I have lost count of how many times I’ve read Whiteness as Property, taught it, and drawn upon its insights in my own work. I can say that the first few times I read it, so long ago now, I read it too quickly, filled as I was with the anticipation, excitement even, of finding an explanation, a conceptual framework, for how to understand the complex articulation of race, ownership and labour; that messy and painful amalgam of transgenerational experience that seems to determine the life chances of so many people, including myself, my parents, and my grandparents; indeed, those of most people who I knew as a child growing up in a city whose property titles still bore the traces of the de jure racial segregation of an earlier time, and whose de facto imperial spatial configurations remain pretty much intact. By beginning her analysis with reflections on her grandmother’s experiences as a worker who had to “pass” as white in order to secure and keep her job, Professor Harris enabled many of us to connect a painful present and personal realities to larger historical processes and events. The narrative at the beginning of Harris’s article is saturated with a sensibility of how the world is constituted through relations of ownership that contaminate overlapping spheres of embodiment, affect, emotion, urban infrastructure, wage labour, and the intimate and propertied spaces of home and kinship. The article deftly teaches us how race — despite its many mutations and re-articulations — has retained its power as a juridical and affective regime through which labour relations and property ownership were organised and valued long after slavery and indentureship had ended, long after the end of the plantation, long after the sun had set on the British empire.
In this short reflection, I want to take a few insights from Whiteness as Property and reflect on how race and relations of ownership are imbricated in particular ways in the current moment in the United Kingdom. Specifically, I want to reflect on her insights about the foundational place of racial sovereignty in the fabrication of the race/property nexus; the continued reification of racial identity in this neo-liberal moment; and the way in which racial value maintains its grip over the spheres of work and employment. From the renewed attention on lethal police violence, to the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on black and brown peoples both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, to specific forms of organised state abandonment that have highlighted the vulnerability of racialised and working class peoples to premature death, the intercalation of race and property seems to be more pointed and poignant than ever.
Racial Sovereignty
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. — Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as Property
Racial sovereignty formed through practices of slavery, indentureship, colonial land theft, internment, and displacement determine the boundaries of the proper citizen subject, indeed, the proper subject of humanity. As I have elaborated elsewhere, sovereignty itself is intimately tied to concepts of property, ownership, and practices of status-making. The border becomes a complex site, both internally and externally, of competing claims to belonging and of exclusion. Racial sovereign formations license lethal forms of violence. The expectation of “proper” citizen subjects to preserve their territory, their way of life, their communities, deemed legitimate by law, most if not all of the time, has long justified both individual and state acts of violence in settler regimes. How else are we to understand the brutal murder of George Floyd, and so many other black and indigenous people, so many migrants, at the hands of police and border control; now, in many cases, caught on camera and broadcasted globally? While the reasons that led so many thousands of people in the past few months to take to the streets all over the world to demand justice remain a subject of at least some debate, surely it was not only the fact of Floyd’s murder but the image of it that spurred so many to flout lockdowns and social distancing to assemble and protest. What effects have the auditory dimensions of the footage of Floyd’s death had on people, with his excruciating last words, “I can’t breathe,” becoming a rallying cry for justice? The look on the officer’s face — staring with seeming impunity into the camera — along with the indifference of the officers who participated in Floyd’s murder, was for many people too much to swallow; the image was literally undigestible, unconsumable without a profound reaction of rage.
We can understand the uprising and protest of so many thousands of people in the United Kingdom and the United States (as elsewhere) as a refusal of the sense of entitlement that characterises the property power of whiteness, which finds one of its most extreme manifestations in the figure of the cop. To say “Black Lives Matter” can mean a refusal of the jurisdiction of the racial sovereign violence of the police; it can express a radical autonomy that exceeds the economy of racial value encoded in the juridical apparatus of the state.
