The "Consolation Prize" of the White Working Class

  Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” puts forth an explanation as to how racial identity formed and was translated into property interests protected by law. Harris draws heavily upon the history of interracial interaction in the United States to construct this explanation. She not only chronicles the events that formed racial identities, attached economic value to racial identity, and legitimated that economic value through law, but she also at times ascribes motivation to these events and speculates at the intentions behind the choices made in the United States. This attribution of motivation is a key part of Harris’s description of slavery.

    Harris points to a time where black slaves and white unfree laborers were both part of the working force. Though the two groups could be distinguished from one another, there was not yet a notion that all black people were slaves. This distinction between the two groups grew, however. White laborers were indentured for a term of many years rather than forever, and the demand for labor was increasing, so reliance on black slaves as a source of labor increased. As reliance on black slaves increased, “virtually all slaves were not white” (1717). Blackness corresponded so much with being enslaved that the mere characteristic of being black became sufficient justification for being enslaved or being presumed by others to be a slave. Creating this othering social category of black people facilitated the creation of slave codes and other laws that defended whiteness as property. Laws that dictated that any children of a slave mother and white father were to be born slaves essentially converted black women into factories to produce more slaves, the ultimate sign of the commodification of slave bodies. 

Harris clearly believes that these events stem from the white colonists’ interests in securing a cheap labor force. It was the realization that white indentured servants would not be a sufficient labor force that made the white plantation owners in the United States rely more heavily on black slaves for labor. Converting racial identities into property that can be defended by the state secures white Americans an entire socioeconomic class of laborers.

As a reader, I realized that this reasoning can be extended to show that wealthy white Americans can also use the concept of whiteness as property to secure two separate and distinct socioeconomic classes of laborers: black working class Americans and white working class Americans. Harris says that whiteness persists as a valued social identity, and, therefore, whiteness serves as a “consolation prize” (1758) for white Americans. White working class Americans perceive themselves to be higher in the pecking order than black working class Americans by virtue of being white. Though white working class Americans do tend to have higher incomes, they still lack substantial wealth compared to the wealthy white Americans. However, they put up with their socioeconomic status because they perceive themselves to be above black Americans and therefore not at the bottom of American hierarchy. 

Given this reasoning, it seems that wealthy Americans, especially those whose enterprises rely on working class labor from both black and white working class Americans, have a major incentive to defend whiteness as a valued social identity. The idea of white supremacy is essential to their access to labor and may even contribute to the white working class’s acceptance of the growing economic inequality in the United States.