is necessary to guard against the objectification of human
beings.12 To avoid that danger, "we must cease thinking that market
alienability is inherent in the concept of property."113 Following this
classic forms that existed at common law . . . so long as it observes the basic conditions
associated with its own raison d'etre." Epstein, No New Property, supra note 68, at 754. Thus,
he argues that there is a legitimate basis for treating copyrights and patents, broadcast frequencies,
or corporate indentures as property, but no justification exists for treating welfare benefits
as property, because the former confer significant financial gain whereas the latter do not. See
id. at 754-62.
109See, e.g., O'Brien v. O'Brien, 489 N.E.2d 712, 713 (N.Y. 1985); Joan M. Krauskopf,
Recompense for Financing Spouse's Education: Legal Protection for the Marital Investor in
Human Capital, 28 KAN. L. REV.379, 4IO-I6 (I980); see also Charles Reich, The New Property
After 25 Years, 24 U.S.F. L. REV. 223, 226 (1990) (arguing that, if a professional degree is a
couple's major asset, failure to accord it the status of property may result in substantial injustice
to the wife). But see In re Marriage of Graham, 574 P.2d 75, 77 (Colo. 1978) (holding that an
M.B.A. did not constitute marital property subject to division).
110 See Radin, supra note 98, at I903-09. Universal market rhetoric in fact subjects "everything
people need or desire" to commodification and "includes not only those things usually
considered goods, but also personal attributes, relationships, and states of affairs." Id. at I86o.
Radin identifies Richard Posner with this view. See id. at I862 n.49 ("Posnerargues that, but
for the costs of implementing a property system, value would be maximized if everything scarce
and desired were ownable and salable .... Thus, [because we ought to maximize value,]
everything scarce and desirable ought to be ownable and salable.") (citation omitted); see also
Elizabeth M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, The Economics of the Baby Shortage, 7 J. LEGAL
STUD.323, 324 (1978) (arguing for the establishment of a market for babies). This model rejects
inalienability - reductively conceptualized as market-inalienability - as being dysfunctional,
with the result that everything, including bodily integrity, is objectified and property that is
personal collapses into the fungible. See Radin, supra note 98, at I880-8I.
1ll The distinction between personal and fungible property is described as follows:
Property is personal in a philosophical sense when it has become identified with a person,
with her self-constitution and self-development in the context of her environment. Personal
property cannot be taken away and replaced with money or other things without
harm to the person - to her identity and existence. In a sense, personal property
becomes a personal attribute. On the other hand, property is fungible when there is no
such personal attachment.
Radin, supra 98, at i880 n.II5; see Radin, supra note 63, at 959-61.
112 See Radin, supra note 98, at 1903-06.
113Id. at 1903.
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
logic, then, the inalienability of whiteness should not preclude the
consideration of whiteness as property. Paradoxically,its inalienability
may be more indicative of its perceived enhanced value, rather than
its disqualification as property.
(b) Right to Use and Enjoyment. - Possession of propertyincludes
the rights of use and enjoyment. If these rights are essential aspects
of property, it is because "the problem of property in political philosophy
dissolves into . . . questions of the will and the way in which
we use the things of this world."114 As whiteness is simultaneously
an aspect of identity and a property interest, it is something that can
both be experienced and deployed as a resource. Whiteness can move
from being a passive characteristicas an aspect of identity to an active
entity that - like other types of property- is used to fulfill the will
and to exercise power. The state's official recognition of a racial
identity that subordinated Blacks and of privileged rights in property
based on race elevated whiteness from a passive attribute to an object
of law and a resource deployable at the social, political, and institutional
level to maintain control. Thus, a white person "used and
enjoyed" whiteness whenever she took advantage of the privileges
accorded white people simply by virtue of their whiteness - when
she exercised any number of rights reserved for the holders of 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.
(c) Reputation and Status Property. - In constructing whiteness
as property, the ideological move was to conceptualize white racial
identity as an external thing in a constitutive sense - an "object[]or
resource[]necessary to be a person."115 This move was accomplished
in large measure by recognizing the reputational interest in being
regarded as white as a thing of significant value, which like other
reputational interests, was intrinsically bound up with identity and
personhood. The reputation of being white was treated as a species
of property, or something in which a property interest could be asserted.16
In this context, whiteness was a form of status property.
114Minogue, supra note 44, at 15.
115Radin, supra note 63, at 960.
116 There have been longstanding debates on whether one's reputation is more correctly
characterized as property or liberty. CompareVan Alstyne, supra note 8I, at 479 n.97 (claiming
that interests in reputation, traditionally described as interests in liberty, are at least as well
described as property interests) with MUNZER,supra note 58, at 46 n.9 (noting that reputation
in Anglo-American law is more often described as a liberty interest than a property interest).
Reputational interests, however, have been treated as interests possessing aspects of both in
American law. As Robert Post indicates, the concepts of reputation manifested in the common
law of defamation at different points in history include reputation as property, reputation as
honor, and reputation as dignity. See Robert C. Post, The Social Foundations of Defamation
1734 [Vol. Io6:1707
I993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY 1735
The conception of reputation as property found its origins in early
concepts of property that encompassed things (such as land and personalty),
income (such as revenues from leases, mortgages, and patent
monopolies), and one's life, liberty, and labor.117 Thus, Locke's famous
pronouncement, "every man has a 'property' in his own 'person,"'118undergirded
the assertion that one's physical self was one's
property.119 From this premise, one's labor, "the work of his hands,"
combined with those things found in the common to form property
over which one could exercise ownership, control, and dominion.120
The idea of self-ownership, then, was particularly fertile ground for
the idea that reputation, as an aspect of identity earned through effort,
was similarly property. Moreover, the loss of reputation was capable
of being valued in the market.121
The direct manifestation of the law's legitimation of whiteness as
reputation is revealed in the well-established doctrine that to call a
white person "Black"is to defame her.122 Although many of the cases
Law: Reputation and the Constitution, 74 CAL. L. REV. 691, 693 (1986). Reputation is a
"melange"lending itself to different descriptions over time. Id. at 740.
117See Macpherson, supra note 58, at 7.
118LOCKE,supra note 46, at I30.
119Radin surmises that Locke's use of person in this passage probably refers to ownership
of one's physical body. See Radin, supra note 63, at 965. To construe the Lockean precept of
holding property in one's person as meaning property in one's body depends on a particular
theory of the person that equates persons with human bodies. However, solving the riddle of
the meaning of person is not an essential predicate to recognizing whiteness as property because
whatever the concept of personhood, whiteness was bound up with identity and liberty in both
private and public spheres.
120LOCKE,supra note 46, at 130.
121Reputation as honor is also grounded in historical traditions, but in contrast to the values
of the marketplace, embodies the values of society that endow social roles. See Post, supra note
116, at 699-700. Thus, a king does not work to attain honor; rather, honor is attributed to his
position and he is expected to "personify"the role. The underlying presumption is one of social
stratification, in which hierarchically determined roles are assigned rather than earned. See id.
at 700-02. Post notes that the idea of reputation as honor is predicated on the norms of a
"deference society" in which "ascribed social roles are pervasive and well established." Id. at
701-02. Although American society, which is at least overtly committed to egalitarian principles,
might not accurately be characterized as a "deferencesociety,"honor defined by hierarchypersists
in some institutions. Id. at 706-07.
Being regarded as white, or the reputation of whiteness, representsa blending of the concepts
of reputation as honor - that which is claimed by virtue of status - and reputation as property
- that which has value in the market. Whiteness was honorific in that it was conferred and
not earned, based on the inherent unequal status of dominant and subordinate groups. Thus,
it might be seen as outside conceptions of reputation as property. In fact, whiteness as reputation
seems to evoke Post's description of reputation as honor. See id. at 725-26. Nevertheless,
because whiteness is something to which market value attaches, I argue that the reputation of
whiteness also presents aspects of property. Indeed, being Black - or being de-propertied of
whiteness - is something that causes harm capable of pecuniary measurement. See infra notes
222-226 and accompanying text.
122See J.H. Crabb, Annotation, Libel and Slander: Statements Respecting Race, Color, or
Nationality as Actionable, 46 A.L.R. 2d 1287, 1289 (1956) ("The bulk of the cases have arisen
HARVARD LAW REVIEW
were decided in an era when the social and legal stratification of
whites and Blacks was more absolute, as late as 1957 the principle
was reaffirmed, notwithstanding significant changes in the legal and
political status of Blacks. As one court noted, "there is still to be
considered the social distinction existing between the races," and the
allegation was likely to cause injury.123 A Black person, however,
could not sue for defamation if she was called "white." Because the
law expressed and reinforced the social hierarchy as it existed, it was
presumed that no harm could flow from such a reversal.124
Private identity based on racial hierarchywas legitimated as public
identity in law, even after the end of slavery and the formal end of
legal race segregation. Whiteness as interpersonal hierarchy was recognized
externally as race reputation. Thus, whiteness as public reputation
and personal property was affirmed.
(d) The Absolute Right to Exclude. - Many theorists have traditionally
conceptualized property to include the exclusive rights of use,
disposition, and possession, with possession embracing the absolute
right to exclude.125 The right to exclude was the central principle,
too, of whiteness as identity, for mainly whiteness has been characterized,
not by an inherent unifying characteristic, but by the exclusion
of others deemed to be "not white." 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.126 In
that sense, the courts protected whiteness as any other form of prop-
erty.
from situations in which it was stated erroneously that a white person was a Negro. According
to the majority rule, this is libelous per se."); Annotation, Libel and Slander: Statements
Respecting Race, Color, or Nationality as Actionable, 50 A.L.R. I413, 1413-14 (1927) ("The
great weight of authority in the cases involving charges that the plaintiff is of African origin is
that such an imputation is actionable per se."). But see Collins v. Oklahoma State Hosp., I84
P. 946, 947-48 (Okla. I916). See generally MANGUM,supra note 30, at 18-25 (summarizing
cases on this issue from the i8oos to the I930s).
123 Bowen v. Independent Publishing Co., 96 S.E.2d 564, 565 (S.C. 1957).
124 See Post, supra note 116, at 725-26.
125See RICHARDA. EPSTEIN,TAKINGS:PRIVATEPROPERTYANDTHEPOWEROFEMINENT
DOMAIN 65 (1985) ("The idea of property embraces the absolute right to exclude."). The idea
that property means "myright to exclude you from some use or benefit of something"is pervasive
in modern theory. See Macpherson, supra note 58, at 2. Not all theorists agree that the right
to exclude embodied in property rights is absolute. See generallyMargaretJ. Radin, The Liberal
Conception of Property: Cross Currents in the Jurisprudence of Takings, 88 COLUM.L. REV.
1667, 1669-70 (criticizing as "naive conceptualism" the neoconservative view that the word
"property"has a "timeless,""obvious, objective meaning"that is "in"the Constitution).
126 See infra notes 133-140 and accompanying text.
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WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
Moreover, as it emerged, the concept of whiteness was premised
on white supremacy rather than mere difference. "White"was defined
and constructed in ways that increased its value by reinforcing its
exclusivity. Indeed, just as whiteness as property embraced the right
to exclude, whiteness as a theoretical construct evolved for the very
purpose of racial exclusion. Thus, the concept of whiteness is built
on both exclusion and racial subjugation. This fact was particularly
evident during the period of the most rigid racial exclusion, as whiteness
signified racial privilege and took the form of status property.
At the individual level, recognizing oneself as "white"necessarily
assumes premises based on white supremacy: It assumes that Black
ancestry in any degree, extending to generations far removed, automatically
disqualifies claims to white identity, thereby privileging
"white"as unadulterated, exclusive, and rare. Inherent in the concept
of "being white" was the right to own or hold whiteness to the exclusion
and subordination of Blacks. Because "[i]dentityis . . . continuously
being constituted through social interactions,"127the assigned
political, economic, and social inferiority of Blacks necessarily shaped
white identity. In the commonly held popular view, the presence of
Black "blood"- including the infamous "one-drop"128- consigned
a person to being "Black" and evoked the "metaphor . . . of purity
and contamination" in which Black blood is a contaminant and white
racial identity is pure.129 Recognizing or identifying oneself as white
is thus a claim of racial purity,130 an assertion that one is free of any
taint of Black blood. The law has played a critical role in legitimating
this claim.
D. White Legal Identity: The Law's Acceptance and Legitimation of
Whiteness as Property
The law assumed the crucial task of racial classification, and
accepted and embraced the then-current theories of race as biological
fact. This core precept of race as a physically defined reality allowed
the law to fulfill an essential function - to "parcelout social standing
according to race"and to facilitate systematic discrimination by articulating
"seemingly precise definitions of racial group membership."'13
This allocation of race and rights continued a century after the abolition
of slavery.132
127Post, supra note 1i6, at 709.
128F. JAMESDAVIS,WHOIS BLACK?5 (I991) (citations omitted).
129
Gotanda, supra note 24, at 26.
130See id. at 27.
131 Robert J. Cottrol, The Historical Definition of Race Law, 21 LAW& SOC'YREV. 865,
865 (1988).
132See id.
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HARVARD LAWREVIEW
The law relied on bounded, objective, and scientific definitions of
race - what Neil Gotanda has called "historical race"133- to construct
whiteness as not merely race, but race plus privilege. By
making race determinant and the product of rationality and science,
dominant and subordinate positions within the racial hierarchy were
disguised as the product of natural law and biology134rather than as
naked preferences.135 Whiteness as racialized privilege was then legitimated
by science and was embraced in legal doctrine as "objective
fact."
Case law that attempted to define race frequently struggled over
the precise fractional amount of Black "blood"- traceable Black
ancestry - that would defeat a claim to whiteness.136 Although the
courts applied varying fractional formulas in different jurisdictions to
define "Black"or, in the terms of the day, "Negro"or "colored,"the
law uniformly accepted the rule of hypodescent137- racial identity
was governed by blood, and white was preferred.138
133Gotanda defines "historical race" as socially constructed formal categories predicated on
race subordination that included presumed substantive characteristics relating to "ability, disadvantage,
or moral culpability." Gotanda, supra note 24, at 4.
134 See infra note I39 and accompanying text.
135 See Cass R. Sunstein, Naked Preferencesand the Constitution, 84 COLUM.L. REV. 1689,
1693-94 (I989).
136
See, for example, People v. Dean, I4 Mich. 406 (I866), in which the majority held that
those with less than one-quarter Black blood were white within the meaning of the constitutional
provision limiting the franchise to "white male citizens," see id. at 425. The dissent argued that
a preponderance of white blood should be sufficient to accord the status of whiteness. See id.
at 435, 438 (Martin, C.J., dissenting).
137 "Hypodescent"is the term used by anthropologistMarvin Harris to describe the American
system of racial classification in which the subordinate classification is assigned to the offspring
if there is one "superordinate"and one "subordinate"parent. Under this system, the child of a
Black parent and a white parent is Black. MARVINHARRIS,PATTERNSOF RACEIN THE
AMERICAS37, 56 (1964).
138 According to various court decisions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
term "negro"was construed to mean a person of mixed blood within three generations, see State
v. Melton & Byrd, 44 N.C. (Busb.) 49, 51 (I852); a person having one-fourth or more of African
blood, see Gentry v. McMinnis, 3 Dana (Ky.) 382, 385 (I835); Jones v. Commission, 80 Va.
538, 542 (I885); a person having one-sixteenth or more of African blood, see State v. Chavers,
50 N.C. II, I4-15 (1857); State v. Watters, 25 N.C. (3 Ired.) 455, 457 (I843); a person having
one-eighth or more of African blood, see Rice v. Gong Lum, 139 Miss. 760, 779 (1925); Marre
v. Marre, 184 Mo. App. 198, 211 (I914); anyone with any trace of Negro blood, see State v.
Montgomery County School Dist. No. 16, 242 S.W. 545, 546 (I922). The term "colored"too
had a range of legal meanings. See II C.J. Colored 1224 (I917). For a review of court decisions
and statutes of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries delineating who is a "Negro"or who is
colored, see MANGUM,supra note 30, at 1-17.
An example of the complexity of defining these terms is revealed in State v. Treadaway, 52
So. 500 (La. I9Io), in which the Louisiana state supreme court exhaustively reviewed the
various meanings of the words "negro"and "colored"in considering whether an "octoroon"a
person of one-eighth Black blood - was a Negro within the meaning of a statute barring
cohabitation between a person of the "white"race and a person of the "negro or black" race.
See id. at 50I-Io. In examining the definitions propounded in various dictionaries, court
I738 [Vol. Io6:I707
I993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY I739
This legal assumption of race as blood-borne was predicated on
the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and craniology that saw their major
development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.139 The
legal definition of race was the "objective"test propounded by racist
theorists of the day who described race to be immutable, scientific,
biologically determined - an unsullied fact of the blood rather than
a volatile and violently imposed regime of racial hierarchy.
In adjudicating who was "white,"courts sometimes noted that, by
physical characteristics, the individual whose racial identity was at
issue appeared to be white and, in fact, had been regarded as white
in the community. Yet if an individual's blood was tainted, she could
not claim to be "white"as the law understood, regardless of the fact
that phenotypically she may have been completely indistinguishable
from a white person, may have lived as a white person, and have
descended from a family that lived as whites. Although socially accepted
as white, she could not legally be white.140 Blood as "objective
decisions, and statutory law that used either term, the court concluded that "colored"denoted
a person of mixed white and Black blood in any degree, and a "negro"was a "person of the
African race, or possessing the black color and other characteristics of the African." Id. at 53I.
Because "thereare no negroes who are not persons of color; but there are persons of color who
are not negroes," id., the court concluded that the statute did not include octoroons because
they were not commonly considered "negroes,"although they were persons of color, see id. at
537. The response of the Louisiana legislature was to reenact the statute with the identical
language, except it substituted the word "colored"for the word "Negro." See MANGUM,supra
note 30, at 5-6.
139For example, Samuel Morton, one of the principal architects of these theories, ascribed
the basis of Black and non-white racial inferiority to differences in cranial capacity, which
purportedly revealed that whites had larger heads. Notwithstanding the gross breaches of
scientific method and manipulation of data evident in Morton's theory, see GOSSETT,supra note
20, at 73-74, his I839 book, Crania Americana, was widely accepted as the scientific explanation
of Blacks' inability to mature beyond childhood, see GOSSETT,supra note 20, at 58-59 (citing
the remarks of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., extolling Morton as a "leader"whose "severe and
cautious . . . researches"would provide "permanentdata for all future students of Ethology");
TAKAKI,supra note I6, at II3 (citing the remarks of an Indiana senator in 1850 who spoke of
the diminished brain capacity of Blacks). These and other widely disseminated theories of Black
inferiority provided the rationale for the political and popular discourse of the time that argued
that Black equality and participation in the polity were impossible because Blacks lacked the
capacity to develop rational decisionmaking. See REGINALDHORSMAN,RACEANDMANIFEST
DESTINY16-57 (describing the permeation of "scientific"bases for racial inferiority into every
aspect of American thought).
140See, e.g., Sunseri v. Cassagne, I85 So. I, 4-5 (La. I938). The case involved a suit by
Sunseri to annul his marriage to Cassagne on the grounds that she had a trace of "negroblood."
He contended that his wife's great-great-grandmotherwas a "full-bloodednegress,"and Cassagne
herself asserted that she was Indian. See id. at 2. It was not disputed that all of Cassagne's
paternal ancestors from her father to her great-great-grandfather were white men. See id.
Moreover, Cassagne had been regarded as white in the community, as she and her mother had
been christened in a white church, had attended white schools, were registered as white voters,
were accepted as white in public facilities, and had exclusively associated with whites. See id.
at 4-5. Nevertheless, because certificates and official records designated Cassagne and some of
her relatives as "colored,"the court concluded that she was not white and that thus there were
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
fact" dominated over appearance and social acceptance, which were
socially fluid and subjective measures.