In the United Kingdom, the need to defend the state against the internal threat posed by “radical Islam” has meant the surveillance, harassment and criminalisation of British Muslims through the Prevent strategy. In conjunction with the “hostile environment” policy that has been at the core of Tory immigration policy since 2012, the British state has been hard at work at maintaining its racial boundaries of citizenship, going so far as to deport black British citizens on the spurious grounds that they lacked the requisite documents to prove citizenship (some of which were destroyed by the Home Office itself). While black Britons who had arrived as part of the Windrush generation have suffered in untold numbers, the policy was also applied to people from other parts of the Commonwealth including India and Pakistan. And this is to say nothing of the fortress mentality, so greatly emboldened by Brexit, that has been taken to extreme heights in response to the so-called migration crisis that has seen the death of tens of thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa, including those who have drowned in the Mediterranean or who have died in detention facilities. Homing in on the ways in which the racial sovereign borders of the state are enacted in everyday practices (and have been for a very long time indeed) requires us to look more closely at how these forms of racial violence are performed at this particular neoliberal conjuncture.
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. — Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as Property
In The Hard Road to Renewal, Professor Stuart Hall gave us a stunning diagnosis of Thatcherite politics in Britain, and many of his prognostications remained absolutely on point and essential to revisit in the aftermath of the disastrous election in December 2019, which saw the Tory party sweep many traditional Labour strongholds. What seems somewhat different from that earlier period of Powellite racism, which pitched white nationalists against people of color, is the emergence over the past thirty or forty years of increasingly reified uses of racial identity by people of color themselves. The shared political ground and struggle that had anti-racists in the United Kingdom using the term “black” as a political identity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s has been replaced or perhaps captured by a more static notion of racial identity that seemingly makes it more difficult to generate anti-racist, anti-capitalist political movements.
This is not to be nostalgic for a previous political moment, but rather to try to understand how neo-liberalism and the politics of ownership that this economic and ideological form proliferates has impacted anti-racist struggle. It’s clear that many Asians never identified as “black,” and while historically embedded racism between black and brown communities in countries as far apart as Guyana and Uganda have their own inglorious particularities, wielding racial identity like a trait, a property that can be weaponised in efforts to quash grassroots struggle against racial injustice, has found new footing after decades of New Labour multicultural policies that were enwrapped within a Thatcherite (and now turbocharged Tory austerity) neo-liberal spirit of privatisation, marketisation, and entrepreneurialism.
How do we begin to understand how a government that has indisputably tacked right of where the Tories were even a couple of years ago can also claim the most racially diverse cabinet in British history? While the brown or black Tory is not a new thing, one such figure, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has recently demonstrated how racial identity — reified through a combination of decades of multicultural policies, the emergence of a market in “diversity,” and the general diminution of collective responses to social ills — can be wielded as a blunt tool, in order to evade accountability and indeed reject accusations of racism. Multiculturalism as state policy in the United Kingdom has a contradictory legacy, as Avtar Brah has noted, and has been widely discredited for abandoning the anti-racist impetus that informed earlier political demands for greater cultural diversity in school curricula, for instance. State multiculturalism in the United Kingdom has been criticised for contributing to the divisions within racialised communities, which became defined on the basis of static, essentialist cultural practices and ethnic identifications.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United Kingdom, the Home Secretary admonished Black Lives Matter protestors for their “thuggery” and “reckless conduct,” choosing highly problematic, if not racially charged, terms to describe the tiny minority of protestors who had damaged property during the protests. In response to this, Labour MP Florence Eshalomi challenged the Home Secretary and stated that people expected this government to act to rectify long standing racial inequality. In her reply, Patel essentially put herself above any criticism on the basis that she too was a victim of racial harassment. Predictably, the multiracial coalition of Labour MPs who wrote to the Home Secretary to complain that her response amounted to a form of “gaslighting” was met with criticism of being rooted in “divisive identity politics” by Tory MPs. On my reading, the current political conjuncture has produced the conditions in which a right-wing woman of color occupying one of the highest political offices in the country can reify her own racial identity — and indeed her own incontrovertible experiences of racism — and, in recalling the universally legible era of ‘Paki bashing’ in 1970s United Kingdom, both render that period as something from the past, remote from the current Tory government, and use it to deny the very grave forms of racial injustice that affect black British citizens in specific ways. Rather than becoming a basis for a shared solidarity, Patel’s use of her racial identity and experience as a “thing” to be exploited in her verbal battle with a black woman MP was befitting of the recent history of her office, home of the “hostile environment” policy referred to above.
