SFFA vs. Harvard

In Cheryl Harris's Whiteness as Property, she argues for an understanding of race as determinant of property. She uses cases like Plessy v. Ferguson to evidence this claim, demonstrating how the United States has established a legal precedent for equating whiteness with property. She then argues that affirmative action is needed to order to remedy these injustices - she states that it could "brake the distorting link between white identity and property." However, given how broad Harris's conception of affirmative action is, I wonder what limitations exist to how different types of "affirmative action" could actually break this link. 

When most people bring up affirmative action at the dinner table, the debate includes a mention of SFFA v. Harvard (maybe thats just my family but I digress). In this case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of SFFA, claiming that affirmative action in higher education violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And yet, Harris says that "The truncated application of affirmative action as a policy has obscured affirmative action as a concept... the debate... cannot be understood unless the concept... is considered and conceptually disengaged from its application in the United States" (1787). Thus, I found myself wondering about the applicability of affirmative action as Harvard used it to the way in which Harris writes about it. 

When conceptualizing race, she states: "whiteness is an aspect of racial identity surely, but it is so much more; it remains a concept based on relations of power, a social construct predicated on white dominance and Black subordination" (1761). Although Harris never uses the word Ideology, the language in this quote evidences a reading of Harris as arguing for racism as an ideology, much like that which Shelby argues for. In conceiving of whiteness as property, Harris shows how race is a social construct; it arose from the material conditions of a need for labor, was further perpetuated in order to maintain these relations of power, and then in turn sought to "justify" extreme injustice. Given the ideological nature of race, and its perpetuation from and of the material conditions and relations of power, the argument could be made that one must abolish such material conditions and relations. Affirmative action thus should work to abolish such conditions which facilitated racism and led to its inception. Harris conceptualizes what affirmative action should look like when she says: 

 "If affirmative action 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 "create an illusion of unity" among whites" (1789). 

But if one were to look to Harvard's model of affirmative action pre-SFFA, it's worth asking whether their policy was actually carrying out this goal. Harris argues that the core value of whiteness is its exclusivity, an exclusivity predicated not on any intrinsic characteristic, but on the symbolic construction of an "other." If that is true, then simply admitting more students of color to an elite institution may not do the work of dismantling that exclusivity. If anything, it risks preserving the very system of elite higher education that perpetuates extreme wealth inequality - inequality that itself disproportionately burdens communities of color. Harvard's model of affirmative action, in other words, may be better understood as redistributing access to an exclusionary system rather than challenging the material conditions that made that system possible. And if Harris is right that racism is sustained by those material conditions, then affirmative action of that kind may fall short of what she envisions, or actually exacerbate patterns of exclusivity that she seeks to dismantle. 



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