But, in fact, "blood"was no more objective than that which the
law dismissed as subjective and unreliable. The acceptance of the
fiction that the racial ancestry could be determined with the degree
of precision called for by the relevant standards or definitions rested
on false assumptions that racial categories of prior ancestors had been
accurately reported, that those reporting in the past shared the definitions
currently in use, and that racial purity actually existed in the
United States.141 Ignoring these considerations, the law established
rules that extended equal treatment to those of the "same blood,"
albeit of different complexions, because it was acknowledged that,
"[t]here are white men as dark as mulattoes, and there are pureblooded
albino Africans as white as the whitest Saxons."142
The standards were designed to accomplish what mere observation
could not: "That even Blacks who did not look Black were kept in
their place."143 Although the line of demarcation between Black and
white varied from rules that classified as Black a person containing
"anydrop of Black blood,"144to more liberal rules that defined persons
with a preponderance of white blood to be white,145 the courts universally
accepted the notion that white status was something of value
sufficient grounds to annul the marriage. See Sunseri v. Cassagne, 196 So. 7, io (La. 1940);
see also Johnson v. Board of Educ. of Wilson County, 82 S.E. 832, 833-35 (1914) (refusing to
allow the children of a "pure white" husband and a wife who was less than "one-eighthnegro"
to be admitted to white schools because of the presence of "negroblood in some degree," even
assuming that the marriage was valid and not violative of the miscegenation statute).
141 It is not at all clear that even the slaves imported from abroad represented "pureNegro
races." As Gunner Myrdal noted, many of the tribes imported from Africa had intermingled
with peoples of the Mediterranean, among them Portuguese slave traders. Other slaves brought
to the United States came via the West Indies, where some Africans had been brought directly,
but still others had been brought via Spain and Portugal, countries in which extensive interracial
sexual relations had occurred. By the mid-nineteenth century it was, therefore, a virtual fiction
to speak of "pureblood" as it relates to racial identification in the United States. See MYRDAL,
supra note 4, at 123.
142People v. Dean, 14 Mich. 406, 422 (i866).
143Diamond & Cottrol, supra note 20, at 281.
144For a history of the "one-drop"rule, see DAVIS,cited above in note 128, at 5. According
to Davis:
The nation's answer to the question "Who is black?"has long been that a black is any
person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflectsthe long experience
with slavery and later with Jim Crow segregation. In the South it became known as
the "one-drop rule," meaning that a single drop of "black blood" makes a person black.
It is also known as the . . . "traceable amount rule," and anthropologists call it the
"hypo-descent rule," meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the
subordinate group. This definition emerged from the American South to become the
nation's definition, generally accepted by whites and blacks alike. Blacks had no other
choice.
Id. (citations omitted).
145See, e.g., Gray v. Ohio, 4 Ohio 353, 355 (1831).
I740 [Vol. Io6:1707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
that could be accorded only to those persons whose proofs established
their whiteness as defined by the law.146 Because legal recognition of
a person as white carried material benefits, "false" or inadequately
supported claims were denied like any other unsubstantiated claim to
a property interest. Only those who could lay "legitimate"claims to
whiteness could be legally recognized as "white," because allowing
physical attributes, social acceptance, or self-identification to determine
whiteness would diminish its value and destroy the underlying
presumption of exclusivity. In effect, the courts erected legal "No
Trespassing" signs.
In the realm of social relations, racial recognition in the United
States is thus an act of race subordination. In the realm of legal
relations, judicial definition of racial identity based on white supremacy
reproduced that race subordination at the institutional level. In
transforming white to whiteness, the law masked the ideological content
of racial definition and the exercise of power required to maintain
it: "It convert[ed] [an] abstract concept into [an] entity."147
i. Whiteness as Racialized Privilege. - The material benefits of
racial exclusion and subjugation functioned, in the labor context, to
stifle class tensions among whites. White workers perceived that they
had more in common with the bourgeoisie than with fellow workers
who were Black. Thus, W.E.B. Du Bois's classic historical study of
race and class, Black Reconstruction,148 noted that, for the evolving
white working class, race identification became crucial to the ways
that it thought of itself and conceived its interests. There were, he
suggested, obvious material benefits, at least in the short term, to the
decision of white workers to define themselves by their whiteness:
their wages far exceeded those of Blacks and were high even in
comparison with world standards.149 Moreover, even when the white
working class did not collect increased pay as part of white privilege,
there were real advantages not paid in direct income: whiteness still
yielded what Du Bois termed a "public and psychological wage" vital
to white workers.150 Thus, Du Bois noted:
They [whites]were given public deference .. . becausethey were
white. They were admittedfreelywith all classesof white people,to
146The courts adopted this standard even as they critiqued the legitimacy of such rules and
definitions. For example, in People v. Dean, 14 Mich. 406 (i886), the court, in interpreting the
meaning of the word "white"for the purpose of determining whether the defendant had voted
illegally, criticized as "absurd"the notion that "a preponderance of mixed blood, on one side or
the other of any given standard, has the remotest bearing upon personal fitness or unfitness to
possess political privileges," id. at 417, but held that the electorate that had voted for racial
exclusion had the right to determine voting privileges, see id. at 416.
147STEPHEN J. GOULD, THE MISMEASUREOF MAN 24 (I98I).
148W.E.B. Du Bois, BLACKRECONSTRUCTION(photo. reprint I976) (I935).
149 See id. at 634.
150Id. at 700.
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HARVARD LAWREVIEW
public functions, to public parks .... The police were drawn from
their ranks, and the courts,dependenton theirvotes, treatedthem
with . . . leniency .... Their vote selected public officials, and while
this had small effect upon the economicsituation,it had greateffect
on their personal treatment .... White schoolhouses were the best
in the community,and conspicuouslyplaced,andthey costanywhere
fromtwice to ten timesas muchper capitaas the coloredschools.151
The central feature of the convergence of "white" and "worker"
lay in the fact that racial status and privilege could ameliorate and
assist in "evad[ing] rather than confront[ing] [class] exploitation."152
Although not accorded the privileges of the ruling class, in both the
North and South, white workers could accept their lower class position
in the hierarchy "by fashioning identities as 'not slaves' and as 'not
Blacks.'"153 Whiteness produced - and was reproduced by - the
social advantage that accompanied it.
Whiteness was also central to national identity and to the republican
project. The amalgamation of various European strains into an
American identity was facilitated by an oppositional definition of
Black as "other."154As Hacker suggests, fundamentally, the question
was not so much "who is white," but "who may be considered white,"
151Id. at 700-oI.
152ROEDIGER, supra note 19, at 13. One of Roediger's principal themes is that whiteness
was constructed both from the top down and from the bottom up. See id. at 8-I i. His vigorous
analysis of the role of racism in the construction of working class consciousness leads him to
conclude that "the pleasures of whiteness could function as a [wage] for white workers ....
[S]tatus and privilege conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitive
class relationships." Id. at 13. Roediger further argues that the conjunction of "white" and
"worker"came about in the nineteenth century at a time when the non-slave labor force came
increasingly to depend on wage labor. The independence of this sector was then measured in
relation to the dependency of Blacks as a subordinated people and class. See id. at 20. The
involvement of all sectors, including the white working class, in the construction of whiteness
aids in explaining the persistence of whiteness in the modern period. See discussion infra
PP. 1758-77.
153ROEDIGER, supranote 19, at I3.
154"One of the surest ways to confirm an identity, for communities and individuals, is to
find some way of measuring what one is not." KAIERICKSON, WAYWARDPURITANS:A STUDY
IN THE SOCIOLOGYOF DEVIANCE 64 (I966).
Toni Morrison's study of the Africanist presence in U.S. literature echoes the same theme of
the reflexive construction of "American"identity:
It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much immigrant
literature)understood their Americaness as an opposition to the resident black population.
Race in fact now functions as a metaphor so necessary to the construction of Americaness
that it rivals the old pseudo-scientific and class-informed racisms whose dynamics we are
more used to deciphering .... Deep within the word "American"is its association with
race. To identify someone as South African is to say very little; we need the adjective
"white"or "black"or "colored"to make our meaning clear. In this country, it is quite
the reverse. American means white ....
TONI MORRISON, PLAYING IN THE DARK: WHITENESS AND THE LITERARYIMAGINATION46-
47 (I992).
1742 [Vol. I06:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
as the historical pattern was that various immigrant groups of different
ethnic origins were accepted into a white identity shaped around
Anglo-American norms.155 Current members then "ponder[ed]
whether they want[ed] or need[ed] new members as well as the proper
pace of new admissions into this exclusive club."156Through minstrel
shows in which white actors masquerading in blackface played out
racist stereotypes, the popular culture put the Black at "'solo spot
centerstage, providing a relational model in contrast to which masses
of Americans could establish a positive and superior sense of identity[,]'
. .. [an identity] . . . established by an infinitely manipulable
negation comparing whites with a construct of a socially defenseless
group."157
It is important to note the effect of this hypervaluation of whiteness.
Owning white identity as property affirmed the self-identity and
liberty158of whites and, conversely, denied the self-identity and liberty
of Blacks.159 The attempts to lay claim to whiteness through "passing"
painfully illustrate the effects of the law's recognition of whiteness.
The embrace of a lie, undertaken by my grandmother and the thousands
like her, could occur only when oppression makes self-denial
and the obliteration of identity rational and, in significant measure,
beneficial.160 The economic coercion of white supremacy on selfdefinition
nullifies any suggestion that passing is a logical exercise of
liberty or self-identity. The decision to pass as white was not a choice,
if by that word one means voluntariness or lack of compulsion. The
fact of race subordination was coercive and circumscribed the liberty
155 Andrew Hacker says that white became a "common front" established across ethnic
origins, social class, and language. ANDREW HACKER, Two NATIONS 12 (1992).
156 Id. at 9.
157
ROEDIGER, supra note I9, at II8 (quoting Alan W.C. Green, "Jim Crow," "Zip Coon":
The Northern Origin of Negro Minstrelsy, ii MASS.REV. 385, 395 (I970)).
158 I do not attempt here to review or state a position with regard to the profusion of theories
that describe the relationship between liberty and property; that is beyond the scope of this
inquiry. Rather, I use liberty in the Hohfeldian sense as a privilege, "alegal liberty or freedom,"
not involving "a correlative duty but the absence of a right on someone else's part to interfere."
MUNZER, supra note 58, at i8 (1990).
159 In this respect, whiteness as property followed a familiar paradigm. Although the state
can create new forms of property other than those existing at common law, "in each case that
it creates new property rights, the state necessarily limits the common law liberty or property
rights of other citizens, for conduct which was once legal now becomes an invasion or an
infringement of the new set of rights that are established." Epstein, No New Property, supra
note 68, at 754; see HIGGINBOTHAM,supra note 20, at 13 (noting that, when the law establishes
a right for a person, group, or institution, it simultaneously constrains those whose "preferences
impinge on the right established").
160 This problem is at the center of one of the early classics of Black literature, The
Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, by James Weldon Johnson, the story of a Black man
who "passes" for white, crossing between Black and white racial identities four times. See
Henry L. Gates, Jr., Introduction to JAMESW. JOHNSON,THE AUTOBIOGRAPHYOF AN EXCOLOUREDMAN
vi (Vintage 1989) (I912).
I993] I743
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
to self-define. Self-determination of identity was not a right for all
people, but a privilege accorded on the basis of race. The effect of
protecting whiteness at law was to devalue those who were not white
by coercing them to deny their identity in order to survive.161
2. Whiteness, Rights, and National Identity. - The concept of
whiteness was carefully protected because so much was contingent
upon it. Whiteness conferred on its owners aspects of citizenship that
were all the more valued because they were denied to others. Indeed,
the very fact of citizenship itself was linked to white racial identity.
The Naturalization Act of I790 restricted citizenship to persons who
resided in the United States for two years, who could establish their
good character in court, and who were "white."162 Moreover, the
trajectory of expanding democratic rights for whites was accompanied
by the contraction of the rights of Blacks in an ever deepening cycle
of oppression.163 The franchise, for example, was broadenedto extend
voting rights to unpropertied white men at the same time that Black
voters were specifically disenfranchised, arguably shifting the property
required for voting from land to whiteness.164 This racialized version
of republicanism - this Herrenvolk165republicanism - constrained
161I am indebted to Lisa Ikemoto for the insight regarding how whiteness as property
interacts with liberty and self-identity.
162 See Naturalization Act of 1790, ch. 3, ? I, I Stat. 103, I03 (1790) (repealed I795). As
Takaki explains, this law "specified a complexion for the members of the new nation" and
reflected the explicit merger of white national identity and republicanism. TAKAKI,supra note
16, at 15. It was also another arena in which the law promulgated racial definitions as part of
its task of allocating rights of citizenship. These decisions further reinforced white hegemony
by naturalizing white identity as objective when in fact it was a constructed and moving barrier.
As noted in CorpusJuris, a white person
constitutes a very indefinite description of a class of persons, where none can be said to
be literally white; and it has been said that a construction of the term to mean Europeans
and persons of European descent is ambiguous. "Whiteperson"has been held to include
an Armenian born in Asiatic Turkey, a person of but one-sixteenth Indian blood, and a
Syrian, but not to include Afghans, American Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Hawaiians,
Hindus, Japanese, Koreans, negroes; nor does white person include a person having one
fourth of African blood, a person in whom Malay blood predominates, a person whose
father was a German and whose mother was a Japanese, a person whose father was a
white Canadian and whose mother was an Indian woman, or a person whose mother
was a Chinese and whose father was the son of a Portuguese father and a Chinese
mother.
68 C.J. White 258 (1934) (citations omitted).
163See Diamond & Cottrol, supra note 20, at 262.
164For an account of the linkage between expanding white voting rights and increased
constraints on rights for Blacks, see ROEDIGER,supra note 19, in which he describes the
experience in Pennsylvania, see id. at 59; see also Diamond & Cottrol, supra note 20, at 260-
61 n.26 (summarizing the fate of free, enfranchised Blacks who were later disenfranchised in
the face of rising racism at the same time that property requirements were abolished for white
voters).
165Pierre van der Berghe uses this term to describe those societies in which dominant groups
operate within democratic and egalitarian rules, and subordinate groups are subjected to undemocratic
and tyrannical regulation. The classic contemporary example of this model is South
[Vol. Io6:I707I744
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
any vision of democracy from addressing the class hierarchies adverse
to many who considered themselves white.
The inherent contradiction between the bondage of Blacks and
republican rhetoric that championed the freedom of all men was
resolved by positing that Blacks were different.166 The laws did not
mandate that Blacks be accorded equality under the law because
nature - not man, not power, not violence - had determined their
degraded status. Rights were for those who had the capacity to
exercise them, a capacity denoted by racial identity. This conception
of rights was contingent on race - on whether one could claim
whiteness - a form of property. This articulation of rights that were
contingent on property ownership was a familiar paradigm, as similar
requirements had been imposed on the franchise in the early part of
the republic.167 For the first two hundred years of the country's
existence, the system of racialized privilege in both the public and
private spheres carried through this linkage of rights and inequality,
and rights and property. Whiteness as property was the critical core
of a system that affirmed the hierarchical relations between white and
Black.
III. BOUND BY LAW: THE PROPERTY INTEREST IN WHITENESS
As LEGAL DOCTRINE IN PLESSY AND BROWN
Even after the period of conquest and colonization of the New
World and the abolition of slavery, whiteness was the predicate for
attaining a host of societal privileges, in both public and private
spheres. Whiteness determined whether one could vote, travel freely,
attend schools, obtain work, and indeed, defined the structureof social
relations along the entire spectrum of interactions between the individual
and society. Whiteness then became status, a form of racialized
privilege ratified in law. Material privileges attendant to being white
Africa. See PIERRE VAN DER BERGHE, RACE AND RACISM: A COMPARATIVEPERSPECTIVEI7i8
(I967).
166See Diamond & Cottrol, supra note 20, at 262.
167The organizing principle of the Federalist vision of the republic was that government
must protect the rights of persons and the rights of property. See JENNIFERNEDELSKY,PRIVATE
PROPERTYANDTHELIMITSOFAMERICANCONSTITUTIONALISM17 (I99I). But if, as Madison
stated, "'the first object of government is the protection of different and unequal faculties of
acquiring property,'" id. at 17 (citation omitted), then an extension of the rights of suffrage to
all would subject those with material property, always a minority, to the control of the propertyless,
see id. at i8. The solution adopted by Madisonian republicanism limited the franchise
and installed a system of freehold suffrage. See id. at 19. The result, according to Nedelsky,
was a distortion of the republican vision as inequality was presumed and protected. See id. at
I. But see Book Note, Private Property, Civic Republicanism and the Madisonian Constitution,
I04 HARV.L. REV. 961, 963-64 (I99I) (arguing that Nedelsky mischaracterizes the Madisonian
vision of property to be referring only to material property when in fact Madison's concept of
property included everything to which one could claim a right).
I993] I745
HARVARD LAW REVIEW
inhered in the status of being white. After the dismantling of legalized
race segregation, whiteness took on the character of property in the
modern sense in that relative white privilege was legitimated as the
status quo. In Plessy v. Ferguson168and the case that overturned it,
Brown v. Board of Education,169the law extended protectionto whiteness
as property, in the former instance, as traditional status-property,
in the latter, as modern property.
A. Plessy
Plessy arose at a time of acute crisis for Blacks. The system of
legalized race segregation known as Jim Crow170and heightened racial
violence171had reversed the minimal gains attained by Blacks during
Reconstruction.172 Against a background of extreme racial oppression,
the Supreme Court's opinion in Plessy rejecting thirteenth and fourteenth
amendment challenges to state enforced racial segregation was
consonant with the overall political climate.
The case arose in I89I, as one of a series of challenges to a
Louisiana law that required racial segregation of railway cars, and
was brought after Homer A. Plessy attempted to board a coach reserved
for whites and was arrested for violating the statute.173 Because,
according to the plea filed on Plessy's behalf, "the mixture of
African blood [was] not discernable in him,"174it is evident that
Plessy's arrest was arranged as part of a strategy that included the
168 I63 U.S. 537 (I896).
169347 U.S. 483 (I954).
170See generally C. VANNWOODWARD,THE STRANGECAREEROFJIMCROWpassim (I974)
(describing the American system of legally mandated race segregation).
171Lynching, an extreme form of social control designed to contain or obliterate potential
economic and political challenges posed by Blacks, rose during the ten-year period between
I890 and I900. In I892 alone, over 255 Black men, women, and children were lynched. See
GIDDINGS, supra note 37, at 26.
172Some historians have argued that the actual material conditions of Blacks deteriorated
in the last two decades of the nineteenth century as they were squeezed out of the core of the
labor force. See MYRDAL,supra note 4, at 222 (arguing that, after Emancipation, "no . . .
proprietary interest [of slaveowners] protected negro laborers from the desire of white workers
to squeeze them out of skilled employment[,] [t]hey were gradually driven out and pushed down
into 'Negro jobs', a category which has been more and more narrowly defined").
173See CHARLESLOFGREN,THE PLESSYCASE41 (1987).
174 Id. at 41.
I746 [Vol.106:1707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
tacit cooperation of railway officials, many of whom were displeased
with the separate car law due to the increased expense of operation.175
The Court dismissed Plessy's claim that legalized racial separation
produced racial subordination because
[T]he underlyingfallacy of the plaintiff's argumentconsists in the
assumptionthat the enforcedseparationof the two racesstampsthe
coloredrace with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by
reasonof anythingfound in the act but solely becausethe colored
racechoosesto put that constructionon it.176
Plessy's claim, however, was predicated on more than the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy additionally
charged that the refusal to seat him on the white passenger car deprived
him of property - "this reputation [of being white] which has
an actual pecuniary value" - without the due process of law guaranteed
by the amendment.177 Because phenotypically Plessy appeared
to be white,178 barring him from the railway car reserved for whites
severely impaired or deprived him of the reputation of being regarded
as white.179 He might thereafter be regarded as or be suspected of
being not white180and therefore not entitled to any of the public and
private benefits attendant to white status.
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 a passenger violated due process guarantees.181 Because
of white supremacy, whiteness was not merely a descriptive or ascrip-
175 See id. at 32.
176Plessy v. Ferguson, I63 U.S. 537, 551 (I896).
177 Brief for Plaintiff in Error at 8, Plessy (No. 2Io) [hereinafter Brief for Homer Plessy].
178 See LOFGREN, supra note 173, at 41.
179 Albion Tourgee, attorney for Plessy, had specifically sought a fair-skinned plaintiff in
order to raise this argument, over vigorous opposition from organized Black leadership. Although
Tourgee was seeking a narrower ground for the Court to rule upon, as he was very
pessimistic about overturning Jim Crow in the hostile political climate, Black leadership objected
that such a strategy, even if successful, would mitigate conditions only for those Blacks who
appeared to be white. Legally sanctioning the privilege of fair skin over dark would only serve
to reinforce the legitimacy of the race hierarchy that kept white over Black. Nevertheless,
Tourgee prevailed in his efforts to pursue this strategy and Homer A. Plessy was chosen because
phenotypically he appeared to be white. See JACKGREENBERG,LITIGATIONFORSOCIAL
CHANGE: METHODS, LIMITS AND ROLE IN DEMOCRACYI3-I5 (I974). Greenberg notes that
one of the benefits of Tourgee's approach was that, had it been accepted by the Court, it might
have, in time, made Jim Crow laws extremely difficult to administer. Thus, states might simply
have abandoned them. See id. at 14.
