Cheryl Harris And Claudia Rankine's Whiteness As Property

For centuries, the world has witnessed the different peculiar forms of the racism in the form of prejudice and stereotyping. Millions of the people has been haunted by this issue of racial discrimination worldwide. This essay discusses the current issues of racial inequality on the basis of color, race, sex, etc. as well as portraying the real picture of the present United States of America, where the law has come to support and legitimize benefits that accrue to white people only. Claudia Rankine in her poetry ‘Citizen – An American Lyric’ and African American legal scholar Cheryl Harris in her article ‘Whiteness as Property’ develop their arguments about the ongoing exploitation of the people of color and agree that the black community is

They depict that how the white supremacy and its biased ideology is being systematically established and how the system has managed to make society numb towards the oppression of the blacks rendering them invisible. Rankine constructs her argument about the systematic erasure of the black community by presenting different instances of racial discrimination, police brutality and killings of the black people by the police and the white people. In order to prove her argument, Claudia reminds us the horrible natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, experienced by the black community in New Orleans, in 2005. The Hurricane catastrophe exposed the real racist picture of the contemporary United States, where the majority of black people struggled for their survival before and post the hurricane catastrophes. She expresses her pain for the blacks by writing, “I don’t know what the water wanted. It wanted to show you no one would come” (Rankine 94).This means that the lives of black people in the disaster were of no cost for white administration and there was no hope of help for them. The system intentionally saved the white people on the priority basis, while leaving blacks behind for dying. She connects her argument with Harris by taking us on a personal and conceptual journey through the contemporary black experience and provides an opportunity to explore our understanding of processes that reinforce the white supremacy. Similarly, Harris recounts her story of America’s racist theory and asserts that the valuation of whiteness and this similar system of erasure and creates a link between whiteness and judicial legal system. She writes, “[…]the courts protected whiteness as any other form of property (Harris 1736). She reveals that how the judicial system has been a crucial tool in protecting the property, rights, wealth and privileges etc. of the whites in the United