On Denying Prejudice and Discrimination
...I came up behind a couple and their young son. The child, about four or five years old, had evidently been complaining about big dogs. The mother was saying, 'But why are you afraid of big dogs?' 'Because they're big,' he responded with an eminent good sense. 'But what's the difference between a big dog and a little dog?' the father persisted. 'They're big,' said the child. 'But there's really no difference,' said the mother, pointing to a large slathering wolfhound with narrow eyes and the calculated amble of a gangster, and then to a beribboned Pekinese the size of a roller skate, who was flouncing along just ahead of us all, in that little fox-trotty step that keep Pekinese from ever being taken seriously. 'See?' said the father. 'If you look really closely you'll see there's no difference at all. They're all just dogs.'
...I used this story in my class because I think it illustrates a paradigm of thought by which children are taught not to see what they see; by which blacks are reassured that there is no real inequality in the world, just their own bad dreams; and by which women are taught not to experience what they experience, in deference to men's ways of knowning. The story also illustrates the possibility of a collective perspective or social positioning that would give rise to a claim for the legal interests of groups. In a historical moment when individual rights have become the basis for any remedy, too often group interests are defeated by, for example, finding the one four-year-old who has wrestled whole packs of wolfhounds fearlessly to the ground; using that individual experience to attack the validity of there ever being any generalizable four-year-old fear of wolfhounds; and then recasting the general group experience as a fragmented series of specific, isolated events rather than a pervasive social phenomenon ('You have every right to think that that wolfhound has the ability to bite off your head, but that's just your point of view').
-- Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
On Race and Political Organizing*
While it has allowed various white supporters of movements for social change to justify their fatigue in recent times, the colorblindness attack has destabilized the movement for transformative social change within communities of color as well.
The way to combat this fatigue is to reinvigorate race as a political category, not just for analysis but for action. Race is useful to explain a material reality in which blacks, other people of color, and whites who are otherwise socially positioned in the same way have less social, political, and economic power than others. What we are calling political race is also useful and (and perhaps necessary) for collective organizing to change, through political action, the reality of racialized injustice. Political race is both a critique of the status quo and space for action to change it. It helps locate a problem in a way that allows those most directly affected to function as a catalyst for reform. And it draws on psychological strengths that are already present in the black community. From segregation can come congregation.
-- Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy
On Affirmative Action*
[A]ffirmative action is more than a program: it is a principle, internationally recognized, based on a theory of rights and equality. Formal equality overlooks structural disadvantage and requires mere nondiscrimination or 'equal treatment'; by contrast, affirmative action calls for equalizing treatment by redistributing power and resources in order to rectify inequities and to achieve real equality. The current polarized debate on affirmative action and the intense political and judicial opposition to the concept is thus grounded in the fact that, in its requirement of equalizing treatment, affirmative action implicitly challenges the sanctity of the original and derivative present distribution of property, resources, and entitlements, and it directly confronts the notion that there is a protectable property interest in 'whiteness.' If affirmative action doctrine 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.*Note: My emphasis in bold
-- Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness As Property"
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