180See Brief for Homer Plessy, supra note I77, at 9-o0.
181 Id. at 8.
1993] I747
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
tive characteristic- it was propertyof overwhelming significance and
value. Albion Tourgee, one of Plessy's attorneys, pointedly argued
that the property value in being white was self-evident:
How much would it be worth to a young man enteringupon the
practiceof law, to be regardedas a white man ratherthan a colored
one? Six-seventhsof the populationare white. Nineteen-twentieths
of the propertyof the countryis ownedby whitepeople. Ninety-nine
hundredthsof the businessopportunitiesare in the controlof white
people. . . . Probablymost white personsif given a choice, would
preferdeath to life in the United Statesas coloredpersons. Under
theseconditions,is it possibleto concludethat thereputationof being
white is not property? Indeed, is it not the most valuable sort of
property,being the master-keythat unlocksthe goldendoor of op-
portunity?182
Moreover, Tourgee noted that, in determining who was white, not
only were there no national standards, there were also conflicting rules
that, by definition, incorporated white domination:
There is no law of the United States, or of the state of Louisiana
definingthe limits of race- who are white and who are "colored"?
By what rulethen shallany tribunalbe guidedin determiningracial
character?It may be said that all thoseshouldbe classedas colored
in whomappearsa visibleadmixtureof coloredblood. By whatlaw?
With what justice? Why not count everyoneas white in whom is
visibleany traceof white blood? Thereis but one reasonto wit, the
dominationof the white race.183
The Court ignored Tourgee's argument, and asserted simply that,
although the statute obviously conferred power on the train conductor
to make assignments by race, no deprivation of due process had
resulted because the issue of Plessy's race did not "properlyarise on
the record."l84 Because there was nothing to indicate that Plessy had
182 Id. at 9.
183Id. at 1i. Although from a very different perspective and analysis, Tourgee's attack on
the arbitrarinessof racial categories presaged the full-blown assault on the illusion of colorblindness
offered by Neil Gotanda's insight that recognition of race in this society involves race
subordination. Gotanda states:
Under hypodescent [the rule governing race in the United Statesl, Black parentage is
recognized through the generations .... Black ancestry is a contaminant that overwhelms
white ancestry. Thus, under the American system of racial classification, claiming a
white racial identity is a declaration of racial purity and an implicit assertion of racial
domination. ...
. . . [T]he moment of racial recognition is the moment in which is reproduced the
inherent asymmetry of the metaphor of racial contamination and the implicit impossibility
of racial equality.
Gotanda, supra note 24, at 26-27 (footnotes omitted).
184Plessy v. Ferguson, I63 U.S. 537, 549 (I896). The information filed against Plessy had
failed to specify his race. See LOFGREN,supra note I73, at I54. However, Plessy's petition for
writs of prohibition and certiorari had alleged that he was seven-eighths white. See id. at 55.
I748 [Vol. Io6:7o07
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
been improperly classified under any operative racial definition, no
claim for a lack of judicial process in reviewing an improper classification
would lie.
The opinion, however, inexplicably proceeded to consider whether
Plessy had suffered damage to his property in the form of his reputation,
a question dependent on the issue of racial classification that
the Court had previously declined to address. The Court simply
concluded that, if Plessy were white, any injury to his reputation
would be adequately compensated by an action for damages against
the company, given that counsel for the state had conceded that the
statute's liability exemption for conductors was unconstitutional.185
The Court stated:
If he be a white man and assignedto a coloredcoach, he may have
his actionfor damagesagainstthe companyfor beingdeprivedof his
so-calledproperty. Upon the otherhand, if he be a coloredmanand
be so assigned,he has been deprivedof no property,since he is not
lawfullyentitledto the reputationof beinga white man.186
At one level, the Court's opinion amounted to a wholesale evasion
of the argument that, as a matter of federal constitutional law, Plessy's
assignment to a railway car for Blacks, in the absence of a clear
standard defining who was white, was an arbitrary and unauthorized
taking of the valuable asset of being regarded as white. At another
level, the Court's decision lent support to the notion of race reputation
as a property interest that required the protection of law through
actions for damages. It did not specifically consider any particular
rule of race definition, but it protected the property interest in whiteness
for all whites by subsuming even those like Plessy, who phenotypically
appeared to be white, within categories that were predicated
on white supremacy and race subordination. Officially, the court
declined to consider whether Plessy met any statutory definition of
whiteness, but deferred to state law as the legitimate source of racial
definitions.187 Although the opinion rhetorically signaled some qualAttached
to the petition was the affidavit of the arresting officer who had identified Plessy as a
"passengerof the colored race." Id. Notwithstanding the court's demurral, there was thus little
doubt that the record contained facts pertaining to Plessy's race.
185See Plessy, 163 U.S. at 549.
186Id.
187 The Court validated, as acceptable norms, state law requirements including, presumably,
all common law regarding the proportion of "colored blood necessary to constitute a colored
person." The Court stated:
It is true that the question of the proportion of colored blood necessary to constitute a
colored person, as distinguished from a white person, is one upon which there is a
difference of opinion in the different states .... But these are questions to be determined
under the laws of each state and are not properly put in issue in this case.
Id. at 552 (citations omitted).
Obviously, state law also would control the federal due process claim. This fact invites
speculation that had Plessy been on a train in a different state with different laws defining
I993] 1749
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
ifications about the existence of the property right in whiteness,188in
fact, the Court protected that right by acknowledging that whites
could protect their reputation of being white through suits for damages
and by determining that Plessy would be subject to rules that continued
white privilege. Plessy demonstrated the Court's chronic refusal
to dismantle the structure of white supremacy, which is maintained
through the institutional protection of relative benefits for whites at
the expense of Blacks. In denying that any inferiority existed by
reason of de jure segregation, and in denying white status to Plessy,
"whiteness"was protected from intrusion and appropriate boundaries
around the property were maintained.
B. Brown I
Nearly sixty years later, Brown 1189 reversed the Court's prior
endorsement of "separatebut equal" in Plessy and marked the end of
the legal recognition of state-enforced racial separation. In no uncertain
terms, Brown I flatly rejected Plessy's assertion that segregation
did not mark Blacks as inferior, and condemned legalized race segregation
in public schools as inherently unequal.190 In Brown I, the
plaintiffs contended that "segregatedpublic schools are not 'equal' and
cannot be made 'equal."''91 The Court stated the issue as the constitutional
viability of segregation within circumstances of substantive
equality, because "with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications
and salaries of teachers, and other tangible factors," Black schools
and white schools either had been equalized or were being equalized
in the school systems that were the subject of the litigation.192 Brown
I held that, parity of resources aside, the evil of state-mandated
segregation was the conveyance of a sense of unworthiness and inferiority.193
To its credit, the Court not only rejected the property right
of whites in officially sanctioned inequality, but also refused to protect
the old property interest in whiteness by not accepting the argument
that the rights of whites to disassociate is a valid counterweight to
the rights of Blacks to be free of subordination imposed by segregation.
It did not accept the premise that neutral principles guaranteed
that white preferences should remain undisturbed.194
whiteness, the case might have gone the other way, although on the narrower basis of the
deprivation of due process.
188 The opinion says that the right asserted by Plessy is "so-called"property and acknowledged
the existence of such a property right "forthe purposes of this case." Id. at 549.
189 Brown v. Board of Educ. (Brown I), 347 U.S. 483 (I954).
190 See id. at 494-95.
191 Id. at 488.
192Id. at 492.
193 See id. at 494.
194 Herbert Wechsler's search for the neutral principles that justify the outcome in Brown is
I750 [Vol. Io6:I707
1993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY I75I
Yet Brown I was plagued by ambiguous motives195and clouded
rhetorical vision.196 In fact, it is unclear what definition of equality
was articulated by Brown I, and in this ambiguity, the property
interest in whiteness continued to reside. Against the backdrop of
real inequality, even as the Court abandoned the highly formalistic
view of equality underpinning Plessy, it remained unwilling to embrace
any form of substantive equality, unwilling to acknowledge any
right to equality of resources.197 The Court refused to extend continued
legal protection to white privilege, yet it simultaneously declined
to guarantee that white privilege would be dismantled, or even to
direct that the continued existence of institutionalized privilege violated
the equal protection rights of Blacks.
In its unwillingness to do so, the Brown I Court failed to address
the full measure of the harm.198 A very real aspect of injury was
unsuccessful because he argues that Brown really is about the competing associational claims of
Blacks whose rights to freely associate were impaired by segregation and the rights of whites
to be free from association with Blacks. See Herbert Wechsler, Toward Neutral Principles of
Constitutional Law, 73 HARV.L. REV. I, 34 (1959). Defining the problem of segregation in
purely associational terms ignores the crucial fact that the system of white supremacy was built
not merely to achieve race segregation, but also to construct systematic disadvantage.
195
Assessing the underlying reasons for Brown is beyond the scope of this work, but it is
noteworthy that a careful analysis of Brown not only reveals the way in which it was analytically
and remedially compromised by the protection of the new form of whiteness as property, but
also discloses that the impetus for the decision was as much white self-interest as the relentless
struggle of Blacks for equal justice. The removal of de jure segregation resulted from the
domestic pressure generated by the oppressed Black masses under the banner of equal justice
under law as well as from the external dynamic of competition between the United States and
the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World. The United States was vulnerable to the
charge that its domestic policies toward Black people residing in the United States were a better
indication of its view of the emerging nations of Africa and Asia than its rhetoric of democracy.
For a thorough and fascinating account of Brown in the context of U.S. foreign policy and Cold
War initiatives, see Mary Dudziak, Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative, 41 STAN.L. REV.
6I (1988). See also Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest
Convergence Dilemma, 93 HARV. L. REV. 5I8, 524-25 (I980) (arguing that the decision in
Brown was also in the interests of white foreign policymakers); Mark Tushnet, What Really
Happened in Brown v. Board of Education, 91 COLUM.L. REV. 1867, I885 (1991) (citing the
briefs filed by the Department of Justice that noted that the system of Jim Crow was a
tremendous handicap to U.S. foreign policy in its competition with the Soviet Union for influence
in Africa).
196Some historians have suggested that this ambiguity may have been deliberate to some
extent, part of the necessary price for a unanimous opinion. See J. HARVIEWILKINSONIII,
FROM BROWN TO BAKKE 31 (I979).
197According to Alan Freeman:
[Brown] has come to stand for both more and less than equality of educational opportunity
- more to the extent it reached out to strike down other discriminatory practices, but
much less to the extent there is no recognized right, no ethical claim for equality of
resources or a substantively effective education as such.
Alan P. Freeman, Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review, in THE POLITICSOF LAW:A
PROGRESSIVECRITIQUE96, Ioi (David Kairys ed., I982). This ambiguity infected the remedial
phase. See infra pp. I754-56.
198This failure may have been due, in part, to the difficulty of attacking the system of racial
HARVARD LAW REVIEW
that legalized race segregation structured material inequalities into all
socioeconomic relations and institutions, including publicly funded
schools.199 All other things, then, most assuredly were not equal.200
The purpose of the law of segregation was to subordinate and disadvantage
Blacks. Indeed, legalized segregation could not achieve its
purpose without imposing inequality. The purposeful creation and
maintenance of inequality, then, was the violation from which the
plaintiffs in Brown I sought relief. Although the Court partially
recognized the claim and acknowledged that "[s]eparate. . . [is] inherently
unequal,"201it failed to expose the problem of substantive
inequality in material terms produced by white domination and race
segregation.
oppression from different fronts. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the long campaign against state-enforced
segregation had long debated the merits of different strategies: (i) pursuing suits that sought
equalization of school facilities in systems throughout the country where disparitieswere obvious;
or (2) undertaking a direct attack on Plessy. The major issues were not only ideological - that
is whether integration was a desired or viable goal - but were strategic as well. That the legal
battle was being waged under severe financial constraints made pure equalization suits a less
effective and less useful choice, as it was evident early on that equalization suits would have
to pursue remedies locality by locality, with each outcome turning on facts highly specific to the
case and having little or no precedential value. Unequal conditions were factual questions in
essence, and required intensive investigatory resources to make out a case. See MARKV.
TUSHNET,THE NAACP's LEGALSTRATEGYAGAINSTSEGREGATEDEDUCATION107-10 (I987).
Moreover, equality of facilities alone was unacceptable to the plaintiffs, their lawyers, and
many of those directly engaged in the struggle. An argument limited to "separate but equal"
alone would have served to reinforce the very principle of the system of racial oppression, built
to police and reflect race and class privilege. Finally, because the lawyers for the NAACP were
fighting for a mandate to desegregate the system from top to bottom, many, such as Thurgood
Marshall, believed that the difference between the strategies was more form than substance,
because "relief in the form of equalization of facilities was subsumed under the request for an
end to discrimination." TUSHNET,supra, at o18.
199Cf. Derrick A. Bell, School Litigation Strategies for the 197o's: New Phases in the
Continuing Quest for Quality Schools, 1970 Wis. L. REV. 257, 291-92 (noting that separate
facilities are likely to be unequal because prejudiced school authorities may be unwilling to
provide resources to minority schools).
200 There is some evidence to suggest that the Brown I decision was in part a reaction to
the Court's reluctance to involve itself in a seemingly endless inquiry into whether a particular
set of circumstances was "equal." The cases that preceded Brown I, brought as part of the
NAACP's legal offensive against Plessy's endorsement of race segregation, sought to test the
limits of Plessy's sanction of "separate but equal." That is, if under Plessy, equal protection
required separate but equal facilities, then if there were no equal or parallel facilities, the court
would be required to order the state to act to rectify the inequality. See LOFGREN,supra note
173, at 201 (citing the use of Plessy "to complicate and make more costly the enforcement of
race separation"). Although this approach appeared to be a litigation strategy within the
framework of race segregation, in fact, the limits of the meaning of equality were being tested.
201Brown v. Board of Educ. (Brown I), 347 U.S. 483, 495 (I954).
I752 [Vol. IO6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
Brown I's dialectical contradiction was that it dismantled an old
form of whiteness as property while simultaneously permitting its
reemergence in a more subtle form. White privilege accorded as a
legal right was rejected, but de facto white privilege not mandated
by law remained unaddressed. In failing to clearly expose the real
inequities produced by segregation, the status quo of substantive disadvantage
was ratified as an accepted and acceptable base line - a
neutral state operating to the disadvantage of Blacks long after de
jure segregation had ceased to do so.202 In accepting substantial
inequality as a neutral base line, a new form of whiteness as property
was condoned. Material inequities between Blacks and whites - the
product of systematic past and current, formal and informal, mechanisms
of racial subordination - became the norm. Brown disregarded
immediate associational preferences of whites, but sheltered and protected
their expectations of continued race-based privilege. Redressing
the substantive inequalities in resources, power, and ultimately, educational
opportunity that were the product of legislated race segregation
was left for another day, as yet not arrived.203 Although the
Court might legitimately retreat from the task of articulating a remedy
that might too deeply involve the judiciary in the operation of public
schools, it is unacceptable for the Court to ignore the infringement or
violation of a constitutionally protected right because of concerns
about the proper institutional role of the judiciary. As Laurence Tribe
notes, "[t]here is a very real difference between saying 'There is a
violation here but institutional considerations prevent us from providing
a remedy,' and saying 'There is no violation."'204 Similarly, when
202As Professor Bell notes ironically:
[Wlhile we spoke and thought in an atmosphere of 'rights and justice,' our opponents
had their eyes on the economic benefits and power relationships all the time. And that
difference in priorities meant that the price of black progress was benefits to the other
side, benefits that tokenized our gains and sometimes strengthened the relative advantages
whites held over us.
BELL,supra note 3I, at io8.
203The underfunding of schools in Black districts continues, although no longer based on
explicitly racial criteria. In part, these funding inequities are the result of property tax-based
funding schemes for public schools that operate to the disadvantage of all poor students. But
because of the convergence of housing and employment discrimination, and the lack of political
power of poor school districts, Blacks disproportionately experience "the racist impact of less
than equal funding to poor school districts." GERTRUDEEZORSKY,RACISMANDJUSTICE:THE
CASE FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION 19 n.20 (I99I); see JONATHAN KOZOL,SAVAGEINEQUALITIES:
CHILDRENIN AMERICA'SSCHOOLSpassim (I991) (exposing the two-tier system of educational
funding that results in present-day segregated and unequal public school systems).
204LAURENCEH. TRIBE,AMERICANCONSTITUTIONALLAW1512 (I988). Tribe concludes
that the Court's refusal to find a constitutional wrong that arises from regulations that have a
racially discriminatory impact in the absence of discriminatory intent is a reservation about the
institutional capacity of the Court to articulate a remedy, masquerading as a question about the
I993] I753
HARVARD LAWREVIEW [Vol. IO6:I707
Brown declined to acknowledge the problem of substantive and de
facto inequities in the education system, it failed to identify clearly
the harm, and instead, set the matter of remediation on a defective
foundation.
C. Brown II
The Court's remedial approach in Brown 11205also can be seen as
an example of judicial weakness and undue deference to white concerns;
but more fundamentally, Brown II recognized the property
interest in whiteness by leaving intact the ability of whites to control,
manage, postpone, and if necessary, thwart change. In Brown II,
which concerned the question of the appropriate relief to be granted,
the Court remanded the cases to the lower courts in the various
jurisdictions to consider the particular conditions present in each area
and to articulate an appropriate approach to achieving desegregation
"with all deliberate speed."206 The Court implicitly assumed that the
problem of inequality would be eradicated by desegregation. If all
students were assigned to schools on a non-racial basis, no school
would be identifiable by race, and therefore neither acute discrimination
in resource allocation nor gross disparities in outcomes or results
would likely occur, or at least so the theory went.
Integration, however, at least in the way it is currently structured
and implemented, has not led to the goal sought by Blacks: a quality
education for Black children or, at least, minimum equity.207 Elimiexistence
of a constitutional violation. See id. at I502-11 (discussing Washington v. Davis, 426
U.S. 229 (1976), in which the Court rejected an Equal Protection challenge to a screening test
brought by unsuccessful Black applicants for police department positions because a discriminatory
intent on the part of the department was not shown, see id. at 240). Tribe notes:
The Supreme Court may be forgiven for being taken aback by [the] prospect [of becoming
deeply involved in the operation of local government]; the institutional concerns about
such a role for the judiciary are serious and legitimate. But the Court may not be
forgiven for the way it has elided the problem rather than facing up to it. The proper
course would have been to confront the remedial challenge head on: either grit the teeth
and get to work fixing the inequality, no matter what it takes, or swallow hard and
acknowledge that the constitutional wrong cannot be judicially put right. . . . [When the
Court does neither] ... the actual circumstances of racial disadvantage - unemployment,
inadequate education, poverty, and political powerlessness - are to be regarded as mere
unfortunate conditions, not as consequences of racial discrimination. Those conditions
are then readily rationalized ....
Id. at 1512 (footnotes omitted).
205 Brown v. Board of Educ. (Brown II), 349 U.S. 294 (I955).
206Id. at 301.
207The aftermath of Brown I and thirty years of school desegregation litigation demonstrates
that Brown's assumption that pupil integration would eliminate racial separation overlooked the
critical issue of power and the influence of facially-neutral government policies on the success
of desegregation. Desegregated schools are rare, particularly in the urban context, because
patterns of residential segregation - fostered by private lending and construction practices and
public land use and development policy - gradually became greater determinants of de facto
racial segregation in schools than any explicit, racially discriminatorystudent assignment policies.
I754
1993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY I755
nating the subordination of the intended beneficiaries of the Brown
decision - Black children - would have required more expansive
remedies.208 Selecting desegregation as the sole remedy was the consequence
of defining the injury solely as racial separation.
