AFRAM 437 Midterm Exam

Describe how the law legitimized whiteness as property*

The law reified whiteness as property by guarding its value present in the social world with legal backing in the courts

Racial recognition was once an abstract concept when it was constrained in the social world, but it is now transformed into an enforceable entity

"Hypodescent” & tracing any amount of Blackness as a taint to a person’s value

Traditional/Status: bottom-up, distributed to one’s ““natural” character” (Harris 1993, 1726), this form upholds how property was defined by social relations and that the state’s function is to reflect these ongoing relations (Harris 1993)

• “common law” as the “primary right of the first possessors” (Harris 1993, 1726), which sets custom/precedent

• Custom of valuing whiteness became explicitly weaponized through the law

Modern: Property reflected changing social relations and those changes were supported by the government, functions of property upheld by the government (Harris 1993, 1728)

• Intangible forms of property now became questions of “power, selection, and allocation” (Harris 1993, 1729)

Ties between Whiteness and Citizenship

• Homogeneity through exclusion became the basis of America’s “national identity” “project” (Harris 1993, 1742)

• Whiteness is NOT unifying, rids anyone of the ability “to self-define” (Harris 1993, 1743-1744)

• Naturalization Act of 1790 (must be (1) free, (2) white, and of “good, moral character,” Harris 1993, 1744), these were qualities made up that effectively excluded African Americans

• Expanding whiteness (or citizenship) depended on strengthening exclusion (Harris 1993)

Ties between Whiteness and Labor/Employment

Whiteness gave automatic social advantage to anyone identifiable as white, a guaranteed spot above another group on the constructed social hierarchy

• Prevent coalition & mixed-race solidarity in the working classes

• Privilege to white people no matter their class standing (what Du Bois calls the “public and psychological wage” where white people can move freely in the social world and have their ability to exercise their rights protected because white people control spaces of power)

• To earn public psychological wages: passing had to be done, making it far from a choice under the “coercion of white supremacy” (Harris 1993, 1743)

Ties between Whiteness and Political Participation

• Citizenship (tied to whiteness under the Naturalization Act of 1790) gave one the ability to exercise rights and demand political representation and for their interests to be met

• Black Americans marginalized from the social hierarchy and were not deemed capable of or worth political representation

• Representation Clause of the Constitution

De Jure Segregation*

White supremacy and racial segregation is protected under the law through explicit language allowing its pervasive use. Whiteness was defined by what it isn’t and is inscribed into the law which protected one’s ability to access and exercise their rights.

De Facto Segregation*

Whether mandated explicitly under the law or not, de facto segregation is felt in actuality when living in American society.

• Redlining persists

• Economic and education opportunities

• Accessing social capital

• Generational wealth attainment & inheritability

De Jure vs De Facto Segregation

When Brown I ended the official legally-sanctioned racial segregation in public schools, it condemned the practice of de jure segregation (when the law supported it) in place of formal equalized treatment.

HOWEVER

What Brown I does not account for is the engrained white supremacy that underlies de facto segregation and just because the law no longer sanctioned explicitly stated segregation, equalizing treatment for Black communities was not put into effect.

• As Professor Bell describes even in these “rights and justice” environments, people in power “had eyes on the economic benefits and power relationships all the time. And that difference in priorities” make what appears to be a win, in actuality, a loss that further disadvantages Black communities (Harris 1993, 1753)

• What is equalizing for white communities (formal equality), will not be equalizing treatment for Black and Brown communities (substantive equality)

Dominant Narratives Under the Law: Rights

• Fully alienable/transferrable (Harris 1993, 1731)

• inalienability to basic rights is not transparent with multiple meanings (“non-transferrable, non-marketable” (Harris 1993, 1731)

Dominant Narratives Under the Law: Equality

• Formal

• Protected by the law through courts

• Founding principle (Declaration of Independence “all men created equal”)

Dominant Narratives Under the Law: Property*

• Tangible

• Inalienable property “The common core of inalienability is the negation of the possibility of separation of an entitlement, right, or attribute from its holder” (Harris 1993, 1731)

• Inalienable in nontransparent understanding in Declaration of Independence (this is the Lockean social contract where individualized ownership and protection is prioritized (Harris 1993, 1761))

Dominant Narratives Under the Law: Neutrality

The default of the law is to protect the status quo, as outlined by the U.S. Constitution (which is guards the property interest in whiteness but is disguised as a neutral, impartial stance defending constitutionality)

• Objectivity of the law from social spaces (Ex. “objective merit” in Bakke case (1978)

