White Privilege, or Modern Racism

Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property" was a pretty hefty article with a strong historical context and many (mostly engaging and appropriate) examples including seminal court cases and U.S. law in practice. Her main claim is that, with roots in American practices of conquest and colonization, "whiteness" has become more than just a racial identity; it has become a form of property and a foundation for racialized (white) privilege. The development of whiteness as property and the persistence of its continuing legacy contribute to modern ideas and formulations of racism in U.S. society. Interestingly, Laura Pulido also discusses the social effects of white privilege, but in the context of environmental racism and geographic landscapes.

To be honest, I didn't immediately identify with Harris's connection between whiteness and property, but her argument, though lengthy, was well-written with a bevy of pertinent and tangible examples. Her observation that whiteness has an understood and highly prized, if not directly acknowledged, value in our society is certainly true. But the ways that she applied this with various studies, court cases, and historical events really backed up her claim that whiteness does indeed function as a modern (and status-related) form of property.

I think an important part of this argument is the fact that valuing whiteness inherently requires a devaluing of the "other" in order to perpetuate the ideas and practices of white privilege. Both whiteness and property are based on concepts of exclusion (isolating ownership of these entities for one's own), and our entire society operates on the assumption that this privilege should not be disturbed (as it would implicate an upheaval of sorts in almost every social relation that is constructed upon this privilege; that is, all social relations).

I found Harris's article to be more readable than Pulido's, which included discussion of many initially abstract concepts like intentionality and scale in an exploration of essentially, the production of environmental racism by both conscious effort (targeting of groups) and unconscious and broader social processes ("white flight", etc). I connected more deeply with Harris's discussion of white privilege as it affected (and effected) real policies concerning issues like affirmative action.

Nationalism and Illegal Alienage

Mai Ngai explores the historical trajectory of "illegal aliens" in terms of U.S. law and society. She draws connections between race and illegal status, building on many concepts from last week's readings (construction of racial ideologies and racialized spaces), while also contributing new and interesting claims of her own. She differentiates between legal aliens, illegal aliens, and "alien citizens" (more on that later). Kim and de Genova also refer to the ideas of Omi and Winant (Kim more explicitly) in their historical explorations of the racialization of Asians and Latinos in the U.S.

One of the main themes of Ngai's book Impossible Subjects is the role of U.S. immigration restrictions in the construction of modern ideas of race and citizenship - in particular, the development of current racial hierarchies. As she says, restrictive immigration policy "produced new categories of racial difference" (6); as such, "illegal alienage" is not, as many might think, a natural condition, but one that is very dependent on law, policy, and the exercise of sovereignty. I identified with her example of the racial formation of Asians as contingent on histories of "conquest and colonialism" (8), because I think this plays a huge role in the ways that Asian-Americans are viewed as a racial Other. Even though individuals may be U.S. citizens by birth, they can be assumed to be "foreign" or "other" by virtue of their racial categorization and affiliation with illegal immigration. This is the idea of the "alien citizen."

Ngai also includes a "globalist perspective" on immigration policy, noting that migration is a process that is bound by space and time, and mobilized by greater forces between nations and those in power. Particularly important is her emphasis on our understanding of immigration as wholly influenced by workings of nationalism and sovereignty. De Genova also discusses nationalism in the creation of an inherent racial identity, saying, “U.S. nationalism’s very appropriation for itself of ‘American’-ness as its exclusive ‘national’ identity could never be other than a European settler-state’s imperial gesture of usurpation” (5). This challenge to U.S. nationalism is the theme in this week’s reading that I found most thought-provoking. Especially in recent times, nationalism is often equated with pride in one’s country, and thus seems to be almost dangerous to question. De Genova and Ngai show us that it’s necessary to question what we often take for granted.

Human Geography and the Racialized Landscape

These first four readings largely centered on ideas of race as embedded in our spatial, cultural, and visual understanding of the world. I'm glad that Omi and Winant was the first. Though I had read "Racial Formation" previously, reading it in conjunction with the other three pieces offered a little more understanding. Their theory of racial formation is an alternative to conventional paradigms of race as it is viewed in the U.S. They argue that the state as an institution is inherently racial, just as Lipsitz, Schein, and Rojas argue that space and landscape are structured by racial ideas and ideologies.

I found the Schein article to be the most captivating, not only because I haven't read many studies of the normativity of landscape, but also for its focus on individual and collective perceptions of cultural landscapes. I appreciated Schein's theoretical discussion of landscape as a spatial, visual, AND material way of framing the world. He mentions the ideas of J.B. Jackson (whose humanistic approach is also noted by Rojas), namely that landscape is an organization of space, and to understand it, we must ask who owns, uses, creates, and changes this space. And not only that, but who does it affect? How does the process happen?

The idea of a human geography, imbued with a morality of sorts, is really interesting. Viewing the landscape as it's linked to our identities and "desires," not just for its aesthetic or profitability, shows that it is not just a byproduct of human activity, but as Jackson noted, "capable of providing for social change" (202). Lipsitz also discusses moral geography, exploring the American ideal of pure space and its manifestation in segregated residential areas. He takes on the rise of suburbia as the creation of a “white spatial imaginary.” This is particularly interesting in contrast to Rojas’s study of Latino suburbs in East LA, a different example of the racialization of a particular urban landscape.