Moreover, Brown II's order to desegregate with all deliberate speed
was so open-ended that it engendered increasingly protracted battles
with social and political forces that defiantly resisted court-ordered
integration.209 Robert Carter, former General Counsel of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, noted that Brown
II represented a break with a tradition in constitutional law that
constitutionally protected rights were regarded as "personaland present,"
the violation of which required immediate remediation.210 Thus,
when Brown II directed the schools to desegregate "with all deliberate
speed" rather than immediately, it articulated a new and heretofore
unknown approach to rectifying violations of constitutional rights an
approach that invited defiance and delay.211 It is clear that the
Integration of public school systems became even less attainable by reason of the physical exodus
of white students and their families from school districts that were under a mandate to desegregate.
See Bell, supra note 195, at 5I8.
208 In "Chronicle of the Sacrificed Black Schoolchildren," a chapter in Derrick Bell's 1987
book And We Are Not Saved, BELL, supra note 31, Geneva Crenshaw, the storyteller who
illuminates many contradictions in existing doctrine pertaining to race and rights, chides Professor
Bell for not advocating a better desegregation policy:
For example - if we recognize that the real motivation for segregation was white
domination of public education - suppose the Court had issued the following orders:
I. Even though we encourage voluntary desegregation, we will not order racially
integrated assignments of students or staff for ten years.
2. Even though "separate but equal" no longer meets the constitutional equal-protection
standard, we will require immediate equalization of all facilities and resources.
3. Blacks must be represented on school boards and other policy-making bodies in
proportions equal to those of black students in each school district.
The third point would have been intended to give Blacks meaningful access to decisionmaking
- a prerequisite to full equality still unattained in many predominately Black
school systems.
BELL, supra note 31, at 112.
209 "The Supreme Court endorsed a formula of gradual desegregation that provided the
opportunity for massive resistance in the Deep South and for token desegregation elsewhere."
Tushnet, supra note I95, at 1867. Following Brown, from the late I950s through the midI960s,
white opposition to school integration was fierce and often violent. Notwithstanding the
existence of court orders mandating the admission of Black students and the presence of federal
marshals, state governors stood in the doorways of state universities to obstruct school desegregation.
Public school systems in the South shut down rather than admit Black students.
Students and their families were terrorized and beaten. See, e.g., United States v. Farrar, 414
F.2d 936, 939-42 (5th Cir. I969); United States v. Crenshaw County Unit of The United Klans
of Am., 290 F. Supp. 181, I83 (M.D. Ala. I968); Bullock v. United States, 265 F.2d 683, 688
(6th Cir.), cert. denied, 360 U.S. 909 (I959).
210Robert L. Carter, The Warren Court and Desegregation, 67 MICH. L. REV. 237, 243
(1968).
211 As this delay in implementing school desegregation stretched over the years, the Court
grew increasingly impatient with the subterfuge and insubordination of school officials. See
HARVARD LAW REVIEW [Vol. o06:I707
nature of the injury to Black children was not what defined the scope
of the remedy; rather, the level of white resistance dictated the parameters
of the remedy.212 Although the Court was unwilling to give
official sanction to legalized race segregation and thus required an end
to "separate but equal," it sought to do so in a way that would not
radically disturb the settled expectations of whites that their interests
- particularly the relative privilege accorded by their whiteness
would not be violated.
D. Brown's Mixed Legacy
Milliken v. Bradley213marks the logical consequence of Brown's
ambivalence on the question of the state's responsibilityto give content
to the mandate of equality. Because the Milliken Court saw no
evidence that suburban school districts had directly caused or substantially
contributed to the segregation of Detroit's school system, it
rejected, by a five to four vote, an interdistrict, metropolitan desegregation
plan, stating that it would exceed the permitted boundaries
of judicial action.214 The majority did not contest the factual determination
that the government at all levels had "participate[d]in the
maintenance" of racially discriminatory policies in the Detroit school
system,215nor did it reject the findings of the court below that private
sectors such as real estate and lending institutions had engaged in
e.g., Bradley v. School Bd., 382 U.S. 103, 105 (1965) (per curiam) ("Delays in desegregating
school systems are no longer tolerable.");Griffin v. County Sch. Bd., 377 U.S. 218, 234 (1964)
(announcing that "the time for mere 'deliberate speed' had run out"). However, by this time,
the patterns of official segregation implemented through overt governmental action became less
important than patterns of de facto segregation maintained by economics and governmental
inaction. Hence, thirty-six years after Brown I and II, federal court intervention in local school
systems has produced decidedly mixed results. There is a consensus among the white polity
that, despite the fact that many school systems are as segregated now as they were when Brown
I and II were decided, the federal courts do not have an unlimited license nor indeterminate
time to achieve an unattainable goal, given the patterns of residential segregation. Recent
Supreme Court decisions suggest that the mandate to desegregate with all deliberate speed is
now read to require not only the school boards' implementation of integration, but also a
temporal constraint on the federal courts' efforts to ensure integration as well. In Board of
Educ. v. Dowell, iii S. Ct. 630 (I991), the Court considered a challenge brought by the
Oklahoma City School Board to the continuation of an injunction imposed in a school desegregation
case. The majority opinion criticized the lower court's application of a standard for
modifying or dissolving an injunction as too strict because it "would condemn a school district,
once governed by a board which intentionally discriminated, to judicial tutelage for the indefinite
future," a result not required by the Equal Protection Clause. Id. at 638.
212
Although the Court insisted that the purpose of implementing the remedy "with all
deliberate speed" was to permit preparation for necessary administrative changes, examination
of the historical record clearly indicates that the purpose of the formula was to allow "compliance
on terms that the white South could accept." Carter, supra note 21o, at 243.
213 418 U.S. 77 (I974).
214 See id. at 745.
215 Id. at 746.
I756
WHITENESSAS PROPERTY
exclusionary practices that created residential segregation and reinforced
school segregation.216 It reinterpreted all of these facts, however,
to be neutral and, therefore, an inadequate predicate for intervention
in an unfortunate but unrectifiable inequity.217 In effect, the
protection of the expectations of the local school boards that the de
facto segregation resulting from exogenous factors would be left undisturbed
was determined to be of greater significance than any constitutional
injury caused by the state.218 Like the substantive inequality
of power and resources in Brown, the white privilege and Black
subordination fostered by systems of interlocking private and public
power was left intact by Milliken.
Thus, we are left with Brown's mixed legacy: Brown held that the
Constitution would not countenance legalized racial separation, but
Brown did not address the government's responsibility to eradicate
inequalities in resource allocation either in public education or other
public services, let alone to intervene in inequities in the private
domain, all of which are, in significant measure, the result of white
domination. In attempting to remedy state-mandated racial separation
by the simple prescription of desegregation, the Brown decisions finessed
the question of what to do about the inequality produced by
state and private policy and practice. Brown modified Plessy's interpretation
of the Equal Protection Clause and accommodated both
Blacks' claims for "equality under law" and the global interests of
white ruling elites.219 What remained consistent was the perpetuation
of institutional privilege under a standard of legal equality. In the
foreground was the change of formal societal rules; in the background
was the "natural"fact of white privilege that dictated the pace and
course of any moderating change. What remained in revised and
reconstituted form was whiteness as property.
IV. THE PERSISTENCEOF WHITENESSAS PROPERTY
In the modern period, neither the problems attendant to assigning
racial identities nor those accompanying the recognition of whiteness
have disappeared.220 Nor has whiteness as property. Whiteness as
216See id. at 724.
217See id. at 746-47. As Justice Douglas's dissent notes, the "decision . . . means that there
is no violation of the Equal Protection Clause though the schools are segregated by race and
though the black schools are not only 'separate' but 'inferior.'" Id. at 761 (Douglas, J., dis-
senting).
218 See id. at 746-47.
219 See Bell, supra note 195, at 524-25.
220 Doe v. State, 479 So.2d 369 (La. App. 4th Cir. i985), is a prime example. Before this
decision, the Doe plaintiffs had sued to change the racial classification of their parents on their
birth certificate from "colored"to white. See id. at 37I. Although by upbringing, experience,
and appearance they were white, the court noted that, if the plaintiffs had standing, relief
I993] I757
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
property continues to perpetuate racial subordination through the
courts' definitions of group identity and through the courts' discourse
and doctrine on affirmative action. The exclusion of subordinated
"others"was and remains a central part of the property interest in
whiteness and, indeed, is part of the protection that the court extends
to whites' settled expectations of continued privilege.
The essential character of whiteness as property remains manifest
in two critical areas of the law and, as in the past, operates to oppress
Native Americans and Blacks in similar ways, although in different
arenas. This Part first examines the persistence of whiteness as valued
social identity; then exposes whiteness as property in the law's treatment
of the question of group identity, as the case of the Mashpee
Indians illustrates; and finally, exposes the presence of whiteness as
property in affirmative action doctrine.
A. The Persistence of Whiteness as Valued Social Identity
Even as the capacity of whiteness to deliver is arguably diminished
by the elimination of rigid racial stratifications, whiteness continues
to be perceived as materially significant. Because real power and
wealth never have been accessible to more than a narrowly defined
ruling elite, for many whites the benefits of whiteness as property, in
the absence of legislated privilege, may have been reduced to a claim
of relative privilege only in comparison to people of color.221 Nevertheless,
whiteness retains its value as a "consolationprize":it does not
mean that all whites will win, but simply that they will not lose,222
would be denied because of the plaintiffs' failure to establish that their grandparents had been
incorrectly classified. A subsequent Fourteenth Amendment challenge to the I970 Louisiana
racial classification law was rejected by both the trial and appellate courts on the ground that
the statute had been held constitutional in a prior decision of the Louisiana Supreme Court.
See State ex. rel. Plaia v. Louisiana State Bd. of Health, 296 So.2d 809, 810 (La. I974). The
statute was repealed in I983, and the Doe plaintiffs again brought a mandamus action that was
again rejected by the trial court. See Doe, 479 So.2d at 371. On appeal, the state appellate
court concluded that "the very concept of the racial classification of individuals, as opposed to
that of a group, is scientifically insupportable . . . [because] [i]ndividual racial designations are
purely social and cultural perceptions." Id. Louisiana's racial classification system was vigorously
critiqued on constitutional grounds. See Diamond & Cottrol, supra note 20, at 278-85.
221See Letter from Leland Ware, Professor of Law, St. Louis University School of Law, to
Cheryl I. Harris, Assistant Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law 4 (Mar. 23, I992)
(on file at the Harvard Law School Library) [hereinafterWare, Letter].
222 HACKER, supra note I55, at 29. Andrew Hacker says that given the fierceness of
competition in American society, white America
cannot guarantee full security to every member of its own race. Still, while some of its
members may fail, there is a limit to how far they can fall. . . . [N]o matter to what
depths one descends, no white person can ever become black. As James Baldwin has
pointed out, white people need the presence of black people as a reminder of what
providence has spared them from becoming.
Id. at 29-30.
1758 [Vol. Io6:1707
I993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY I759
if losing is defined as being on the bottom of the social and economic
hierarchy - the position to which Blacks have been consigned.
Andrew Hacker, in his I992 book Two Nations,223 recounts the
results of a recent exercise that probed the value of whiteness according
to the perceptions of whites. The study asked a group of white
students how much money they would seek if they were changed from
white to Black. "Most seemed to feel that it would not be out of
place to ask for $50 million, or $i million for each coming black
year."224 Whether this figure represents an accurate amortization of
the societal cost of being Black in the United States, it is clear that
whiteness is still perceived to be valuable. The wages of whiteness
are available to all whites regardless of class position, even to those
whites who are without power, money, or influence. Whiteness, the
characteristic that distinguishes them from Blacks, serves as compensation
even to those who lack material wealth. It is the relative
political advantages extended to whites, rather than actual economic
gains, that are crucial to white workers. Thus, as Kimberle Crenshaw
points out, whites have an actual stake in racism.225 Because Blacks
are held to be inferior, although no longer on the basis of science as
antecedent determinant, but by virtue of their position at the bottom,
223HACKER,supra note I55.
224 Id. at 32. Hacker reports these results from white students who were presented with the
following parable:
THE VISIT
You will be visited tonight by an official you have never met. He begins by telling
you that he is extremely embarrassed. The organization he represents has made a
mistake, something that hardly every happens.
According to their records . . . you were to have been born black: to another set of
parents, far from where you were raised.
However, the rules being what they are, this error must be rectified, and as soon as
possible. So at midnight tonight, you will become black. And this will mean not simply
a darker skin, but the bodily and facial features associated with African ancestry. However,
inside you will be the person you always were. Your knowledge and ideas will
remain intact. But outwardly you will not be recognizable to anyone you now know.
Your visitor emphasizes that being born to the wrong parents was in no way your
fault. Consequently, his organization is prepared to offer you some reasonable recompense.
Would you, he asks, care to name a sum of money you might consider appropriate?
. . . [The] records show you are scheduled to live another fifty years - as a black
man or woman in America.
How much financial recompense would you request?
Id. at 31-32. Hacker further argues that evidence of the continued value of whiteness is
manifested in the fact that no white person would be willing to trade places with an even more
successful black person:
All white Americans realize that their skin comprises an inestimable asset. ... Its value
persists not because a white appearance automatically brings success and status ....
What it does ensure is that you will not be regarded as black, a security which is worth
so much that no one who has it has ever given it away.
Id. at 60.
225 See Crenshaw, supra note 3, at I38I.
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
it allows whites - all whites - to "include themselves in the dominant
circle. [Although most whites] hold no real power, [all can claim]
their privileged racial identity."226
White workers often identify primarily as white rather than as
workers because it is through their whiteness that they are afforded
access to a host of public, private, and psychological benefits.227 It
is through the concept of whiteness that class consciousness among
white workers is subordinated and attention is diverted from class
oppression.228
Although dominant societal norms have embraced the idea of fairness
and nondiscrimination, removal of privilege and antisubordina-
226
Id.; see ROEDIGER, supra note I9, at 5 (describing the significance of whiteness to white
workers).
This argument is not to suggest that poverty does not exist among whites. It is evident,
however, that poverty is not proportionately represented across all racial groups. Blacks are
and have been disproportionately affected by poverty and all its attendant social ills, such as
inadequate housing, health care, and education. The relative advantage accorded to whites
because of white supremacy is what I am identifying as a core component of "whiteness." This
advantage does not mean that no whites will be poor, but that the poor will be disproportionately
Black. See BUREAUOF THE CENSUS,U.S. DEP'T OF COMMERCE,SERIESP-6o, No. I8I,
POVERTYIN THEUNITEDSTATES:I991, at x (1992) [hereinafterCENSUS](reportingthat the
poverty rate of whites, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics is II.3%, 32.7%, I3.8%, and 28.7%,
respectively).
227 These benefits may be difficult to discern, yet they often remain crucial. Albert Memmi's
classic indictment of French colonialism in pre-independence Algeria offers invaluable insight
into the benefits of racism to the working or lower class, notwithstanding the nearly equivalent
positions of need of lower class whites and Blacks. He suggests that the problem is not merely
gullibility or illusion:
If the small colonizer defends the colonial system so vigorously, it is because he benefits
from it to some extent. His gullibility lies in the fact that to protect his very limited
interests, he protects other infinitely more important ones, of which he is, incidentally,
the victim. But, though dupe and victim, he also gets his share.
[P]rivilege is something relative. To different degrees every colonizer is privileged, at
least comparatively so, ultimately to the detriment of the colonized. If the privileges of
the masters of colonization are striking, the lesser privileges of the small colonizer, even
the smallest, are very numerous. Every act of his daily life places him in a relationship
with the colonized, and with each act his fundamental advantage is demonstrated.
. . . From the time of his birth, he possesses a qualification independent of his
personal merits or his actual class.
ALBERT MEMMI, THE COLONIZERAND THE COLONIZED I -I2 (Howard Greenfield trans.,
I965).
228 Social scientists have noted this phenomenon as part of the social dynamic of the white
working class for some time:
It is through differential access to social institutions and political power that the bourgeoisie
binds white workers to it in "whiteness."
. .. [T]o the extent that white workers identify with "whiteness,""acentral component
of Anglo-American bourgeois consciousness . .. ," and not with their proletarian status
as workers, they will remain supporters and defenders of relative privileges for whites as
extended by capital.
Hermon George, Jr., Black America, the "Underclass"and the Subordination Process, BLACK
SCHOLAR,May/JuneI988, at 44, 49-50 (quotingROXANNEMITCHELL& FRANKWEISS, A
HOUSE DIVIDED: LABORAND WHITE SUPREMACY84 (198I)).
I760 [Vol. Io6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
tion principles are actively rejected or at best ambiguously received
because expectations of white privilege are bound up with what is
considered essential for self-realization. Among whites, the idea persists
that their whiteness is meaningful.229 Whiteness is an aspect of
racial identity230 surely, but it is much more; it remains a concept
based on relations of power, a social construct predicated on white
dominance and Black subordination.
B. Subordination Through Denial of Group Identity
Whiteness as property is also constituted through the reification of
expectations in the continued right of white-dominated institutions to
control the legal meaning of group identity. This reification manifests
itself in the law's dialectical misuse of the concept of group identity
as it pertains to racially subordinated peoples. The law has recognized
and codified racial group identity as an instrumentality of exclusion
and exploitation; however, it has refused to recognize group identity
when asserted by racially oppressed groups as a basis for affirming or
claiming rights.231 The law's approach to group identity reproduces
subordination, in the past through "race-ing"a group - that is, by
assigning a racial identity that equated with inferior status, and in
the present by erasing racial group identity.
In part, the law's denial of the existence of racial groups is predicated
not only on the rejection of the ongoing presence of the past,232
but is also grounded on a basic tenet of liberalism - that constitutional
protections inhere in individuals, not groups.233 As informed
by the Lockean notion of the social contract, the autonomous, freewill
of the individual is central. Indeed, it is the individual who, in
229Roediger describes this phenomenon as the "white problem." ROEDIGER,supra note I9,
at 6.
230 "Racial identities are not only black, Latino, Asian, Native American, and so on; they
are also white. To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it." bell
hooks, Representing Whiteness: Seeing Wings of Desire, ZETA, Mar. I989, at 39 (citation
omitted).
231 "Notably in the context of the affirmative action debate, some philosophers and policymakers
even refuse to acknowledge the reality of social groups, a denial that often reinforces
group oppressions." IRISM. YOUNG,JUSTICEANDTHEPOLITICSOFDIFFERENCE9 (1990).
232 According to Aviam Soifer, in many ways, particularly as it pertains to racial subordination,
the Supreme Court has decided that history has stopped. See Aviam Soifer, On Being
Overly Discrete and Insular: Involuntary Groups and the Anglo-AmericanJudicial Tradition,
48 WASH.& LEE L. REV. 38I, passim (I99I).
233 See William B. Reynolds, Individualism vs. Group Rights: The Legacy of Brown, 93
YALEL.J. 983, 984 (1984) (citing the remarks of Professor Chester Finn that civil rights "inhere
in individuals, not in groups"). As Fiss notes, the strong appeal of the antidiscrimination
principle as the mediating principle that informs the Equal Protection Clause is grounded in its
tie to individualism, "yield[ing] a highly individualized conception of rights." Owen M. Fiss,
Groups and the Equal Protection Clause, 5 PHIL.& PUB. AFF. 107, 127 (I976). Thus, it is the
individual who lays claim to constitutionally protected rights. See id.
I76II993]
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
concert with other individuals, elects to enter into political society234
and to form a state of limited powers. This philosophical view of
society is closely aligned with the antidiscrimination principle - the
idea being that equality mandates only the equal treatment of individuals
under the law.235 Within this framework, the idea of the
social group has no place.236
Although the law's determination of any "fact,"including that of
group identity, is not infinitely flexible, its studied ignorance of the
issue of racial group identity insures wrong results by assuming a
pseudo-objective posture that does not permit it to hear the complex
dialogue concerning the identity question, particularly as it pertains
to historically dominated groups.
Instead, the law holds to the basic premise that definition from
above can be fair to those below, that beneficiaries of racially conferred
privilege have the right to establish norms for those who have
historically been oppressed pursuant to those norms, and that race is
not historically contingent. Although the substance of race definitions
has changed, what persists is the expectation of white-controlled institutions
in the continued right to determine meaning - the reified
privilege of power - that reconstitutes the property interest in whiteness
in contemporary form.
234See LOCKE,supra note 46, atI54-64; see also Steven J. Heyman, The First Duty of
Government:Protection, Liberty and the Fourteenth Amendment, 41 DUKEL.J. 507, 514 (I99I)
(noting that Locke based the right of protection "on the consent of free individuals to enter
society and establish government for the preservation of their natural rights").