Dominant Narratives Under the Law: Power*

• who weilds and is accepted to wield power

• Discovery Doctrine

• Hegemony

• Legal frameworks to uphold power dynamics as expressed in the social world, reifeid (this is how whiteness as power and property become structural, tangible effects)

Affirmative Action & Arguments Against It

“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...” (Harris 1993, 1784)

1. White innocence (AA aims to bring fairness, not guilt (Harris 1993, 1783))

2. (Illigitimate) Property interest found in Blackness (AA affirms broader concepts of identity & property, doesn’t rely on exclusion (Harris 1993, 1780-1781)

AA is “corrective and distributive justice” (Harris 1993, 1781)

Passing

Describe how passing is a form of racial Subordination in a society structured by white supremacy

In a society where being identified as white is the criterion for the distribution of power, passing is a form of racial subordination because at any point somone could be stripped of their privileges that were once easily accessed.

Costs & Benefits of Passing

-generational impact and risk of children being discriminated against

-code-switching and distancing/abandoning one’s self from community

-identity crrisis

+can access privileges ascribed to whiteness unquestioned (b/c you are identified as white & have that social, political, and economic support)

+less at risk of physical and state-enforced violence

Factors leading to Evolution of Racial Slavery

1. feedback loop to African societies

2. shrinkage of European labor

3. increasingly assigning permenant degrading property status to phenotypical features (Blackness as a taint)

Defining Features of Racial Slavery

1. African slaves are property, not citizens and without rights

2. Those enslaved are permanently slaves and cannot get freed

3. Exponential economic profit with a global system surrounding the sale and kidnapping of African bodies

4. Reproduction of labor force, slave status was inherited (not something a person can control about themselves) → anti-miscegenation

How were African Americans lives defined largely by work?

The reason why more Africans lived longer in North America compared to Latin America was because they were kept alive only to work (Wood 2000, 78), just as slave ships were designed to make sure to cargo (slaves) lasted the voyage

• Colonial America: largely concentrated in Chesapeake & coastal southeast and because Europeans were not familiar with growing cotton and agriculture on this land, Africans’ (women and men) skills and knowledge was abused (Wood 2000, 79)

• Work would often never end (buildings, learned to become wheelwrights, house carpenter, shingle cutters, boat builders, or cabinetmakers (Wood 2000, 79)

• Network of canals & waterways built “for travel & irrigation,” “involved in all aspects of the colonial boat-building trade” Wood 2000, 79-80)

• Black women: “endless demands of the white household,”, “supervised the complex process” of preparing hogs,” and “worked in the fields” (Wood 2000, 80). Black women were esp vulnerable because they had the ability to “grow” the labor source

The role of the judicial branch (state and federal courts) in securing legal protection for Jim Crow laws

Examine tactics used to disenfranchise African Americans (Jim Crow era)

Eight-Box Ballot

Literacy Tests

Poll tax

Describe and discuss how notions of criminality were propagandized to further oppress African Americans

13th Amendmnet, quitting a job was a crime

sharecropping

antimiscegenation

“exclusion laws” (Indiana & Illinois)

Racist Attitudes that Shaped Black Education under Jim Crow

Racial Disparities in Black Education

How did Black families/communities resisted discrimination in education?

Describe and discuss the relationship between work, incarceration, and disenfranchisement

Race Riots (1896-1918)

Whiteness as property

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Organized effort to try out LA laws, perfect example of discrimination because:

Homer A. Plessy passed as white but tried to board car reserved for whites & was denied entry

• courts responded w blame-the-victim mentality, “the colored race chooses to put that construction on it” (Harris 1993, #)

• Argued that this action violates Equal Protections Clause of 14th Amendment

• Brief filed “reputation of belonging in the dominant race… is property, in the same sense that a right of action or inheritance is property” (Harris 1993, #)

• “Suffered damage to property in the form of reputation” b/c race classification failed to address in court & if Plessy were white “he would be adequately compensated” (Harris 1993, #)

• Resistance through the courts through reformism was one of the few ways lawyers could make Black people’s lives more survivable (Harris 1993, #)

Discuss the origins of property rights

Cheryl Harris:

• “Racial otherness became justification” for “enslaveability” → first slave codes made “white” associated with being “free” and “Black” was neither of those, “polar constructs” (Harris 1993, 1718)

• Slavery emerges as a “peculiar, mixed category of property and humanity” (Harris 1993, 1718) → Representation Clause of the Constitution

• “reproduction of one’s labor source” → 1662 anti-miscegenation law

• “Stand-in for currency” → Johnson v. Butler (1815, Harris 1993, 1720)

• “First posession": dependent on a sovereign government “giver of rights” (in context of land appropriation from Native Americans) which was established by white settlers who believed the land was “vacant” (Harris 1993, 1716)

