{"id":38359,"date":"2014-11-17T01:07:20","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T01:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38359"},"modified":"2017-03-01T13:40:26","modified_gmt":"2017-03-01T13:40:26","slug":"the-value-of-whiteness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38359","title":{"rendered":"The Value of Whiteness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/190489\/value-whiteness\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>The Value of Whiteness<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/columns\/diary-mad-law-professor\" target=\"_blank\">The Diary of a Mad Law Professor<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\" target=\"_blank\">The Nation<\/a><br \/>\n2014-11-12<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.law.columbia.edu\/fac\/Patricia_Williams\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Patricia J. Williams<\/strong><\/a>, James L. Dohr Professor of Law<br \/>\n<em>Columbia Law School, New York, New York<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>A lawsuit is being waged against the \u201cwrongful birth\u201d of a black child.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In a recent encounter between <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fox_News_Channel\" target=\"_blank\">Fox\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bill_O%27Reilly_(political_commentator)\" target=\"_blank\">Bill O\u2019Reilly<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Comedy_Central\" target=\"_blank\">Comedy Central\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jon_Stewart\" target=\"_blank\">Jon Stewart<\/a>, the two men discussed \u201cwhite privilege.\u201d O\u2019Reilly maintained that his accomplishments had nothing to do with race and everything to do with hard work. Stewart pointed out that O\u2019Reilly had grown up in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Levittown,_New_York\" target=\"_blank\">Levittown, New York<\/a>, a planned community to which the federal and local governments transferred tremendous mortgage subsidies and other public benefits\u2014while barring black people from living there\u2014in the post\u2013<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/World_War_II\" target=\"_blank\">World War II<\/a> period. O\u2019Reilly thereby reaped the benefits of a massive, racially exclusive government wealth transfer. As legal scholar <a href=\"https:\/\/law.ucla.edu\/faculty\/faculty-profiles\/cheryl-i-harris\/\" target=\"_blank\">Cheryl Harris<\/a> observed in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=37896\" target=\"_blank\">1993 <em>Harvard Law Review<\/em> article<\/a>, \u201cthe law has established and protected an actual property interest in whiteness\u201d\u2014its value dependent on the full faith and credit placed in it, ephemeral but with material consequences.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/s3.documentcloud.org\/documents\/1307597\/sperm-bank-lawsuit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">A recent lawsuit<\/a> brought by Jennifer Cramblett pursues the stolen property of whiteness in unusually literal terms. Cramblett is suing an <a href=\"http:\/\/midwestspermbank.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ohio sperm bank<\/a> for mistakenly inseminating her with the sperm of an African-American donor, \u201ca fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter [Payton] in an all-white community,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=37544\" target=\"_blank\">according to the <em>Chicago Tribune<\/em><\/a>. Cramblett is suing for breach of warranty and negligence in mishandling the vials of sperm with which she was inseminated, as well as emotional and economic loss as a result of \u201cwrongful birth,\u201d which deprived her of the whiteness she thought she was purchasing&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/190489\/value-whiteness\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lawsuit is being waged against the \u201cwrongful birth\u201d of a black child.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,1467,8,20],"tags":[1965,18241,17990,3058,3411,18442,2831],"class_list":["post-38359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-cheryl-harris","tag-cheryl-i-harris","tag-jennifer-cramblett","tag-patricia-j-williams","tag-patricia-williams","tag-the-diary-of-a-mad-law-professor","tag-the-nation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38359"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51947,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359\/revisions\/51947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}