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134 Harv. L. Rev. F. 1 (2020-2021)

handle is hein.journals/forharoc134 and id is 1 raw text is: VOLUME 134 HARVARD LAW REVIEW FORUM © 2020 by The Harvard Law Review Association REFLECTIONS ON WHITENESS AS PROPERTY Cheryl I. Harris* I. CHATTEL Chattel (Black) is the fusion of race and property - embodied as always essential and forever disposable. II. TIME Hard time. 8 minutes and 46 seconds is an eternity. Centuries without a breath. III. HOME Home is not a haven. You can be shot eight times in your home, in your bed. Before anything. Before you can breathe. IV. TERRA NULLIUS A walk in the pandemic. Dappling sunlight through the leaves. A quiet street in early morning. The symphony of birds. The air as clear as the sky is blue. A bucolic scene that conjures security, tranquility, timelessness. It was always meant to be. But it is a mirage: the tableau was born in theft, and theft continues to sustain it. Through violence, the land and the people are transformed into property, into commodities, abstracted into investments, financial products, and debt instruments.1 * Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, University of California Los Angeles School of Law. My thanks to the editors at the Harvard Law Review for the opportunity to seek and reflect on connections between past and present. My grat- itude also to voices of protest who point towards possible futures. 1 Black bodies were cast as living currency around which were built valuation systems, insur- ance, financial products, banking institutions, and other forms of financialization central to the development of racial capitalism. See, e.g., ERIC WILLIAMS, CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY (1944) (discussing the constitutive role of new world slavery in developing industrial capitalism); CALVIN SCHERMERHORN, THE BUSINESS OF SLAVERY AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM, 1815-1860, at 2 (2015) (North American capitalism developed in the context of an Atlantic system 1I

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