Subjugation of Group Identity

“When group identity is predicate for exclusion, the law has acknowledged it, when it is a predicate for resistance of a claim of freedom, the law determines it to be illusory” (Harris 1993, 1766)

Uncertain Century

WOOD, 2000 Uncertain Century

• Changing meanings assigned to African Americans and use of slavery in the U.S., status of African Americans initially were unclear (variety of statuses: indentured servants, free Africans, enslaved Africans)

Evolution of Slavery in Terrible Transformation

Wood, 2000

1. Fear of discontent and solidarity (multiracial “giddy multitude” and always fearing slave revolts)

2. No feedback loop for African slaves (wouldn’t influence future of supply of labor, what occurred after people were removed from their homes was not clear/reported)

3. Slavery became contingent on unchangeable physical appearance (permanence) ““heathen” people but Black” & ““Protestants” but white”

4. Reproduction of one’s permanent labor source by shaping one’s status “on the condition of the mother” which ignored all previous English laws

5. “Creation of strict legal codes” or slave code as early as 1705 in Virginia “and other colonies followed” (Wood 2000, 72)

6. Explicit prejudice in social world (Wood 2000, 72)

Terrible Transformation

• After 1650: no longer use of religious differences to serve greed and self interests of white settlers, now used color and associations assigned to phenotype to define and justify slavery (Wood 2000, 65)

• Unchangeability of phenotype (compared to religious and spiritual background being able to change in order to get free)

• No longer described as ““heathen people” but as “black people” and “They began, for the first time, to describe themselves not as Christians, but as “whites”” (Wood 2000, 68)

• Large and gradual changes

How African Americans create a distinct culture amid bondage?

• Indian-African relations: blend Native & African foods to create hybrid cuisine (gumbo (Wood 2000, 81)

• Palmetto leaves unknown to Europeans but recognized by Africans were used to make “circular baskets…, as they had in Africa” (Wood 2000, 81)

• “Africans who survived the middle passage brought numerous skills with them” (Wood 2000, 82)

• “Creating families was as difficult as preserving old ones” (Wood 2000, 85) but intensely valued nonetheless (a new healthy life being born, survivance)

• Musical traditions, drums to remember and allow African culture to outlast bondage (Wood 2000, 86)

• Expanded linguistic traditions: Africans learned from one another & created new phrases based on the diversity of people who were captured (Wood 2000, 87)

• Despite trying to make Africans appear “inferior,” “appearance was difficult to legislate” & many would “dress in extravagant English finery” on some holidays and on others wear “colors and materials that invoked their free African past” (Wood 2000, 88)

• Distinct, time-consuming, and communicative messaging through hairstyles (Wood 2000, 88-89)

• Combined belief systems “in a process of evolution that took many generations” (Wood 2000, 89)

Brown I*

Brown II*

Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)

Supreme Court helped restore white rule in Reconstruction period that outlasted Andrew Johnson’s rollbacks

The federal government now covered few privileges of African Americans with narrow meaning and few contexts to apply them

1. right to use navigable waters

2. right to travel

Other rights were in the hands of individual states’ policies (Reconstruction’s major setback and ensured that states’ rights truly meant activating white supremacy)

1863 Civil Rights Cases*

Ruled discrimination in places of commerce to be unconstitutional because it infringed on individual freedoms (right to discriminate)

• CA: SF theatre’s lawyers were supported b/c they were a private business

• NYC: opera house didn’t admit Black people (private business argument again)

• TN: railroad “ladies” car didn’t allow entry of Black women

Civil Rights Act of 1875*

WHO Justice John Marshall Harlan (resistance amid majority views that states should determine how someone could access their rights with or w/o discrimination

WHAT Courts understood that free Black people followed the law during slavery & this act only made token violations

WHY upholds white supremacy and concentration of power

WHEN Reconstruction era, rolling back progress to protecting rights of new citizens (African Americans)

Significance: ensured that simply crossing jurisdictions meant that African Americans’ rights were nonexistent or extremely limited (the property interest in whiteness is pervasive)

Miliken v. Bradley*

Bakke

Croson

Wygant

Race (as a social construct)*

Ideas and values have been ascribed to phenotypical features and biology, values racial dichotomy instead of finding commonality (see Race: The Power of an Illusion)

Convict Leasing*

Jim Crow*

Thirteenth Amendment (1865)*

Fourteenth Amendment*

“Badge of Slavery”*

Accomodationism*

The Tuskegee Way*

Eight-Box Ballot Act*

12 Rules Governing Racial Thinking*

Double Taxation*

States’ Rights