235See Fiss, supra note 233, at 123 (1976) (noting that "the antidiscrimination principle
would seem individualistic in a negative sense - it is not in any way dependent on a recognition
of social classes or groups," although he argues that "the recognition and protection of social
groups may be required to determine which state purposes are legitimate .. .").
236"Political philosophy typically has no place for a specific concept of the social group."
YOUNG, supra note 231, at 43. Many scholars have vigorously opposed this notion. See, e.g.,
TRIBE, supra note 204, at 514-21 (arguingthat the appropriateview of constitutional guarantees
of equal protection is that they are animated by an antisubjugation principle that requires that
actions be evaluated not by the intent of the actors, but by the impact on members of protected
groups); Burke Marshall, A Comment on the Non-discrimination Principle in a "Nation of
Minorities," 93 YALE L.J. ioo6, ioo6 (I984) (arguing that discrimination and subordination
were imposed not against individuals, but against a people, so that the remedy "has to correct
and cure and compensate for the discrimination against the people and not just the discrimination
against the identifiable persons").
Although the existence and definition of a social group is complex, it is possible to articulate
a coherent concept of a social group. For example, Iris Marion Young defines a social group
as
a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms,
practices, or way of life. . .. Groups are an expression of social relations; a group exists
only in relation to at least one other group. Group identification arises . . . in the
encounter and interaction between social collectivities that experience some differences in
their way of life and forms of association, even if they also regardthemselves as belonging
to the same society.
YOUNG, supra note 231, at 43. However, groups do not have "substantiveessence." Id. at 47.
Rather, they are "cross-cutting, fluid, and shifting." Id. at 48.
I762 [Vol. IO6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
In undertaking any definition of race as group identity, there are
implicit and explicit normative underpinnings that must be taken into
account. The "riddle of identity" is not answered by a "search for
essences" or essential discoverable truth, nor by a search for mere
"descriptions and re-descriptions."237 Instead, when handling the
complex issue of group identity, we should look to "purposes and
effects, consequences and functions."238 The questions pertaining to
definitions of race then are not principally biological or genetic, but
social and political: what must be addressed is who is defining, how
is the definition constructed, and why is the definition being propounded.239
Because definition is so often a central part of domination,
critical thinking about these issues must precede and adjoin any
definition. The law has not attended to these questions. Instead,
237Martha Minow, Identities, 3 YALEJ.L. & HUMAN.97, 97, I28 (i99I).
238 Id. at 97.
239In the modern South African context, evolution of the terms "Black" and "African"
illustrate the possible interplay between definitions of identity and liberation. A central feature
of apartheid law was the Population Registration Act that empowered the Ministry of the
Interior to register the entire South African population, to classify each individual as a "white,"
"coloured," or "Black." Population Registration Act No. 30 of I950, ? I(I) (as amended by
Population Registration Act No. io6 of 1969, ? i(a) (S. Afr.)). The definition, based on criteria
such as appearance, social acceptance, and descent, produced predictably freakish and contradictory
results, with siblings and parents being classified differently. See STUDYCOMM'NON
U.S. POLICYTOWARDSOUTHERNAFRICA,SOUTHAFRICA:TIMERUNNINGOUT48-49 (I98I)
[hereinafter TIMERUNNINGOUT].
In opposition to the categories propounded by the regime, during the 1970S different definitions
of race emerged in the context of the struggle against the apartheid regime. "Black"was
defined by the Black Consciousness Movement, led by Steven Biko, to mean "[a]llthose people
who by law or tradition have been politically, socially or economically exploited against [sic] as
a group in South African Society and who identify themselves as a unit in the struggle for
liberation." Ziyad Motala, The Re-definition of "Black"in the South African Liberation Struggle
6 (unpublished manuscript, on file at the Harvard Law School Library); see TIME RUNNING
OUT, supra, at I77.
Sometime, too, in the I96os or I970s, the African National Congress, the oldest and largest
organized manifestation of the liberation movement, began using the term "African"for all those
persons not of European origin. The word "African"thus subsumed the official categories of
Bantu, Coloureds, and Indians. Subsequent references to Coloureds often appeared as "socalled
'Coloureds."' See IMMANUELWALLERSTEIN,The Construction of Peoplehood, in RACE
NATIONANDCLASS:AMBIGUOUSIDENTITIES71, 72-73 (Etienne Balibar & Immanuel Wallerstein
eds., 1991).
This comparison reveals the rich, complex, and ultimately organic nature of group selfidentity.
Both the alternative usage of "Black"and "African"are fed by the impulse of oppressed
people to deny legitimacy to categories propounded by their oppressors. It is the rejection of
the right to control definitions of self and group identity. Thus, neither of these redefinitions
situate around the axis of biological referents inherent in apartheid legislation. Instead, they
implicitly or explicitly substitute the experience of oppression as the principal criterion and
confront the problem of domination and subordination. In contrast to government-imposed
classifications, these definitions are propounded by people exploited by apartheid, are arrived at
through struggle, and are put forward to actively resist the source of their oppression, thus
addressing the critical definitional issues of who, how, and why.
1763I993]
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
identity of "the other" is still objectified, the complex, negotiated
quality of identity is ignored, and the impact of inequitable power on
identity is masked.240 These problems are illustrated in the land claim
suit brought by the Mashpee, a Massachusetts Indian tribe.241
In Mashpee Tribe v. Town of Mashpee,242the Mashpee sued to
recover land that several Indians had conveyed to non-Indians in
violation of a statute that barred alienation of tribal land to nonIndians
without the approval of the federal government.243 In order
to recover possession of the land, the Mashpee were requiredto prove
that they were a tribe at the time of the conveyance.244 Although the
trial judge admitted to some preliminary confusion about the appropriate
definition of "tribe,"245he ultimately accepted the standard
articulated in prior case law that defined tribe as "a body of Indians
of the same or similar race, united in a community under one leadership
or government, and inhabiting a particular though sometimes
ill-defined territory."246The Mashpee were held not to be a tribe at
the time the suit was filed, so that their claim to land rights based on
group identity were rejected.247
The Mashpee's experience was filtered, sifted, and ultimately rendered
incoherent through this externally constituted definition of tribe
that incorporated outside criteria regarding race, leadership, territory,
and community.248 The fact that the Mashpee had intermingled with
Europeans, runaway slaves, and other Indian tribes signified to the
jury and to the court that they had lost their tribal identity.249
240As Martha Minow notes:
If lawyers and judges treat identity as something discoverable rather than forged or
invented, they hide the latitude for choice and struggle over identity. At the same time
they exercise their own power to make those choices .... The use of a specific notion
of identity to resolve a legal dispute can obscure the complexity of lived experiences while
imposing the force of the state behind the selected notion of identity.
Minow, supra note 237, at III.
241Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun offer a sensitive interpretation of the case as an
exploration of the problems of meaning, telling, and legal translation within a context of white
domination and Native American subordination. See Gerald Torres & Kathryn Milun, Translating
Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case, I990 DUKE L.J. 625,
passim.
242447 F. Supp. 940 (D. Mass. 1978).
243See id. at 946.
244See id. at 943.
245See id. at 949.
246Montoya v. United States, I80 U.S. 26I, 266 (I90o); accord Mashpee v. New Seabury
Corp., 427 F. Supp. 899, 902 (Mass. I977).
247See Mashpee, 447 F. Supp. at 950.
248See Torres & Milun, supra note 241, at 634-35 & n.3I.
249See id. at 638-39. It was not the facts but the meaning of the facts that was contested.
See id. at 64I. A meaning was constructed in which the Mashpees had no voice. Torres and
Milun say: "The tragedy of power was manifest in the legally mute and invisible culture of
1764 [Vol. Io6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
But for the Mashpee, blood was not the measure of identity: their
identity as a group was manifested for centuries by their continued
relationship to the land of the Mashpee; their consciousness and embrace
of difference, even when it was against their interest; and, their
awareness and preservation of cultural traditions.250 Nevertheless,
under the court's standard, the tribe was "incapable of legal selfdefinition."251
Fundamentally, then, the external imposition of definition
maintained the social equilibrium that was severely challenged
by the Mashpee land claims.
The Mashpee case presents new variations on old themes of race
and property. Previous reified definitions of race compelled abandonment
of racial identity in exchange for economic and social privilege.252
Under the operative racial hierarchy, passing is the ultimate
assimilationist move - the submergence of a subordinate cultural
identity in favor of dominant identity, assumed to achieve better
societal fit within prevailing norms.253 The modern definition of
"tribe"achieved similar results by misinterpreting the Mashpee's adaptation
to be assimilation. The Mashpee absorbed and managed,
rather than rejected and suppressed, outsiders; yet the court erased
their identity, assuming that, by virtue of intermingling with other
races, the Mashpee's identity as a people had been subsumed. The
Mashpee were not "passing," but were legally determined to have
"passed" - no longer to have distinct identity. This erasure was
predicated on the assumption that what is done from necessity under
conditions of established hierarchies of domination and subordination
is a voluntary surrender for gain.254
Beyond the immediate outcome of the case lies the deeper problem
posed by the hierarchy of the rules themselves and the continued
those Mashpee Indians who stood before the court trying to prove that they existed." Id, at
649.
250See Minow, supra note 237, at II4.
251 Torres & Milun, supra note 241, at 655.
252 These privileges were the motivating forces behind my grandmother'sdecision to "pass."
See supra pp. 1710-12.
253Here again Memmi describes one of the possible responses of an oppressed people - the
"colonized"in Memmi's context - that is strikingly similar to what has been described in the
U.S. context as passing:
The first attempt of the colonized is to change his condition by changing his skin. There
is a tempting model very close at hand - the colonizer. The latter suffers from none of
his deficiencies, has all rights, enjoys every possession and benefits from every
prestige. . . . The first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to that splendid
model and to resemble him to the point of disappearing into him.
MEMMI,supra note 227, at 120. The American edition of this book is dedicated to "theAmerican
Negro, also colonized." Id. at v.
254As Torres and Milun note, "[t]hatinterpretation [of adaptation as surrender of identity]
incorporatesa dominant motif in the theory and practice of modern American pluralism. Ethnic
distinctiveness often must be sacrificed in exchange for social and economic security." Torres &
Milun, supra note 24I, at 651 (footnote omitted).
1765I993]
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
retention by white-controlled institutions of exclusive control over
definitions as they pertain to the identity and history of dominated
peoples. Although the law will always represent the exercise of state
power in enforcing its choices, the violence done to the Mashpee and
other oppressed groups results from the law's refusal to acknowledge
the negotiated quality of identity. Whiteness as property assumes the
form of the exclusive right to determine rules; it asserts that, against
a framework of racial dominance and unequal power, fairness can
result from a property rule, or indeed any other rule, that imposes an
entirely externally constituted definition of group identity.255 Reality
belies this presumption. In Plessy, the Court affirmed the right of
the state to define who was white,256 obliterating aspects of social
acceptance and self-identification as sources of validation and identity.
The Mashpee were similarly divested of their identity through the
state's exclusive retention of control over meaning in ways that reinforced
group oppression. When group identity is a predicate for exclusion
or disadvantage, the law has acknowledged it; when it is a
predicate for resistance or a claim of right to be free from subordination,
the law determines it to be illusory. This determinist approach
to group identity reproduces racial subordination and reaffirmswhiteness
as property.
C. Subjugation ThroughAffirmativeAction Doctrine
The assumption that whiteness is a property interest entitled to
protection is an idea born of systematic white supremacy and nurtured
over the years, not only by the law of slavery and "Jim Crow," but
also by the more recent decisions and rationales of the Supreme Court
concerning affirmative action. In examining both the nature of the
affirmative action debate and the legal analysis applied in three Supreme
Court cases involving affirmative action - Regents of University
of California v. Bakke,257City of Richmond v. J.A. CrosonCo.,258
and Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education,259 it is evident that the
protection of the property interest in whiteness still lies at the core of
judicial and popular reasoning.
Affirmative action remains a wellspring of contention.260 If anything,
the tone of the debate has sharpened since affirmative action
255See Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 552 (I896).
256See id. at 552.
257438 U.S. 265 (1978).
258488 U.S. 469 (I989).
259467 U.S. 267 (1986).
260Hacker says that affirmative action has become "anepithet for our time." HACKER, supra
note I55, at 1x8. The debate in the legal arena has been active. CompareRichard A. Posner,
The DeFunis Case and the Constitutionality of Preferential Treatmentof Racial Minorities, 1974
SUP. CT. REV. I, 25 (arguing that all racial preferences should be held invalid per se) and
I766 [Vol. IO6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
programs were first introduced. The universal battle cry of the political
right is that affirmative action means "quotas"for Blacks, and is
an economic threat to whites.261 This equation, although advanced
most stridently by the right, has deep resonance among many whites
across the political spectrum. In according "preferences"for Blacks
and other oppressed groups, affirmative action is said to be "reverse
discrimination"against whites, depriving them of their right to equal
protection of the laws. Lawsuits brought by white males claiming
constitutional injury allegedly produced by affirmative action programs
have proliferated and have garnered support in many quarters.262
Whites concede that Blacks were oppressed by slavery and
by legalized race segregation and its aftermath, but protest that, notwithstanding
this legacy of deprivation and subjugation, it is unfair
to allocate the burden to innocent whites who were not involved in
acts of discrimination.263
The Supreme Court's rejection of affirmative action programs on
the grounds that race-conscious remedial measures are unconstitutional
under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment
- the very constitutional measure designed to guarantee equality
for Blacks - is based on the Court's chronic refusal to dismantle the
institutional protection of benefits for whites that have been based on
white supremacy and maintained at the expense of Blacks. As a
Antonin Scalia, The Disease as Cure, 1979 WASH. U. L.Q. 147, 153-54 (1979) ("[Affirmative
action] is based upon concepts of racial indebtedness and racial entitlement ratherthan individual
worth and individual need[; thus it] is racist.")with WILLIAMS,The ObligingShell, in ALCHEMY
OF RACEANDRIGHTS,supra note 5, at 121 ("[A]ffirmativeaction is an affirmation; the affirmative
act of hiring - or hearing - blacks is a recognition of individuality that includes blacks
as a social presence. ... It is an act of verification and vision, an act of social as well as
professional responsibility.") and Duncan Kennedy, A Cultural Pluralist Case for Affirmative
Action in Legal Academia, 1990 DUKEL.J. 705, 705, 707 (arguing for affirmative action in law
schools in order to respect the "democratic principle that people should be represented in
institutions that have power over their lives," and for the inclusion of minority scholars in order
to "improve the quality and increase the social value of legal scholarship").
261Hacker cites the campaign of Jesse Helms of North Carolina as another instance of the
deployment of political rhetoric to-"remind white people how much they have invested in
maintaining the status of their race." HACKER,supra note I55, at 203. The Helms campaign
commercial displayed a white working class man tearing up a rejection letter while the voiceover
said, "You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. . . . But it had to go to a
minority because of a racial quota." Id. at 202. See generally THOMASB. EDSALL& MARY
D. EDSALL, CHAIN REACTION 172-97 (I99I) (describing how the Republican Party refocused
the anger of the white working classes away from their declining economic position by indicting
the Democratic Party's pandering to "black"concerns at the expense of the rights of whites).
262See, e.g., Billish v. City of Chicago, 962 F.2d I269, 1272-73 (7th Cir. 1992); Baker v.
Elmwood Distrib. Inc., 940 F.2d 1013, 1015 (7th Cir. I991); United States v. City of Chicago,
870 F.2d 1256, 1257-58 (7th Cir. 1989).
263The "innocent persons" argument is at the heart of the legal and social dispute over
affirmative action. See RONALDJ. FISCUS,THE CONSTITUTIONALLOGICOF AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION7 (Stephen L. Wasby ed., 1992). This argument is considered in greater depth below
in Part IV at pages 1779-84.
I767I993]
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
result, the parameters of appropriate remedies are not dictated by the
scope of the injury to the subjugated, but by the extent of the infringement
on settled expectations of whites. These limits to remediation
are grounded in the perception that the existing order based
on white privilege is not only just "there,"264but also is a property
interest worthy of protection. Thus, under this assumption, it is not
only the interests of individual whites who challenge affirmativeaction
that are protected; the interests of whites as whites are enshrined and
institutionalized as a property interest that accords them a higher
status than any individual claim to relief.
This protection of the property interest in whiteness is achieved
by embracing the norm of colorblindness. Current legal definitions
interpret race as a factor disconnected from social identity and compel
abandonment of race-consciousness. Thus, at the very historical moment
that race is infused with a perspective that reshapes it, through
race-conscious remediation, into a potential weapon against subordination,
official rules articulated in law deny that race matters. Simultaneously,
the law upholds race as immutable and biological.265
The assertion that race is color and color does not matter is, of course,
essential to the norm of colorblindness.266 To define race reductively
as simply color, and therefore meaningless, however, is as subordinating
as defining race to be scientifically determinative of inherent
deficiency. The old definition creates a false linkage between race and
inferiority;the new definition denies the real linkage between race and
oppression under systematic white supremacy. Distorting and denying
reality, both definitions support race subordination. As Neil Gotanda
has argued, colorblindness is a form of race subordination in
that it denies the historical context of white domination and Black
subordination.267 This idea of race recasts privileges attendant
264See Cass R. Sunstein, Lochner'sLegacy, 87 COLUM.L. REV.873, 895 (I987). The Brown
decision was criticized for not being "neutral"because the existing distribution of power and
resources between Blacks and whites was taken by the courts as simply "there"- the base line
from which all actions should be measured. All subsequent departuresfrom the status quo were
then "preferences,"or violations of neutrality. Sunstein argues that the status quo's distribution
of wealth and power is in fact a product of state action and law through the assignment of
entitlements and the creation of property rules. See id.
265 Modern formulations of race have shed notions of inherited inferioritylinked to race and
have substituted a conception of race that Gotanda describes as "formal-race"- in which "Black
and white are seen as neutral apolitical descriptions reflecting merely 'skin color' or country of
ancestral origin . . . unrelated to ability, disadvantage, or moral culpability . . . [and] unconnected
to social attributes such as culture, education, wealth or language." Gotanda, supra note
24, at 4.
266 Gotanda notes that the current discourse of colorblindness assumes that nonrecognition
of race is possible and desirable. He argues, however, that nonrecognition "fosters systematic
denial of racial subordination and the psychological repression of an individual's recognition of
that subordination, thereby allowing such subordination to continue." Id. at I6.
267 See id. at I-2. Gotanda provides an extended discussion of the modern application of
I768 [Vol. IO6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
to whiteness as legitimate race identity under "neutral" colorblind
principles.
The use of colorblindness as the doctrinal mode of protecting the
property interest in whiteness is exemplified in three major affirmative
action cases decided by the Supreme Court: Bakke, Croson, and Wygant.
The underlying, although unstated, premise in each of these
cases is that the expectation of white privilege is valid, and that the
legal protection of that expectation is warranted. This premise legitimates
prior assumptions of the right to ongoing racialized privilege
and is another manifestation of whiteness as property.
I. Bakke. - The Supreme Court's first full-blown review of an
affirmative action program considered the claim of Alan Bakke, a
white male applicant to a state medical school, that he had been the
victim of "reverse discrimination."268 Bakke claimed an Equal Protection
violation because he had been denied admission, despite the
fact that his undergraduate grades and Medical College Admissions
Test (MCAT) scores were higher than those of the Black, Latino, and
Asian students admitted through a special admissions program. The
program reserved sixteen out of one hundred spaces for disadvantaged
and minority students. Bakke reasoned that he had not been admitted
because of his race - white - in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's
equal protection guarantee.269
In a deeply divided four-one-four decision, the Court invalidated
the special admissions plan and ordered that Bakke be admitted.270
Justice Powell, who offered the only opinion in support of Bakke's
position on constitutional grounds, was most concerned and perplexed
by the lack of any basis that he could find to justify this "extraordinary"remedial
action that displaced Bakke's expectation of admittance
and placed the burden of rectifying discrimination, which Justice
Powell said was not proven here, on the shoulders of an "innocent"
white.271 Justice Powell could find no right to substantive equality
justifying an affirmative action program that trumped Bakke's settled
expectations that, because of his grades and test scores, he should be
admitted.272 Moreover, a majority of the Court invalidated the special
admissions plan employed by the University because it denied future
white applicants the opportunity to compete for all one hundred seats
in the class.273
"formal race" through the doctrine of colorblindness and illustrates the severe deficiencies of
color-blind analysis. See id. at 40-52.
