How Ingrained Racism Became Invisible

I interrogate the killing of Ahmaud Arbery using critical race legal scholar Cheryl Harris’ view of whiteness as property. I offer a counter-narrative telling of events to explain how ideological principles rooted in the concept of whiteness as property continues to undergird the agreed upon practices in neighborhoods like Satilla Shores – where Arbery was pursued, shot, and killed by white residents of the development. In doing so, I explore how these principles and practices breed and foster a form of racialized injustice that gets routinely rationalized and excused through a set of normalizations, which privilege whiteness and white logic.

Fostering Spaces for Black Joy in STEM-Rich Making and Beyond

What does it mean to express Black joy and loving blackness through STEM-rich making? What does it mean for Black youth in community-based, youth-focused makerspaces to express Black joy and loving blackness? We look at how Black youth alongside their facilitators co-create spaces of Black joy through making. These makerspaces are located at two local Boys and Girls Clubs in the US Midwest and the Southeast. Makerspaces are informal sites where youth are encouraged to work collaboratively while building digital and physical artifacts. As two Black female STEM educators working with Black youth we frame our work in critical race theory. Specifically we draw on the tenets of whiteness as property and counter-narratives. Using critical ethnographic methods, we explore the ways in which Black youth produce counter-narratives that disrupt whiteness as property through STEM-rich making. Data sources include fieldnotes; artifacts, such as youth work; interviews; and video recordings. The first vignette highlights how two Black girls navigate choosing and creating characters using Scratch. The second vignette focuses on a brother and sister duo who center their making on family and their shared maker identity. We then discuss the freedoms afforded to youth with flexible co-designed curriculum with facilitators and how we foster open spaces. We address this special issue’s driving question by asking, How do we, as STEM facilitators, counter anti-blackness in/through STEM by fostering space for Black joy with youth in making?

Wrestling the Elephant

White supremacist ideology is the elephant in the social work classroom, negatively impacting educators’ abilities to facilitate discussion and learning. One of the most effective ways to dismantle and organize against white supremacy is to politicize the seemingly benign moments that occur in the classroom that can create discomfort for students and instructors. Politicization includes identifying and addressing both the racial (micro-) aggressions that occur in the classroom and the processes and institutional policies that create complacency and lull us to sleep. In this conceptual piece, we use a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework to understand how white supremacy perpetuates itself in the classroom, with a particular focus on whiteness as property. As well, we explore what it means to decolonize the classroom. Using a vignette based on our teaching experiences, we use these two frameworks to analyze classroom dynamics and interactions, and discuss how implications for social work education include waking from the metaphorical sleep to recognize the pernicious effects of whiteness and white supremacy. Included are practical individual teaching, relational, and systemic suggestions to enact change.

White Property Interests in College Athletic Admissions

Dominant cultural narratives position college sports as engines of racial integration and upward mobility. Previous studies examined the chances for low-income men of color becoming athletes in two sports: men’s football and basketball. While highly visible, these athletes represent the minority of participants. The majority of college athletes are White and middle class. In this conceptual article, I apply Cheryl Harris’ whiteness as property framework to identify the institutional conditions that prevent college sports from functioning as integrative and mobility engines and instead protect Whites’ privileged access to higher education via sport.

White Fear, White Flight, the Rules of Racial Standing and Whiteness as Property: Why Two Critical Race Theory Constructs are Better Than One

Despite earning the highest grade point average (GPA) in her graduating class at the recently integrated Cleveland High School (CHS) in Cleveland, Mississippi, Ms. Jasmine Shepard, an African-American female, was named “co-valedictorian” with Ms. Heather Bouse, a White female, who had a lower GPA. Utilizing Derrick Bell’s rules of racial standing theory and Cheryl Harris’ analytical construct whiteness as property, this article examines Ms. Shepard’s lawsuit against the Cleveland School District. In addition to explaining how White flight was deployed as a policy distraction to justify the inequitable treatment of Ms. Jasmine Shepard, this article posits that the specter of Ms. Shepard becoming Cleveland High School’s first Black valedictorian triggered area Whites’ fear of losing the property value of their whiteness.

Measuring the Wages of Whiteness: A Project for Political Economists

This comment responds to the recently held Global Research in International Political Economy roundtable on race in IPE. In particular, it argues that scholars of political economy could draw fruitfully on the notion of “whiteness as property” from the critical race theory subfield of law in order to trace the workings of whiteness, and race more broadly, as a material force in the economy.

Operation Varsity Blues: Disguising the legal capital exchanges and white property interests in athletic admissions

“Operation Varsity Blues” (OVB) indicted coaches and administrators from eight universities for accepting bribes in exchange for admitting fraudulent athletes. As part of the conspiracy parents paid university officials to admit students with little-to-no sport experience as college athletes. Court filings in the case contrasted OVB to the legal process of athletic recruitment and admission in which universities set different criteria to admit those with athletic talent (Smith, 2019a). This conceptual article cautions against such a contrast. Using Harris’ (1993) whiteness as property, Bourdieu’s (2011) capital exchange theory, and findings from my research into athletic recruitment and admission, I examine how OVB closely resembles current athletic admissions practices that provide a legal pathway to college that privileges white, elite communities.