“Whiteness” as a Waste of Space
17th April 2019
Steve Sailer reads this stuff so you don’t have to.
Sofia Leung:
One of the mind-blowing things she shared was this idea of how our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks. Pause here and think about this.
If you don’t already know, “whiteness as property,” is a seminal Critical Race Theory (CRT) concept first introduced by Cheryl I. Harris in her 1993 Harvard Law Review article by the same name. She writes, “slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property” (p. 1721) and the formation of whiteness as property required the erasure of Native peoples. Basically, white people want to stay being white because of the privilege and protection whiteness affords under the law that they created. Harris also makes this really good point, “whiteness and property share a common premise — a conceptual nucleus — of a right to exclude” (1714). Bam! That really hits it on the head.
As I’m collaborating on this book about CRT in Library and Information Studies (LIS), I’ve been having lots of discussions on these topics with some really smart folx.
Where do they find these people?
Ace of Spades; Library Journal Comes Out Against… Libraries