268 Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 277-78 (I978).
269 See id. at 276-78.
270 See id. at 271.
271 See id. at 290-98.
272 See id. at 310.
273 See id. at 319-20.
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HARVARD LAWREVIEW
This analysis incorrectly assumes, first, that Bakke's expectation
of admission was valid and entitled to protection, and second, that
the special admissions program impermissibly infringed the equal protection
rights of future white applicants. These presumptions in fact
mask settled expectations of continued white privilege. By extending
legal protection to these expectations and legitimating them as valid,
the property interest in whiteness was given another form and further
hegemony.
The first presumption - that Bakke's expectation was valid because
he was better qualified - is severely flawed. The judgment of
"who is better qualified" is fraught with complex and subjective assessments.
Test scores and grade point averages are undoubtedly
important factors in determining qualifications for admission, but
work experience, difficulty of course of study, and even such intangibles
as "motivation"and "potentialfor professional contribution"are
also considered. Any combination of these factors can be used to
determine that one applicant is "betterqualified"or more meritorious
than another. Bakke was nevertheless presumptively "betterqualified"
because (and these are the only facts the Court cited) he had higher
MCAT scores and GPAs than students admitted through the special
admissions program.274 Bakke, according to Justice Powell, was
therefore an "innocent victim" and implicitly deserving because he
ranked higher in the selected criteria. Even assuming that Bakke
could establish that his rejection constituted an abridgement of the
Equal Protection Clause,275 Bakke's expectation of admission was
neither reasonable nor supported by the evidence because he may not
274 See id. at 277 & n.7.
275 In order to establish a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, Bakke should have had
to demonstrate that he would have been admitted but for the special admissions program. The
only facts in the record upon which Justice Powell seems to have relied upon were that Bakke
was rejected in two successive years, although on each occasion students who ranked significantly
lower, according to the criteria used to evaluate candidates, were admitted through the special
admissions program. See id. at 276-77 & n.7. Although this analysis compared Bakke's
credentials with those of the students admitted through the special admissions program, equally
probative is a comparison of Bakke's test scores and GPA with those of all other students
admitted and rejected. If white applicants with lower scores than Bakke's were admitted, it
could not fairly be said that Bakke was denied admission because of his race. In fact, both
white and Black applicants with credentials lower than Bakke's were admitted. See JOEL
DREYFUSS& CHARLESLAWRENCEIII, THE BAKKECASE:THE POLITICSOFINEQUALITYI 2I3
(I979). This fact illustrates the inherently discretionary nature of all admissions processes,
which are rarely, if ever, tied to purely mathematical formulae. Although race was undeniably
a factor in favor of the minority applicants, that does not demonstrate that race was the reason
why Bakke was rejected. Instead, the Court held that Bakke should be admitted because the
school conceded that it could not carry its burden of proving that "but for the existence of its
unlawful special admissions program, [Bakke] still would not have been admitted." Bakke, 438
U.S. at 320. This concession by the university was only one of many and was part of a pattern
of serious omissions in its defense of the case. See DREYFUSS& LAWRENCE,supra, at 32.
I770 [Vol. Io6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
have been "better qualified" if the entire range of admissions criteria
had been considered.
The majority of the Court was willing to validate Bakke's expectation
because the special admissions plan violated neutrality, when
"neutrality" was a colorblind decision process based on "objective
merit." In fact, however, the Court's discussion about relative performance,
measured by "neutral"merit criteria, masks its assumptions
about the definition of merit. The Court assumed that merit in this
context meant superior GPAs and MCAT scores and that these were
objective, neutral measures beyond serious challenge. However, Ronald
Dworkin has argued that Bakke's claim that his rejection violated
merit-based standards was unsubstantiated because merit could not
be assumed to mean only undergraduate GPA and MCAT performance.
Merit could in fact mean something quite different, such as
the probability that the individual would make a contribution to the
profession.276 Bakke's presumptions about "merit" were also the
Court's presumptions and formed an essential part of the idea that
Bakke had a specific right to be admitted to medical school based on
a "universal"definition of merit. This reductive assessment of merit
obscures the reality that merit is a constructed idea, not an objective
fact. There are few, if any, self-evident, universally agreed upon,
objective criteria that comprise merit because merit itself is a fluid,
ever-changing objective. Merit criteria are in fact selected in relation
to certain "merit"objectives, and those choices are heavily influenced
by subjective factors. The idea of merit embodied in the opinions of
the plurality have the character of property;the law ratifiedthe settled
expectations in a particular definition of merit as MCAT scores and
GPAs, even though in fact merit is not only shifting, but also is
imperfectly measured by the chosen standard.
Nor is it certain that this standard was neutral or colorblind;
commentators have claimed that the MCAT and other standardized
tests are biased against racial minorities, and that the tests were
deployed to ensure white dominance and privilege.277 The idea, that
276 See Ronald Dworkin, Why Bakke Has No Case, N.Y. REV. BOOKS, Nov. Io, 1977, at
II, 13-14.
277Although MCATs and other standardized tests are not objective measures of ability, they
may be the "best we can do." DERRICK BELL, TEACHER'SHANDBOOKTO RACE, RACISM AND
AMERICAN LAW6I (2d ed. I980). In fact, prior surveys of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a test
also constructed and administered by the Educational Testing Service as an objective measure
of potential performance in college, show a striking correlation between performance and family
income level. See id.
The deployment of standardized tests as a basis for graduate admissions and employment
correlates with demands by Blacks for equal opportunity. Professor Ware has observed:
[S]tandardized tests were not generally used until the late I940S and early I950S. This,
coincidentally, was the time when the NAACP's pre-Brown equalization strategy began
to force institutions of higher education to admit black students or to build separate and
truly equal facilities for them. Prior to that time, students who successfully completed
I993] I77I
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
potential performance as a physician or even as a medical student can
be quantified as a single number on a test that can then be rank
ordered, embraces two central fallacies of biological determinism:the
reification of the abstract concept of intelligence - a "complex and
multifaceted set of human capabilities" - into a unitary thing (the
performance on a test), and the ranking of "complex variation [as] a
gradual ascending scale."278
Second, Bakke argued, and the Court agreed, that the minority
admissions plan abridged Fourteenth Amendment guarantees for
whites, who although not historically oppressed, were nevertheless
"persons"within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause. However,
the special admissions program violated equal protection standards
only if whites as a group can claim a vested and continuing
right to compete for one hundred percent of the seats at the medical
school, notwithstanding their undue advantage over minority candidates.
This advantage results from illegal oppression and race segtheir
undergraduate studies could simply enroll in graduate schools. The sort of competitive
examinations that exist today were not part of the process.
Ware, Letter, supra note 221, at 2; see also Moses v. Washington Parish Sch. Bd., 330 F. Supp.
1340, 1342 (E.D. La. I971) (noting that "testing was first imposed on blacks at the time of full
integration"),aff'd, 456 F.2d I285 (5th Cir. 1972), cert. denied, 409 U.S. I013; DERRICKBELL,
RACE, RACISMAND AMERICAN LAW601 (3d ed. 1992) (noting that, with regard to the use of
testing in primary and secondary education, "[i]tis no coincidence that the interest in grouping
students by ability resurfaced only in the mid-I95os, at the same time that desegregation was
gaining momentum"). Indeed, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (I97I), demonstrates
the correlation between increased reliance on testing and increased demands for integration. In
Griggs, the employer's policy of requiring a high school diploma as a condition of transfer to
higher ranked positions in the operating departments coincided with the company's abandonment
of its policy of excluding Blacks from those departments. See id. at 427. On the date that
Title VII's antidiscrimination provisions became effective, the company imposed the additional
requirement of successful performance on two aptitude tests, see id., neither of which was
designed "to measure the ability to learn to perform a particular job or category of jobs," id.
at 428. Rejecting the employer's claim that the use of the tests was not prohibited by Title VII
because the employer lacked the intent to discriminate, see id. at 432, the Court held that, if
an employment practice in fact has discriminatory impact, it can be justified only by business
necessity - a showing of a relationship between the requirement and the job in question, see
id. at 431; see also Stamps v. Detroit Edison, 365 F. Supp. 87, II5 (E.D. Mich. 1973) (holding
that "[i]t is indisputable that Detroit Edison had used its written examinations to 'freeze the
status quo' of past discrimination and that such has resulted in a differential impact upon the
races").
For a history of the LSAT as a tool developed to respond to the high attrition rates of law
students during the period of open admissions, when competence to perform in law school was
measured by actual performance, not as a device to determine who should gain admission, see
THE MEXICANAMERICANLEGALDEFENSEFUND (MALDEF) LAW SCHOOLADMISSIONS
STUDY16-24 (1980), cited in Portia Y.T. Hamlar, Minority Tokenismin AmericanLaw Schools,
26 How. L. J. 443, 495-97 (I983). See also David M. White, An Investigation into the Validity
and Cultural Bias of the Law School Admissions Test, in TOWARDSA DIVERSIFIEDLEGAL
PROFESSION66, 81-93 (David M. White ed., 1981) (reviewing the accuracy of the LSAT as a
predictor of law school grades).
278GOULD,supranote I47, at 23-25.
I772 [Vol. I06:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
regation in all arenas that operate as an effective and lasting bar to
the participation of people of color. The University's remedial choice
did in fact interfere with the expectations of Bakke and other whites
that they had a property interest in a space in the class. Expectations
of privilege based on past and present wrongs, however, are illegitimate
and are therefore not immune from interference.
Bakke expected that he would never be disfavored when competing
with minority candidates, although he might be disfavored with
respect to other more privileged whites. The relevance of class privilege
is not a matter of conjecture; the special admissions program
and the regular admissions process were not the only paths to admission
to the medical school. Five seats in the class were reserved for
the Dean to exercise his discretion in favor of children of prominent
alumnae/i or donors.279 Indeed, there was clear evidence that Bakke
was rejected from twelve other medical schools, with some citing age
as a factor.280 The well-established bias against older applicants to
medical schools was not challenged by Bakke; nor did the preference
for children of wealthy donors and prominent alumnae/i trigger equal
protection claims, despite the fact that such procedures clearly created
classifications that worked against Bakke, who was neither young nor
the son of a wealthy or prominent alumna or alumnus. Bakke was,
however, white, and the special admissions program endangered his
property interest in whiteness. The Court demonstrated its sympathetic
concern for his interest in this circumstance by deferring to his
vested property interest in whiteness and intervening to reorder the
situation to his benefit and in accordance with his expectations.
2. Croson. - By the time the Court considered the City of Richmond's
set-aside program for minority-owned businesses and contractors
in Croson, the unease that it had displayed in Bakke over inappropriate
burden shifting had matured into full-blown hostility toward
any infringement of white interest. In a suit brought by a disappointed
white contractor, Richmond's minority business enterprise program
was challenged as an impermissible racial preference violating
279 See EZORSKY, supra note 203, at 91. Although this program was later abandoned, see
id. at 91 n.26, present data suggests that children of more affluent families continue to have a
better chance of being accepted at elite institutions, see Graduates of Elite Schools Increasingly
Getting Top Jobs, CHI. TRIB., Aug. I9, 1992, ? 3, at i (citing economists' report on patterns
of acceptance at elite institutions and high-paying employment that indicate that, in contrast to
children of affluent families, "'middle-classstudents of equal ability are relegated to an education
with significantly lower value"'). Harvard University continues to favor children of alumnae as
forty percent of alumnae children were admitted compared with fourteen percent of those who
did not have such connections. The difference is not justified by higher qualifications of "legacy"
candidates over non-legacy candidates. See John Larew, Why Are Droves of Unqualified,
Unprepared Kids Getting in Our Top Colleges? Because Their Dads Are Alumni, WASH.
MONTHLY,June I991, at Io.
280See DREYFUSS& LAWRENCE,supranote 275, at i6.
I9931 1773
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
the Fourteenth Amendment.28' For the first time, a majority of the
Court embraced a strict scrutiny standard to evaluate an affirmative
action program under the Equal Protection Clause.282 Despite the
fact that the City of Richmond had managed to spend only .67% of
its contracting dollars with minority-owned businesses in a city that
was over 50% Black, and that this and other testimony was presented
to the City Council,283the Court held that there was an insufficient
factual predicate upon which to base an affirmative action program
for city contracts that required 30% minority participation.284 Existing
societal discrimination was insufficient in the view of the majority
of the Court to justify an affirmative action program - a program
that it seemed to find was in derogation of the norm of nondiscrimination.
Only a compelling state interest, such as rectifying the city's
own proven discriminatory practices, would justify the imposition on
"innocent whites" of this burden of lost expected profit from the
contract that was not awarded because of the minority participation
requirement.285
In the majority's view, whites cannot be burdened with rectifying
inequities that are the product of history. But even if one accepts this
questionable normative premise,286it is still difficult to see how the
injury claimed by Croson - the loss of anticipated profit - warranted
the application of strict scrutiny review. The gravamen of Croson's
charge was that the state had no right under the Fourteenth Amendment
to interfere with any de facto privilege accruing to him because
he was white, and that therefore the status quo, in which over 99%
281 See City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 485 (I989).
282 See id. at 494.
283 See id. at 479-80.
284 See id. at 477-78, 498-500. Another interesting feature of the Croson decision was the
Court's hostility to the affirmative action set-aside program enacted by the Richmond City
Council precisely because the City Council was predominantly Black. In the majority's view,
the set-aside program was no more than a political spoils system in which Blacks were using
their political power to appropriate economic resources. Blacks' actions to benefit themselves
were deemed inappropriate and as illegitimate as similar action undertaken by whites. See id.
at 495-96. The Court conveniently ignored the fact that history demonstrates that whites did
implement such systems and that their current position of dominance is such a direct and
successful product of it that "neutrality"is all that is now requiredfor them to maintain control.
285 See id. at 488-506.
286 There is little to commend the notion that beneficiaries of historical wrongs are holders
of inviolable rights or interests. The underlying premises of much of the law disputes such an
assumption. For example, the family of an embezzler who occupies a house or possesses goods
purchased with stolen funds is not considered to have a normatively secure claim to the goods
merely because they did not actively perpetuate the wrong. See FIscus, supra note 263, at 45
("[P]ersonalguilt or innocence is irrelevant to the claim of right, as when a party innocently
comes into possession of stolen goods; the claim on those goods by the rightful owner is not
forfeited because of the innocence of the current possessor.");WILLIAMS,The Obliging Shell, in
ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS, supra note 5, at o10 ("If a thief steals so that his children
may live in luxury and the law returns his ill-gotten gain to its rightful owner, the children
cannot complain that they have been deprived of what they did not own.").
I774 [Vol. Io6:1707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
of the government contracting business had gone to whites, could not
be disturbed absent the most compelling justification. Essentially,
Croson's claim was an assertion of the property interest in white-
ness.287
It is not that white individuals like Croson do not or should not
have a right to seek constitutional protection under the Equal Protection
Clause; that is a right guaranteed to all persons. The problem
lies in extending the protection of the law in theform of strict scrutiny
review288to whites as whites. Treating whiteness as the basis for a
valid claim to special constitutional protection 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 racial subordination ratifies existing white privilege
by making it the referential base line. Differential treatment of
whites is not beyond constitutional concern; but differential treatment
of whites does not signify the same meaning as differential treatment
of Blacks. To assert that whites have an equivalent right to a level
of review designed to protect groups and peoples subordinated by
white supremacy is to seek to legitimate a usurpation. After all, race
oppression has meaning in this country not because of what has been
done to whites because of their racial identity, but what has been
done to those who are not white in the name of protecting white-
ness.289
287 Linda Greene has described judicial solicitation for the "rightsof whites," which is evident
throughout American law and appears as a common theme in the Supreme Court's civil rights
decisions during the I988 Term. See Linda S. Greene, Race in the 2zst Century: Equality
ThroughLaw?, 64 TUL. L. REV. 1515, I533-38 (i990). Greene maintains that Croson protects
the rights of whites "against both the economic aspirations of black contractors and the political
effectiveness of black leaders and constituents." Id. at I533. The case is thus situated in the
modern trend of protecting white rights, not through explicit guarantees, but through counterbalancing
Blacks' claims for equality against the "vested interest of white[s] ... in maintaining
the status quo." Id. at I537.
288 The origin of the strict scrutiny standard is Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214
(1944), in which the Court reviewed the exclusion orders that shipped Japanese-Americans out
of the western United States and interned them in camps, see id. at 2I6.
289As noted by one author, there is tremendous irony in ascribing the same meaning to the
differential treatment of whites and the discriminatory treatment of Blacks:
Why does racial discrimination excite us when so many other kinds of discrimination
do not? It is because of the way we interpret history, associating racial discrimination
with practices that now appear self-evidently evil: forcing blacks from their homeland,
enslaving blacks, lynching blacks for actions that among whites would not be criminal,
intimidating blacks who sought to exercise their rights - in sum, systematically disadvantaging
a people in almost every way that mattered ....
A claim made by a white person as a member of the dominant majority draws its
moral force largely from our collective horror at centuries of oppressing black people. It
would be ironic indeed if evils visited on blacks had lent enough force to the moral claims
of whites to prevent what appears to many at this point to be the most effective means
of eliminating the legacy of those evils.
Richard Lempert, The Force of Irony: On the Morality of Affirmative Action and United
Steelworkers v. Weber, 95 ETHICS86, 88-89 (I984).
I993] I775
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
3. Wygant. - In Wygant, more senior white teachers who were
laid-off before more junior Black teachers who had been hired to
remedy prior discrimination by the Jackson, Michigan school board
challenged the union-approved layoff plan as reverse discrimination
barred by the Equal Protection Clause.290 Because the loss of existing
jobs was at issue in Wygant, it has been considered a more difficult
case. Certainly, there was loss: the question, as Justice Marshall noted
in dissent, is whether there was constitutional injury.291 When the
Jackson, Michigan School Board negotiated an agreement with the
union that sought to protect the jobs of more recently hired Black
teachers in the event of a layoff, it disturbed long-standing assumptions
about seniority as the basis of distributing loss. White teachers
who had lost their jobs asserted that their seniority was a vested right
- a property right - on which they were entitled to rely, and of
which they were being deprived because of their race. The Court,
disturbed by the loss of employment to innocent whites, overrode the
'provision in the union agreement that modified seniority rules in the
interest of remediating past racial discrimination, and ordered reinstatement
of the more senior white employees.292 It in fact restructured
the bargain and set aside a portion of the contract negotiated
by the union so that whites were protected from the layoff despite the
contract.
The majority's analysis ignores what positions many of the white
teachers would have held but for the privilege inherent in being white.
Absent the history of overt and covert racial exclusion, many white
employees would not have been hired in the first place and would
therefore have no basis to claim seniority preferences. Thus, a claim
of right predicated on seniority is an assertion of preference based on
that racially discriminatory history. Asserting the property interest in
seniority rights against the background of structured privilege for
whites and inequities for Blacks "is to claim a property right in the
benefits of being white."293 To illustrate the point, one could consider
the extent to which the Court would extend protections to these
workers if they were losing their jobs because of a corporatetakeover,
a plant closing, or any other reason.294
Together, these cases establish the Court's major doctrinal view of
affirmative action as abnormal and against the norm of nondiscrimi-
290 See Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Educ., 467 U.S. 267, 272-73 (1986).
291 See id. at 296 (Marshall, J., dissenting).
292 See id. at 283-84.
293
Singer, supra note 17, at 103.
294
Indeed, Frances Ansley suggests that, when one compares general worker protections
with "white skin protection," it is evident that the courts are not in fact protecting workers but
their whiteness. See Ansley, supra note Io, at I068-69.
I776 [Vol. Io6:1707
I993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY I777
nation. They speak the formal language of equality, but subordinate
equality by vesting the expectations of whites that what is unequal in
fact will be regarded as equal in law. Thus, they enshrine whiteness
as property.
V. DE-LEGITIMATING THE PROPERTY INTEREST IN WHITENESS
THROUGH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
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. The legal affirmation of whiteness and white privilege allowed
expectations that originated in injustice to be naturalized and legitimated.