Affirmative Inaction: Racialised Workers and COVID-19
The underlying, although unstated, premise in [three landmark affirmative action cases] cases is that the expectation of white privilege is valid, and that the legal protection of that expectation is warranted. — Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as Property
The affirmative action debates of the 1990s in the United States seem a far cry from the current racial configurations of the U.K. labour market. Professor Harris’s forensic critique of the successful challenges to affirmative action policies led her to conclude that they assumed “the right to ongoing racialized privilege and [are] another manifestation of whiteness as property.” This conclusion, albeit about a very different time and place, retains relevance as a general statement about forms of racialised privilege embedded in the workplaces of most frontline workers in the United Kingdom. Black and brown doctors, nurses, transport workers, cleaners, and others at the centre of the COVID-19 crisis have been exposed to disproportionate levels of risk of illness and death because of the physiological and psychosocial effects of racism; the intersections of racial subordination and poverty; racism in the workplace; and the racializing effects of how the disproportionate numbers of black and brown people dying from COVID-19 have been articulated and represented.
Many of the more astute analyses of why and how brown and black people are contracting and dying from COVID-19 in disproportionate numbers in the United Kingdom came out concurrently with a minor scandal involving a government report titled Disparities in the Risks and Outcomes of COVID-19, meant to address the racial dimensions of COVID-19 mortality. Initially, the government released only part of the report, and specifically chose not to publish the recommendations. Parliament, said Professor Raj Bhopal, “had not been told the full truth.” While the government eventually relented after it was forced to, its initial commitment to inaction emerged at the same time as the Black Lives Matter protests erupting throughout the country.
Whether it is the private factory or field, the state-run hospital, the sweatshop violating labour and employment laws, the racialised system of value that renders our labour of less value, that renders it disposable, means, at this conjuncture, vulnerability to premature death. While thousands of people took to the streets to protest racial injustice, years of endemic racism in the NHS and social care settings means that racialised workers, many of them women, have felt unable to speak out about shortages in PPE, and therefore continue to be at increased risk of contracting the virus. The first outbreaks of coronavirus infections as the lockdown eased were amongst the most precarious workers in the agricultural, meat-processing and textile industries. Here, colonial processes of bordering and status making intersect with newer iterations of racial nationalism, fabricating the meaning of ‘whiteness’ in ways specific to the United Kingdom; recall that much of the agricultural work in the UK is performed by migrant workers from Eastern Europe, who were a primary target of the xenophobic rhetoric surrounding Brexit. Poor working conditions and low pay are the likely causes of these outbreaks, and the racialisation of these labour markets that render these types of work undervalued like all of the forms of care work at the centre of this viral crisis, have shown us what their true costs are.
Though it may be misleadingly perceived as remote from these concerns, the marketized and privatised higher education sector in the United Kingdom, coupled with the COVID-19 crisis has created a “perfect storm” wherein falling student numbers, and the corresponding loss in tuition income has enabled university managers to embark on radical restructuring plans, as with other sectors of the economy. Hundreds of jobs will be lost across the sector. From cleaners, many of whom are migrant and people of color workers who have waged long struggles for basic employment protections, to precariously employed non-permanent staff among whom women of color are disproportionately represented, to permanent members of staff who have outlived their usefulness in the neoliberal university, they will be unemployed come the winter, in the midst of a pandemic and the greatest economic recession since records began.
In her article, Harris recounted the case of Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, in which the United States Supreme Court overturned a collective bargaining agreement negotiated by a union that sought to protect the jobs of more recently hired young black teachers, at the expense of more senior white staff, were there to be layoffs. Harris noted that “[w]hite 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.” She reasoned that “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.” The law, whether in the presence or absence of perfectly legal and legitimate attempts to protect the jobs of racialised workers, finds a way to keep in place a hierarchy of racial value that places whiteness at its apex.
As we reflect on the jobs that will be lost in the coming weeks and months in the United Kingdom in higher education institutions, and the racism inherent in the economic infrastructure of the sector and in the common sense of its managers, it will seem perfectly plausible in this neoliberal moment for universities to at once proclaim that Black Lives Matter and that curricula will be decolonised while they make hundreds if not thousands of precarious staff jobless. Racial diversity (at least in name) and the rhetoric of decolonisation, rendered consistent with long-established norms of racial value, have become valuable commodities for universities forced to market their wares to students, whose own legitimate expectations, if not met, will find space for complaint in the consumer driven audit culture of the British university.