The Whiteness of Property

Abstract:This article examines property from the standpoint of modern chattel slavery and what I posit as a racial theory of labor. Taking cues from Cheryl Harris’s proposition of whiteness as property and Brenna Bhandar’s discussion of “racial regimes of ownership,” colonial/racial regimes of ownership refer us to a critical interrogation of property as the ownership of human persons. If slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labor and Blackness names the ultimate condition of labor’s subordination to capital, then the affinity between whiteness and capital suggests the whiteness of property.