The relative economic, political, and social advantages dispensed
to whites under systematic white supremacy in the United
States were reinforced through patterns of oppression of Blacks and
Native Americans. Materially, these advantages became institutionalized
privileges, and ideologically, they became part of the settled
expectations of whites295 - a product of the unalterable original
bargain. The law masks what is chosen as natural; it obscures the
consequences of social selection as inevitable.296 The result is that
the distortions in social relations are immunized from truly effective
intervention, because the existing inequities are obscured and rendered
nearly invisible. The existing state of affairs is considered neutral297
295 Frances Ansley identifies the origins of these expectations in segregation:
[I]n the days of Jim Crow, white people who lived in that system had emotional, cultural
and financial stakes in the continuation of a segregated way of life. Segregation had
become a settled expectation that, for most whites, represented their "chosen"preference
.... From the point of view of blacks, these arrangements may have looked unjust
and bizarre. Of course, the arrangements were unjust and bizarre. But they nevertheless
clearly represented settled expectations, and to many ordinary white people these arrangements
seemed natural and essential to their fundamental rights to private property and
personal liberty.
Id. at ioII (citation omitted). She further describes the pattern of antidiscrimination cases
beginning with Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. I (I948), and continuing through Brown I1 and
the cases following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to be embracing the rule that these expectations
could not supersede the mandate of equality. See id. at 101-13.
296See Duncan Kennedy, The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries, 28 BUFF. L. REV.
205, 334-50 (I979).
297 Neutrality, conceptualized as the "preservationof the existing distribution of wealth and
entitlements," is required and maintained through means adjudged to be fair. Sunstein, supra
note 264, at 875. It is Sunstein's argument that this notion of neutrality is so deeply embedded
in the framework of American constitutionalism that, despite the fact that Lochner v. New
York, I98 U.S. 45 (I905) - one of the major cases enshrining this particular definition of
neutrality - has been overruled and severely criticized, the legacy of Lochner's assumptions
about neutrality remain. See id. at 874-75. Neutrality also has its negative implications for
Black self-definition that parallel the self-denial inherent in the phenomenon of passing. Patricia
Williams describes several incidents in which Blacks shunned public identification as Blacks
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
and fair, however unequal and unjust it is in substance. Although
the existing state of inequitable distribution is the product of institutionalized
white supremacy and economic exploitation, it is seen by
whites as part of the natural order of things that cannot legitimately
be disturbed. Through legal doctrine, expectation of continued privilege
based on white domination was reified; whiteness as property
was reaffirmed.
The property interest in whiteness has proven to be resilient and
adaptive to new conditions. Over time it has changed in form, but
it has retained its essential exclusionary character and continued to
distort outcomes of legal disputes by favoring and protecting settled
expectations of white privilege. The law expresses the dominant conception
of "rights," "equality,""property,""neutrality,"and "power":
rights mean shields from interference;equality means formal equality;
property means the settled expectations that are to be protected; neutrality
means the existing distribution, which is natural; and, power
is the mechanism for guarding all of this.
One reason then for the court's hostility toward affirmative action
is that it seeks to de-legitimate the assumptions surrounding existing
inequality. It exposes the illusion that the original or current distribution
of power, property, and resources is the result of "right"and
"merit." It places in tension the settled expectations of whites, based
on both the ideology of white supremacy and the structureof the U.S.
economy, that have operated to subordinate and hyper-exploit groups
identified as the "other." It opens to critique the idea that individualized
and discrete claims to remedy identified discrimination will
achieve the promise of equality contained in the Fourteenth Amendment.
It conceives of equality in transgenerational terms, and demands
a new and different sense of social responsibility in a society
that defines individualism as the highest good, and the "marketvalue"
of the individual as the just and true assessment.298 It unmasks the
because of the perceived negative consequences. This phenomenon, Williams argues, is a
product of a "tabooed sense of self" linked to requirements of neutrality. Thus, she states:
Neutrality is from this perspective a suppression, an institutionalization of psychic taboos
as much as segregation was the institutionalization of physical boundaries. What the
middle-class, propertied, upwardly mobile black striver must do, to accommodate a raceneutral
world view, is to become an invisible black, a phantom black, by avoiding the
label "black"....
WILLIAMS, TheObligingShell, in THE ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS, supra note 5, at 98,
I 9.
The de facto lack of neutrality and equality occurs as part of a partial integration in which
"white"is still good, but some blacks "who are like whites" can be considered good. This is a
form of neo-racism under which "equality and neutrality have become . . . constant and
necessary companions, two sides of the same coin: 'equal . . .' has as its unspoken referent
'. .. to whites'; 'neutral . . .' has as it [sic] hidden subtext '. . to concerns of color."' Id. at
116.
298According to Macpherson, this is the underlying assumption of a full market economy as
"there is no measure of a man's merit other than what the market will award him." C.B.
1778 [Vol. IO6:I707
I993] WHITENESS AS PROPERTY I779
limited character of rights granted by those who dominate. In a word,
it is destabilizing.299
Affirmative action begins the essential work of rethinking rights,
power, equality, race, and property from the perspective of those
whose access to each of these has been limited by their oppression.
This approach follows Mari Matsuda's suggestion of "looking to the
bottom" for a more humane and liberating view.300 From this perspective,
affirmative action is required on both moral and legal
grounds to de-legitimate the property interest in whiteness - to dismantle
the actual and expected privilege that has attended "white"
skin since the founding of the country. Like "passing," affirmative
action undermines the property interest in whiteness. Unlike passing,
which seeks the shelter of an assumed whiteness as a means of extending
protection at the margins of racial boundaries, affirmative
action de-privileges whiteness and seeks to remove the legal protections
of the existing hierarchy spawned by race oppression. What
passing attempts to circumvent, affirmative action moves to challenge.
Rereading affirmative action to de-legitimate the property interest
in whiteness suggests that if, historically, the law has legitimated and
protected the settled expectations of whites in white privilege, deMACPHERSON,
THE RISE AND FALL OF ECONOMIC JUSTICE AND OTHER PAPERS 9 (I985).
Under these conditions, market value equals just value. See id.
299Some critical scholars have argued that the goals of equal protection have never been
fully implemented because allowing the claims of Blacks would disrupt the system. All people
might then lay claim to equal conditions rather than equal opportunity, which is measured by
definitions of merit that perpetuate class preferences. See, e.g., Freeman, supra note 197, at
112-14 (arguing that the retreat in antidiscrimination law is due to the fact that overturning
Black subordination would lay siege to hallowed concepts central to the functioning of the
existing order).
However, Kimberle Crenshaw cautions that we should not overlook the embedded nature
of white supremacy that causes whites to be "unlikely to question the legitimacy" of the class
structure, and instead more likely "to question the legitimacy of racial remedies that relied upon
a suspension of these myths" of equal opportunity. Crenshaw writes that "whites were on the
defensive, not because the promise of vestedness had proven unstable, but because Blacks had
been granted some privileges at their expense." Crenshaw, supra note 3, at 1361. The retrenchment
in antidiscrimination law then was the result of white backlash "againstBlacks and against
institutions perceived as sympathetic to Black interests." Id. at I362.
In characterizing affirmative action to be destabilizing, I do not ascribe to affirmative action
any magical capacity to create cross-racial solidarity with the white working class against class
exploitation. Instead, I intend to evoke the counterhegemonic possibilities of another vision of
rights and remedies, as well as equality, property, neutrality, and power, around which to
mobilize resistance.
300Matsuda suggests something beyond imagining the experience of oppression. Rather, she
says that "[l]ooking to the bottom [involves] adopting the perspective of those who have seen
and felt the falsity of the liberal promise." Mari J. Matsuda, Looking to the Bottom: Critical
Legal Studies and Reparations, 22 HARV.C.R.-C.L. L. REV.323, 324. This shift of perspective
requiresstudying the actual experience of those groups that have suffered oppression and heeding
the voice of that experience rather than considering this viewpoint in the abstract. See id. at
325.
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
legitimation should be accomplished not merely by implementing equal
treatment, but by equalizing treatment among the groups that have
been illegitimately privileged or unfairly subordinated by racial stratification.
Obviously, the meaning of equalizing treatment would vary,
because the extent of privilege and subordination is not constant with
reference to all societal goods. In some instances, the advantage of
race privilege to poorer whites may be materially insignificant when
compared to their class disadvantage against more privileged
whites.30' But exposing the critical core of whiteness as property as
the unconstrained right to exclude directs attention toward questions
of redistribution and property that are crucial under both race and
class analysis. The conceptions of rights, race, property, and affirmative
action as currently understood are unsatisfactory and insufficient
to facilitate the self-realization of oppressed people.
Here I consider some of the preliminary issues that arise from
thinking about affirmative action as a method of attacking whiteness
as property. First, I examine how the property interest in whiteness
has skewed the concept of affirmative action by focusing on the sin
or innocence of individual white claimants with vested rights as competitors
of Blacks whose rights are provisional and contingent, rather
than on the broader questions of distribution of benefits and burdens.
This focus improperly narrows the affirmative action debate to corrective/compensatory
issues, to the exclusion of distributive issues.
Asking distributive questions about affirmative action is not only conceptually
warranted, but is an effective beginning to disentangling
whiteness from property through refocusing on the extent to which
the existing, distorted distribution results directly from racial subordination.
Second, I consider and reject the argument that affirmative
action amounts to the illegitimate establishment of a property interest
in Blackness. Affirmative action does not embody a conception of
Blackness that is the functional opposite of whiteness, because Black
identity, unlike whiteness, is not derived from racial subordination.
Affirmative action does not reify expectations of continued race-based
privilege, for it does not implement a permanent system of unfair
advantage that is then naturalized and held outside the boundaries of
301History reveals that the racial oppression of Blacks has been both beneficial and harmful
to white workers. Racial stratifications have often operated to weaken the capacity of organized
labor to exert leverage in bargaining. Marginalized Black workers have worked in substandard
conditions and for inadequate wages rejected by white laborers. Their work allows employers
to resist demands for improved wages and conditions for all workers. See EZORSKY,supra note
203, at 83-84. However, the white working class has also benefited from Black subordination:
[White workers] have been first in line for hiring, training, promotion, and desirable job
assignments, but last in line for seniority-basedlayoffs. As white, they have also benefited
from housing discrimination in areas where jobs could be had and from the racist impact
of selection based on personal connections, seniority, and qualifications.
Id. at 83.
I780 [Vol. IO6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
continued scrutiny. Finally, I argue that, unlike the property interest
in whiteness that rests on the distorted notions of identity and property
that afford whites the right to exclude "the other," affirmative action
implies broader and more highly developed concepts of identity and
property.
A. Corrective Justice, Sin, and Whiteness as Property
The distorting prism of whiteness as property further reinforces an
exclusively corrective view of affirmative action claims when, in fact,
affirmative action embodies aspects of both corrective and distributive
justice. Ronald Fiscus has described the corrective (or compensatory)
argument in affirmative action as "the claim to compensation for
discrete and 'finished' harm done to minority group members or their
ancestors"; distributive justice "is the claim an individual or group has
to the positions or advantages or benefits they would have been
awarded under fair conditions."302 These arguments are frequently
conflated because, as Fiscus notes, the case for affirmative action often
is premised on the need to compensate minorities for harms done to
them in the past - a discussion that admits of interpretations consistent
with both compensatory and distributive justice claims.303
There are in fact different logical consequences flowing from the
two perspectives. Whether one completely accepts the conceptual
framework outlined by Fiscus,304 the crucial point is that, in failing
to consider the distributive aspects of affirmative action, its validity
has been measured solely against a corrective justice framework that
works to undermine the very core of affirmative action objectives addressing
the harm to Blacks caused by racial oppression. If the
paradigm is one of corrective justice, then the governing principles
are that "compensation should be paid to the one harmed and that it
should be paid by the one who caused the harm."305 Affirmative
action then would appear to contravene both traditional guidelines
302
FISCUS,supra note 263, at 8.
303 See id. Thus, according to Fiscus, if "the argument refers to past harms so great that
their victims (or, more likely, their victims' descendants) deserve to be compensated," it is a
compensatory justice claim. Alternatively, if it refers "to past harms that have continuing,
disabling effects," then, Fiscus argues, it really is a distributive justice claim. Id. at 8-9. In
contrast to remedies imposed for rectifying a retroactive compensatory justice claim, affirmative
action applies when a past injustice has continuing effects and the distributive claim, situated
in the present, has "subsumed or incorporated the compensation claim." Id. at 9.
304For the contrasting view, rejecting distributive justice as a basis for affirmative action,
see Thomas Nagel, Equal Protection and CompensatoryDiscrimination, 2 PHIL. & PUB. AFF.
348, 359 (I973). Nagel argues that preferential policies for minorities can be justified only on
the basis of social utility, not on the basis of distributive justice, because distributive justice
arguments are difficult to construct without the aid of premises on the source of unequal
qualifications between different groups. See id. at 350-51.
305 FISCUS,supra note 263, at 9.
1993] I78I
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
because there is a lack of identity between the recipient of compensation
and the one suffering a substantial share of the original harm
(even allowing for the continued effects of past discrimination), and
because the current generation of whites is being required to compensate
for harms caused by prior generations.306 Even when the Court
has upheld affirmative action plans, it implicitly has accepted the
notion that affirmative action burdens - that is, extracts compensation
from - innocent whites.307 Proponents of affirmative action
justify requiring the sons to pay for the sins of the fathers by pointing
to the compelling interest in eliminating the disadvantage of the present
built on the oppression of the past. Even this argument, however,
accepts the notion that harm was being done.308 Significantly, this
argument has great moral suasion in popular discourse and is the
source of heated debate.309 The focus on innocent whites changes the
affirmative action inquiry from one of rectifying the harm to Blacks
to invoking legal protection for the rights of whites who are innocent
of discriminatory acts, although they have benefited from prior dis-
crimination.310
Mischaracterizing affirmative action as a claim of bipolar corrective
justice between individual Black and white competitors renders
invisible parties essential to the proper adjudication of the claims at
issue. In some instances, when the claim is between competing Black
and white applicants for limited resources, the role of the employer,
state agency, or other distributor of the resources is minimized although,
as decisionmakers and holders of power, they are obviously
306 See id. at 9-o0.
307 See id. at 5.
308 See id. at 4-5.
309 See Ansley, supra note io, at Ioo5 (describing the "innocentvictim" as "themost harrowing
and publicly-debated issue in affirmative action").
310See generally Kathleen M. Sullivan, The Supreme Court, I985 Term- Comment: Sins
of Discrimination: Last Term's Affirmative Action Cases, Ioo HARV.L. REV. 78, 8o (1986)
(arguing that the Supreme Court's approach of only approving affirmative action plans when
designed to rectify past "sins of racism"has "invited claims . . . [that] white workers 'innocent'
of their bosses' or union leadership's past discrimination . . . should not pay for 'the sins of
others of their own race"'). Thus, when the Court invokes legal protections for the interests of
innocent whites, affirmative action claims are conceptualized as problems of corrective justice,
inevitably to the detriment of the claim of any Black aspirant. If affirmative action is cast as
a bipolar corrective justice claim between a Black aspirant and a white applicant or incumbent,
then denying relief to the Black aspirant logically follows. Although the claim for compensation
for unjust loss may be valid, the white applicant or incumbent is innocent of the historical
wrong for which the Black aspirant seeks relief and therefore should not be forced to yield
position. Alternatively, when a white aspirant or incumbent lays a claim of reverse discrimination,
he is asserting another type of corrective justice argument. He argues that he has been
caused unjust harm by the affirmative action program that has displaced white expectations of
a secured position in favor of the Black applicant. In this scenario, it is the white aspirant or
incumbent who has suffered unjust loss and, under a corrective justice model, is the central
focus of the rights debate and rectification question.
I782 [Vol. Io6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
major players.311 In other scenarios, when a white applicant charges
that he has been unfairly passed over, Blacks are at the core of the
dispute but are not parties to the litigation.312 By disavowing the
essential jurisprudential nature of affirmative action to be both corrective
and distributive, conflict that is both private and public in
nature becomes wholly privatized and the parties misaligned.313
If affirmative action is viewed through the prism of distributive
justice, the claim of white innocence no longer seems so compelling,
because a distributive justice framework does not focus primarily on
guilt and innocence, but rather on entitlement and fairness. Thus,
distributive justice as a matter of equal protection requires that individuals
receive that share of the benefits they would have secured in
the absence of racism.314 Conversely, and most significantly, Fiscus
rejects white innocence for the following reasons:
311 This tendency for the employer to fade into the background is exemplified by Wygant v.
Jackson Bd. of Educ., 476 U.S. 267 (I986). The discriminatory hiring practices of the Jackson,
Michigan School Board that had led to gross racial imbalance among teachers were not the
central concerns of the Wygant plurality opinions. Indeed, Justice Marshall's dissent notes that
the decision in the case was impaired by a record that was "informal[,] incomplete," and
"inadequate to inform the Court's decision," leading to a failure to appreciate the factual basis
for the imposition of affirmative action in the first instance. Id. at 295-96 (Marshall, J.,
dissenting). Instead, the discourse focused on whether it was fair to override the seniority
interests of innocent white employees in apportioning loss between Black and white workers.
According to Justice Powell, "'the rights and expectations surrounding seniority make up what
is probably the most valuable capital asset that the worker "owns,"worth even more than the
current equity in his home."' Wygant, 476 U.S. at 283 (plurality opinion) (quoting Richard H.
Fallon, Jr. & Paul C. Weiler, Firefighters v. Stotts: Conflicting Models of Racial Justice, I984
SUP. CT. REV. I, 58 (1985)).
312 See Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 276 (I978). The fact that
minority students were not actual parties to the Bakke litigation was crucial to the way in which
the case was litigated, the strategies were developed, and indeed, even what facts ultimately
became part of the record that went before the Supreme Court. Cf. DREYFUSS& LAWRENCE,
supra note 275, at 40-42 (documenting the omission of critical facts from the record, such as
(I) the Dean's special admissions policy for children of wealthy donors and alumnae; (2) the
university's mistaken concessions that the admissions program for disadvantaged students admitted
i6 students each year that Bakke applied, when in fact it did not; and, (3) the fact that
whites were considered for admission through the Task Force Program).
313 This observation is Frances Ansley's insight regarding the shift in both legal discourse
and popular conception regarding remediation of race discrimination. See Ansley, supra note
o0, at I02I-22. She notes the "picture is of an embattled white, male worker in need of
protection from an overbearing and intrusive government or employer." Id. at 1022. This
vision tends to exclude Black aspirants from consideration. See id. at 1022 n.126.
314 If one assumes relative equality of abilities among the races at birth, then it is only racial
subordination that can explain the fact that Blacks have not secured the proportion of society's
benefits that they would be expected to have based on their numbers in society. But see Posner,
supra note 260, at 17 ("Many groups are underrepresentedin various occupations for reasons of
taste, opportunity, or aptitude unrelated to discrimination. There is no basis for a presumption
that but for past discrimination . . . minorities . . . would supply [a proportional] percent of
the nation's lawyers."). Fiscus argues that, if one accepts relative group equality in ability at
birth, then race-correlated differences must be due to societal factors that differentiate along
I78319931
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
Distributive justice also holds that individuals or groups may not claim
positions, advantages, or benefits that they would not have been
awarded under fair conditions ....
This means that white individuals who would not have won for
themselves a benefit in a racially fair world . . . are not entitled to
claim those benefits by using putatively more objective measures of
merit. If, in a fair world, white males would have achieved N percent
of a given set of benefits, then white males who claim benefits beyond
that percentage are claiming benefits they are not entitled to, whether
or not they appear to have "earned"the benefit according to accepted
criteria. The criteria are likely to be right for measuring immediate
merit .... They are wrong for measuring distributive justice. The
merit claimed by these individuals is in fact a false merit because it
is based on unfair competition .... [T]his means that white males
who are disadvantaged by affirmative action programs, and who are
ostensibly being discriminated against because of their race and/or
gender, are in most cases not being treated unfairly at all - not, that
is, being discriminated against at all.315
The distributive justice lens, then, would refocus the question of
affirmative action on what would have been the proper allocation in
the absence of the distortion of racial oppression.316 By not descending
into the warp of sin and innocence, doctrine and legal discourse
would be redirected toward just distributions and rights rather than
punishment or absolution and wrongs.317
B. Affirmative Action: A New Form of Status Property?
If whiteness as property is the reification, in law, of expectations
of white privilege, then according privilege to Blacks through systems
of affirmative action might be challenged as performing the same
racial lines - racism. See FISCUS,supra note 263, at 24. He rejects the racial ethnicity
argument "because any racially correlated variation in taste, opportunity, or aptitude can only
be explained by either innate racial differences or pervasive societal recognition of race and
differential behavior based on it - i.e., de facto discrimination." Id. at 27.
