Harris or Marx? I Think I Need Glasses Because I'm Seeing Double
While reading Harris’s work, I was struck by how Marx’s framework—the idea that material conditions shape social structures and that ideology serves to justify the resulting oppression—applies to her analysis of whiteness as property. For example, she illustrates that during the period of indentured servitude, there was an almost negligible distinction between Black and White servants. It was only when the material conditions shifted as “decreasing terms of service were introduced for white bond servants” and the “demand for labor intensified” (1717), which created a greater reliance on African labor, that such a distinction developed. In accordance with Marx’s analysis, this shift in material conditions necessitated the production of an ideology that framed Blackness as inherently inferior and solidified a racial hierarchy. This ideology was created to rationalize an economic system that depended on the violent subjugation of Black people. Moreover, Harris highlights that law, as an instrument of the dominant class, played a central role in codifying this ideology into an enforceable system of racial oppression. As she notes, “between 1680 and 1682, the first slave codes appeared, codifying the extreme deprivations of liberty already existing in social practice.” (1718)
Harris’ analysis of the status of interracial children also demonstrates the application of Marx’s framework. She notes that the Virginia colonial assembly asserted that “children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother” (1719). However, this rule directly contradicts the “usual common law presumption that the status of the child is determined by the father” (1719), which had been the prevailing legal norm in determining inheritance and social status. Harris argues that this legal shift was rooted in material conditions as it strategically ensured that the offspring of enslaved Black women would also be enslaved and thus labor force could be expanded without requiring additional capital. Thus, we see the ideology of racial hierarchy and Black inferiority as a response to direct economic demands that justified the legal codification of hereditary slavery.
This also made me wonder: if racial hierarchy is inherently linked to property rights, how does this shape or change contemporary debates on reparations, wealth redistribution, and land ownership? Does it redefine what justice and equity should entail in these discussions?
Not a Marxist, but I think Marx was onto something.
Hi! Great post -- I hadn't thought about how much material conditions come up in Harris' argument!
ReplyDeleteI was also thinking a lot about how much Harris describes an ideology that sounds much like the one Marx depicts. Existing oppression of Black people became justified in law and further incorporated into the psyche of white Americans through the strategic acknowledgement or denial of social norms. This interaction between subjective reality and formal rules furthered the ideology which justified oppression.
The courts denied subjective reality in favor of "objective" reality to deny Black people any property rights to whiteness by determining Blackness based on blood. Even if a person was "completely indistinguishable from a white person," if their "blood was tainted, she could not claim to be 'white' as the law understood" (1739). In this way, the laws made by white people denied the relevance of empirical experience and deferred to a more objective indicator of race. The court relied on the presumption that race could in the past been historically objective, despite it being subjective in the present. This took away any claim that a "passing" Black person could have to the privileges of whiteness.
Alternatively, the courts validated a subjective sense of reality (justice?) over a formal one to defend white people against Affirmative Action programs. In the suit against the City of Richmond's minority business enterprise program, the city "had managed to spend only .67% of its contracting dollars with minority-owned business in a city that was over 50% Black" but the courts nonetheless voted to "evaluate an affirmative action program under the Equal Protection Clause" (1774). Cases like these accept white people's subjective experiences of reality over an objective sense of justice or equality. While objective reality or reason would require that funding be allocated proportionally to the demographic makeup of the population (or at least close), the law accepts white people's experience of historically being dominantly situated as the standard of justice.
The law conveniently flipped between acknowledging race or experience based on race as being objective or a social invention in whichever way maintained whiteness as property and reaffirm the ideology which oppressed Black people. Harris argues that the way to begin to break down the ideology which justifies oppression is laws which acknowledge the empirical inequalities that exist between Black people and white people without normalizing or justifying them.
Great places to focus in Harris' argument, and certainly some of the places that explicitly appeal to economic forces to provide explanations of the production of ideology to rationalize what she identifies as unjust oppression based upon social constructions of race.
ReplyDeleteCurious to hear more, Violet, about this subjective/objective distinction. I would have thought that her point was that objectively, many people of almost entirely European ancestry were 'objectively' classified as not white -- not about subjective experience vs objectivity, but about a false objectivity obscurity reality.