Movable Things: Expectations in the Law and Society
In “Whiteness As Property,” Cheryl Harris explains how expectations have historically become property under US law: “Because the law recognized and protected expectations grounded in white privilege (albeit not explicitly in all instances), these expесtations became tantamount to property that could not permissibly be intruded upon without consent” (Harris 1731). Harris is describing reification, the transformation of an intangible concept like an expectation into a real thing like property. Her claim that expectations can show up in physical ways is reminiscent of Miranda Fricker’s study of social power. In Epistemic Injustice, Fricker analyzes philosopher Thomas Wartenberg’s example of power dynamics: “the power that a university teacher has over her students in grading their work [is] directly dependent upon co-ordination with…the potential employers who take notice of grades” (Fricker 12). Although Fricker does not explicitly mention the reification of expectations in her analysis of Wartenberg’s example, the concept is present all the same. When employers expect students to have high GPAs, students come to expect teachers to facilitate those grades. Fricker and Wartenberg’s example demonstrates how expectations transfer from one agent to another in society. In the context of whiteness and the law, white people expect to be afforded certain privileges by society, so society expects the law to uphold those privileges. Harris’s study of whiteness as property reveals how the law reifies expectations of white privilege while Fricker’s study of social power demonstrates the transferability of expectations in society. Together, the two authors reinforce the notion that an expectation, or an idea about something that does not exist yet, carries real weight in the United States.
Works Cited
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Harris, Cheryl I., “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 8, p. 1707, 1993.