315
FISCUS, supra note 263, at I3-I4.
316 As Fiscus argues, "the question is not Who is to blame for racism? but What would
[Blacks] have naturally attained? . . . [W]hat . . . would [whites] be entitled to in a nonracist
society." Id. at 45.
317 It is not my belief that changing the rationale and discourse around affirmative action
will magically dispel objections or dissipate the very real tensions that have accumulated around
these issues. In the real world, these questions are not merely discursive. Rather, I suggest
that the proper reformulations of these issues would avoid exacerbating the very difficult issues
of allocation by excluding essential parties or minimizing the role of those holding power and
control. For example, Ansley argues that alternatives to the issue of laying off Black versus
white workers include job sharing, increased unemployment compensation, greater worker
control over the workplace, and other remedial measures that require greater employer concessions.
See Ansley, supra note io, at Io69-70. Moreover, correctlyidentifying the locus of power
in the affirmative action debate would serve to better expose class privilege and domination.
See id. at 1021-23.
I784 [Vol. IO6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
ideological function, only on the other side of the racial line.318 As
evidence of a property interest in Blackness, some might point out
that, recently, some whites have sought to characterize themselves as
belonging to a racial minority.319 Equating affirmative action with
whiteness as property, however, is false and can only be maintained
if history is ignored or inverted and the premises inherent in the
existing racial hierarchy are retained. Whiteness as propertyis derived
from the deep historical roots of systematic white supremacy that has
given rise to definitions of group identity predicated on the racial
subordination of the "other,"320and that has reified expectations of
continued white privilege.321 This reification differs in crucial ways
from the premises, intent, and objectives of affirmative action.
Fundamentally, affirmative action does not reestablish a property
interest in Blackness because Black identity is not the functional
opposite of whiteness. Even today, whiteness is still intertwined with
the degradation of Blacks and is still valued because "the artifact of
'whiteness' . . . sets a floor on how far [whites] can fall."322 Acknowledging
Black identity does not involve the systematic subordination
of whites, nor does it even set up a danger of doing so.323 Affirmative
action is based on principles of antisubordination, not principles of
Black superiority.
The removal of white privilege pursuant to a program of affirmative
action would not be implemented under an ideology of subordination,
nor would it be situated in the context of historical or
present exploitation of whites. It is thus not a matter of implementing
systematic disadvantage to whites or installing mechanisms of group
318Interestingly, when I describe my project of exposing the property interest in whiteness,
it is principally whites who make this suggestion. Although this may signal nothing more than
coincidence, I fear there is an undercurrent to the question that is grounded in what Hacker
describes as the fear of retribution - that Blacks will do to whites what whites did to them.
Hacker attributes this observation to Louis Farrakhan. See HACKER,supra note 155, at 206
(discussing white fears of having Black elected officials).
319See, e.g., Susan Diesenhouse, In Affirmative Action, A Question of Truth in Labeling,
N.Y. TIMES,Dec. ii, I988, at E26 (relating the account of Philip J. and Paul J. Malone, two
brothers on the Boston Fire Department who were dismissed for falsely stating on their job
applications that they were Black, a status they claimed by virtue of a Black great-grandmother).
The definition of race deployed by the Malones is based on old fractional formulas that measure
race by bloodlines and consider race to be biologically determined.
320 See supra notes 128-131 and accompanying text.
321 See supra pp. I724-46.
322
HACKER,supranote I55, at 217.
323 The assertion of Black identity in the face of the concerted and relentless efforts to
degrade and eradicate it is indeed essential to the recovery of Blacks in particular and of the
society as a whole. Cf. MEMMI,supra note 227, at 128 ("The more oppression increases, the
more the colonizer needs justification. The more he must debase the colonized, the more guilty
he feels .... How can he emerge from this increasingly explosive circle except by rupture,
explosion?").
I993] 1785
HARVARD LAWREVIEW
exploitation. Whites are not an oppressed people and are not at risk
of becoming so. Those whites that are disadvantaged in society suffer
not because of their race, but in spite of it. Refusing to implement
affirmative action as a remedy for racial subordination will not alleviate
the class oppression of poor whites.324 Indeed, failing to do so
will reinforce the existing regime of race and class domination that
leaves lower class whites more vulnerable to class exploitation. Affirmative
action does not institute a regime of racialized hierarchy in
which all whites, because they are white, are deprived of economic,
social, and political benefits. It does not reverse the hierarchy, but
levels the racial privilege.
Even if one rejects the notion that, properly constructed, affirmative
action policies cause whites no injustice, affirmative action
does not implement a set of permanent, never-ending privileges for
Blacks. Affirmative action does not distort Black expectations because
it does not naturalize these expectations. Because affirmative action
can only be implemented through conscious intervention and requires
constant monitoring and reevaluation, it does not function behind a
mask of neutrality in the realm beyond scrutiny. Affirmative action
for Blacks does not reify existing patterns of privilege, nor does it
produce subordination of whites as a group. If anything, it might
fairly be said that affirmative action creates a propertyinterest in true
equal opportunity325- opportunity and means that are equalized.
324 As Fiscus argues, "unfairness to poor whites is a serious matter in its own right ....
[I]t is [however] a different injustice, and the net unfairness of the society is not improved by
giving to poor whites what Blacks would have won under racially fair conditions. . . . The
only proper remedy for . . . class-based unfairness is one that addresses class per se ....
FISCUS,supra note 263, at 50.
325 See powell, supra note 84, at 379-8o. The issue of equal opportunity was examined in
United Steelworkers of Am. v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (I979). Weber, a white employee who had
been denied a spot in his employer's training program, alleged that the program, open to selected
workers on the basis of seniority with the proviso that at least 50% were Black, violated Title
VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because the program resulted in Black workers receiving
training in preference to more senior whites. The training programhad been designed, pursuant
to a collective bargaining agreement, to rectify the craft unions' past exclusion of Blacks.
Because the company, in the past, had hired only experienced craftworkers, few Blacks had
been able to rise through the craft ranks. See id. at 197-200. The Court upheld the constitutionality
of the training program, and instructed that the language of Title VII was to be
interpreted in light of its affirmative action goals. See id. at 202-04. john powell discusses
Weber as a case in which both the majority and minority workers have a personal property
interest in promotions on the job. powell surmises that the expectation of equal opportunity is
a property interest that both groups have, although "neithergroup has a vested interest in the
job itself." powell, supra note 84, at 379. I contend that expectations in the status quo are not
legitimately considered as property, but have, nevertheless, been treated as property. Thus,
disposing or interfering with these expectations is not impermissible. Indeed, to validate the
status quo against the backdrop of disadvantage would interfere with what powell calls the
property interest in equal opportunity - a legitimate form of property. Thus, Weber's claim
to equal opportunity is not insignificant, but the gravamen of his complaint was that he was
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WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
C. WhatAffirmativeActionHas Been; WhatAffirmativeAction
MightBecome
The truncated application of affirmative action as a policy has
obscured affirmative action as a concept. The ferocious and unending
debate on affirmative action cannot be understood unless the concept
of affirmative action is considered and conceptually disengaged from
its application in the United States.
As policy, affirmative action does not have a clearly identifiable
pedigree326but was one of the limited concessions offered in official
response to demands for justice pressed by Black constituencies.327
Despite uneven implementation in the areas of public employment,
higher education, and government contracts, it translated into the
attainment by Blacks of jobs, admissions to universities, and contractual
opportunities. Affirmative action programs did not, however,
stem the tide of growing structural unemployment and underemployment
among Black workers, nor did it prevent the decline in material
conditions for Blacks as a whole.328 Such programs did not change
more senior and therefore would have been selected for the training program first. This claim
rested on expectations borne of a racialized stratification and was not valid. As powell points
out, "[t]oprotect this expectation would be abusive power." Id. at 380.
326Affirmative action as a matter of U.S. policy surfaced in a remark attributed to President
Lyndon B. Johnson in a I965 speech at Howard University. "You do not take a person who
for years has been hobbled by chains, and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line and
then say 'you are free to compete with all the others.'" Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement
Speech at Howard University (June 4, 1965), in N.Y. TIMES,June 5, I965, at AI4. In fact,
Martin Luther King, Jr. had previously been quoted to the effect that equality could not be
achieved by telling people who do not have boots to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
See HACKER,supra note I55, at II9. Hacker traces the idea to an even earlier history of
presidential initiatives beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1941 Executive Order regarding
employment in defense industries and the creation of the Fair Employment Practices
Commission. See id. at 118-I9. He attributes the phrase "affirmativeaction" to the Kennedy
administration orders that firms with federal contracts take "positive steps" toward a racially
integrated work force. See id. at 119; Exec. Order No. 10,925, 3 C.F.R. 448, 449 (1959-1963).
327See EZORSKY,supranote 203, at 31-32.
328Although the numbers of Blacks who have attained professional status and middle-class
income have increased, so too have the numbers of Black poor. See A COMMONDESTINY:
BLACKSANDAMERICANSOCIETY275 (Gerald D. Jaynes & Robin M. Williams, Jr., eds., I989)
[hereinafter COMMONDESTINY].Over 45 percent of all Black children in 1991 lived below the
official poverty line as defined by government income standards, see CENSUS,supra note 226,
at x, and the Black infant mortality rate has been twice that of whites for most of the century,
although the rates of all groups have improved in this category, see COMMONDESTINY, supra,
at 398. The mortality of Black people from treatable diseases as well as from a host of
socioeconomically related ills, such as homicide, see id. at 397, 419, AIDS, see id. at 420-21,
and substance abuse, see id. at 421-22, continues to be disproportionately high in comparison
with the rest of U.S. society. Further, the gap in per capita income between Blacks and whites
also remains in existence, see id. at i6-i8, 323. On every plane, along every indicator of
socioeconomic conditions from employment rates, see id. at 18, the percentage of persons living
below the poverty line, see id. at 17, and median family wealth, see id. at 282, to health care
1787I993]
HARVARD LAW REVIEW
the subordinated status of Blacks, in part because of structural
changes in the economy, and in part because the programs were not
designed to do so.329
However, affirmative action is more than a program: it is a principle,
internationally recognized,330based on a theory of rights and
equality. Formal equality overlooks structural disadvantage and requires
mere nondiscrimination or "equal treatment";by contrast, affirmative
action calls for equalizing treatmentby redistributingpower
and resourcesin order to rectify inequities and to achieve real equality.
The current polarized debate on affirmative action and the intense
political and judicial opposition to the concept is thus grounded in
the fact that, in its requirement of equalizing treatment, affirmative
action implicitly challenges the sanctity of the original and derivative
standards, see id. at 435, the picture is one of continued, relatively poor material living
conditions for Blacks.
329 One of the more prominent critiques made by writers such as William Julius Wilson is
that affirmative action has failed because it has not changed conditions for the "trulydisadvantaged."
See WILLIAMJ. WILSON,THE TRULYDISADVANTAGEDpassim (I987). Although it is
true that Black poverty and unemployment has persisted, see supra note 328, it is also true that
Blacks at all income and educational levels have benefited from affirmative action. See EZORSKY,
supra note 203, at 63-65 (disputing the claim that affirmative action has aided only
advantaged Blacks and citing studies indicating increased and better employment among Blacks
at the lower end of the economic scale as a result of affirmative action); see also William L.
Taylor, Brown, Equal Protection, and the Isolation of the Poor, 95 YALEL.J. 1700, I7I3-14
(I986) (citing evidence of increased job opportunities for Blacks in blue-collar work as well as
significant increases in minority enrollment in professional schools, which reflect the matriculation
of children from families of low income and job status).
330 The Charter of the United Nations requires that all members promote human rights
"without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion." U.N. CHARTERart. I, ? 3. This
mandate does not mean that one may never differentiate (because this would disallow bilingual
classes for students in a language that they speak), but that one may never discriminate. See
VERNON VAN DYKE, HUMAN RIGHTS, ETHNICITY, AND DISCRIMINATION4 (1985). The International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Race Discrimination defines racial
discrimination as:
[A]ny distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or
national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the
recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental
freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.
U.N. GAOR, 3d Comm. 20th Sess., Annex 2, Agenda Item 58, at 42, U.N. Doc. A/RES/2Io6
(I967). Significantly, the Convention also states that, "when the circumstances so warrant,"
parties shall take "special and concrete measures to ensure the adequate development and
protection of certain racial groups or individuals belonging to them, for the purpose of guaranteeing
them the full and equal enjoyment of human rights." Id. This provision has been
construed by the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection
of Minorities to mean that the implementation of special measures does not violate the
mandate of equality. Thus, affirmative action or "special measures"are not merely permitted,
but are required to attain factual (substantive) equality. See VAN DYKE, supra, at 9-II.
American judicial confusion notwithstanding, affirmative action is perceived under international
law to be entirely consistent with equality.
I788 [Vol. Io6:I707
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY
present distribution of property, resources, and entitlements and directly
confronts the notion that there is a protectable property interest
in "whiteness." If affirmative action doctrine were freed from the
constraint of protecting the property interest in whiteness, if indeed it
were conceptualized from the perspective of those on the bottom, it
might assist in moving away from a vision of affirmative action as an
uncompensated taking and inspire a new perspective on identity as
well. The fundamental precept of whiteness - the core of its value
- is its exclusivity. But exclusivity is predicated not on any intrinsic
characteristic, but on the existence of the symbolic "other," which
functions to "createan illusion of unity"among whites.331 Affirmative
action might challenge the notion of property and identity as the
unrestricted right to exclude.332 In challenging the property interest
in whiteness, affirmative action could facilitate the destruction of the
false premises of legitimacy and exclusivity inherent in whiteness and
break the distorting link between white identity and property.
Affirmative action in the South African context offers a point of
comparison. It has emerged as one of the democratic movement's333
central demands, appearing in both the constitutional guidelines and
draft Bill of Rights issued by the African National Congress. These
documents simultaneously denounce all forms of discrimination and
331
Crenshaw, supra note 3, at 1372.
332
Macpherson suggests that the central problem of liberal democracy has been the failure
to reconcile the contradiction between the "liberal property right" enshrined in law as the
individual right to exclusive use and disposition and the "ethical goal of free and independent
individual development." C.B. Macpherson, Liberal Democracy and Property, in PROPERTY,
supra note 58, at 199, 199-200. Because there is no legitimate norm for constraining the
exclusive property right conferred by liberal theory, it leads to the excessive concentration of
ownership that invariably forecloses "the equal possibility of individual human fulfilment." Id.
at 200. "It led to denial of property as a right to what is needed to be human." Id. at 205.
The crux of the problem lies in an excessively narrow view of the nature of the property right
as the right to exclude others from the benefit or use of something when, in fact, property
legitimately embraces "the right not to be excluded from the use or benefit of . . . the achievements
of the whole society." Id. at 206. A conception of affirmative action that would dismantle
whiteness as property raises similar implications about the meaning of propertyfor it is dissonant
with notions of property, such as the absolute right to exclude.
333As Albie Sachs, one of the leading lawyers for the African National Congress, writes:
Without a constitutionally structured programmeof deep and extensive affirmative action,
a Bill of Rights in South Africa is meaningless. Affirmative action by its nature involves
the disturbance of inherited rights. It is redistributory rather than conservative in character.
It is not a brake on change but rather a regulator of change, designated on the
one hand to guarantee that change takes place, and on the other hand that it proceeds
in an orderly way according to established criteria. ...
In the historical conditions of South Africa, affirmative action is not merely the
corrector of certain perceived structural injustices. It becomes the major instrument in
the transitional period after a democratic government has been installed, for converting
a racist oppressive society into a democratic and just one.
Albie Sachs, Towards a Bill of Rights for a Democratic South Africa, 35 J. AFR. L. 21, 29
(I99I).
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HARVARD LAWREVIEW
embrace affirmative action as a mechanism for rectifying the gross
inequities in South African society.334
The South African conception of affirmative action expands the
application of affirmative action to a much broader domain than has
typically been envisioned in the United States. That is, South Africans
consider affirmative action a strategic measure to address directly the
distribution of property and power, with particular regard to the
maldistribution of land and the need for housing.335 This policy has
not yet been clearly defined, but what is implied by this conception
of affirmative action is that existing distributions of property will be
modified by rectifying unjust loss and inequality. Property rights will
then be respected, but they will not be absolute and will be considered
against a societal requirement of affirmative action. In essence, this
334The Draft Constitutional Principles for the ANC instruct that:
Provision will be made for discrimination to be eliminated in substance as well as in
form. At all levels of government the state will be empowered to pursue policies of
affirmative action for the advancement of persons who have been socially, economically
or educationally disadvantaged by past discriminatory laws and practices and in order
to redress social, economic and educational imbalances in South Africa resulting from
such discrimination with special regard to the maldistribution of land and the need for
housing. Special provision will also be made to redress the added discrimination which
has been suffered by women and the victims of forced removals.
AFRICANNAT'L CONGRESS,CONSTITUTIONALCOMM.,DISCUSSIONDOCUMENT:CONSTITUTIONALPRINCIPLESAND
STRUCTURESFORA DEMOCRATICSOUTHAFRICA30 (Centre for
Development Studies, Univ. of the Western Cape, South Africa, Apr. I99I). The Draft Bill of
Rights similarly authorizes the implementation of affirmative action and states that:
Nothing in the Constitution shall prevent the enactment of legislation, or the adoption
by any public or private body of special measures of a positive kind designed to procure
the advancement and the opening up of opportunities, including access to education,
skills, employment and land, . . . of men and women who in the past have been
disadvantaged by discrimination.
ANC CONSTITUTIONALCOMM.,ANC DRAFTBILLOF RIGHTS,PRELIMINARYREVISEDVERSION
I.I, Art. 14, at 14 (Centre for Development Studies, Univ. of the Western Cape, South
Africa, May I992) [hereinafter ANC DRAFTBILLOFRIGHTS].
335 To deal with the grossly skewed property relations produced by apartheid under which
whites, who number less than 13% of the population, own 87% of the land and 95% of
productive capital, a new democratic government could pursue a number of alternatives ranging
from completely precluding public intervention in the existing patterns of ownership to authorizing
total nationalization. The ANC's proposal on the land issue seems to embody a third
option - permitting intervention through taking property in the public interest and providing
compensation to the owner, but defining compensation to include affirmative action principles.
Sachs suggests that under the formulation:
[M]arket valuation would not be the sole determinant [of compensation]. Affirmative
action principles could enter the picture, so that under broad equal protection principles,
historical, social, and family factors could be taken into account, as well as the need to
ensure continuity of productive use; there could be flexibility in terms of the modalities
of payment, and a wide variety of transitional arrangementsand forms of mixed interests
could be permitted.
ALBIESACHS,PROTECTINGHUMANRIGHTSIN A NEW SOUTHAFRICAI66 (1990); see ANC
DRAFT BILL OF RIGHTS, supra note 334, at II-I2 (describing the objectives and principles of
land redistribution that would consider an "equitable balance" between private and public
interests).
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WHITENESSAS PROPERTY
conception of affirmative action is moving toward the reallocation of
power and the right to have a say. This conception is in fact consistent
with the fundamental principle of affirmative action and effectively
removes the constraint imposed in the American model that strangulates
affirmative action principles by protecting the property interest
in whiteness.
VI. CONCLUSION
Whiteness as property has carried and produced a heavy legacy.
It is a ghost that has haunted the political and legal domains in which
claims for justice have been inadequately addressed for far too long.
Only rarely declaring its presence, it has warped efforts to remediate
racial exploitation. It has blinded society to the systems of domination
that work against so many by retaining an unvarying focus on vestiges
of systemic racialized privilege that subordinates those perceived as a
particularized few - the "others." It has thwarted not only conceptions
of racial justice but also conceptions of property that embrace
more equitable possibilities. In protecting the property interest in
whiteness, property is assumed to be no more than the right to prohibit
infringement on settled expectations, ignoring countervailing equitable
claims that are predicated on a right to inclusion. It is long past time
to put the property interest in whiteness to rest. Affirmative action
can assist in that task. Affirmative action, if properly conceived and
implemented, is not only consistent with norms of equality, but is
essential to shedding the legacy of oppression.
I993] I79I