Cheryl Harris Explores Ties Between Legal History and Modern Inequality at UC Law SF 

Ten years ago, while on a road trip in Alabama, Cheryl Harris stumbled upon something deeply unsettling. Billboards with provocative slogans claimed that being anti-racist or pro-diversity meant supporting the persecution—and even extermination—of white people.

Harris, a leading scholar of critical race theory and law, was stunned. She dug deeper and discovered that the signs were sponsored by the White Genocide Project—an organization labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The slogans, Harris said, echoed a conspiracy theory pushed by white nationalists—one that paints white people as the true victims of racism and anti-racism as a threat to their survival.

“None of these core claims is new,” Harris said. “They are part of the original myth that projects the United States as the white nation.”

Harris questioned how the billboards’ message, denounced a decade ago by local officials in the predominately white towns where they appeared, has now entered political discourse and become “the premise of current government policies and edicts.”

Harris shared this story in her keynote address for the Racial Capitalism Symposium at UC Law San Francisco on Feb. 7. Her speech in a packed auditorium on campus served as the school’s Mathew O. Tobriner Memorial Lecture, honoring the late California Supreme Court justice. Harris serves this year as the Wiley Manuel Visiting Scholar and Professor with Center for Racial and Economic Justice (CREJ), which sponsored the symposium.

While the campaign to shift attitudes on racism is contemporary, Harris explained, the strategy behind it is centuries old. U.S. legal systems have long played a role in upholding whiteness as more than just a social privilege—but as a form of property protected by law, she said. This was the central argument of her groundbreaking 1993 article, “Whiteness as Property.”

“A right legally protected for centuries is not easily relinquished,” Harris said.

To illustrate her point, Harris examined three major Supreme Court cases over the past 50 years:

• Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978): Harris called this case “a partial victory and an actual defeat” for affirmative action. Although the court upheld affirmative action, it did so only to achieve diversity—not to address the ongoing impacts of past discrimination. “The most robust forms of remediation, like quotas, were ruled out, and the most robust justifications for policy were ruled out of bounds,” Harris noted. The primary focus of the case was on the harm caused to whites by attempting to address racism, she said.
• Grutter v. Bollinger (2003): In a case about law school admissions, the Supreme Court again upheld affirmative action on narrow grounds while striking down the undergraduate affirmative action program. Harris said the case ignored the ways structural racism operated to choke off opportunity for many students. Instead, the court cited the educational benefits of diversity, bolstered by claims that a diverse officer corps and professional class support military cohesion and business prosperity. “This is the neoliberal solution to the management of various crises: accommodating modest racial reform while sustaining white hierarchy,” Harris said.
• Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023): In the most recent decision, the Supreme Court struck down the consideration of race in college admissions. Unlike previous rulings, she said, this decision did not rely on arguments about the benefits of diversity. And while portraying concern about the alleged negative impact of affirmative action on Asian American applicants, Harris said the Court ignored the way that privileged whites benefited from nominally race neutral preferences like those for legacy admits and athletes. Again, she said, the primary object of anti-discrimination law is to protect whites from anti-white racism. “There’s a desperate effort here to shore up the value of whiteness against signs of morbidity,” she said.

Harris also reflected on broader political trends, noting that the two-party system appears ill-equipped to address the underlying inequalities in American society and “attacks on the very structure of government coming from an administration organized around replacing democratic institutions with autocracy.”

She said these attacks have produced a “weird, contradictory phenomenon,” where liberal resistance is reduced to defend institutions they previously criticized—like federal law enforcement—to counter what they see as a growing fascist threat. She said, “the threat is real, but the neoliberal face of the opposition party has no credibility with a working class that has been left behind.”

She said efforts to suppress attention to race as politically counterproductive in favor of gestures towards class fail to recognize that the extraction of the value of labor is bound up with and not abstracted from the racialized bodies that perform it. “It is how race and capitalism are intertwined,” she said.

Citing historian Robin D.G. Kelley, Harris argued that both neoliberalism and fascism aim to sustain the dominance of finance capital. She said that while fascism’s commitment to rule by force is rejected by neoliberal elites, the latter still falls short. “They’re fighting over a project that doesn’t leave room for democratic participation by ordinary people,” she said.

Harris compared today’s political climate to the interregnum, a term Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci used to describe the period between World War I and II when old systems were collapsing but new ones had yet to emerge. “In this interregnum, he says a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” she said, quoting Gramsci.

Harris ended on a hopeful note, drawing inspiration from civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. Though Hamer never lived to see the America she envisioned—one marked by freedom, fairness, and equal opportunity—she refused to accept the status quo and never gave up on the dream.

“She understood and acted upon the basic knowledge that this refusal is a choice we can always make together,” Harris said. “It’s what we do in ways big and small. And today together we can remember and imagine a future we do not yet see.”

Additional Symposium Highlights

The symposium also featured panels exploring links between racial capitalism and the global economy and how legal frameworks shape and sustain these relationships.

Professor Ming Hsu Chen, director of UC Law SF’s Center for Race, Immigration, Citizenship and Equality (RICE), spoke with UC Irvine Law Professor Veena Dubal about racial capitalism and globalization. Known for her research on gig workers, Dubal described the “fissured workplace,” a term coined by economist David N. Weil, where corporations outsource labor to cut costs. She said this has led to lower wages, fewer benefits, and widening inequality.

Chen highlighted the challenges faced by highly skilled immigrant workers, including H-1B visa holders, who are vulnerable to layoffs in the post-pandemic tech industry.

“It’s particularly hard for people who are not only out of a job, but if they can’t find a job in 60 days, actually have to return to their home country,” Chen said.

Another panel, moderated by CREJ Co-Director Shauna Marshall, featured leading scholars discussing racial capitalism across theory and practice. The panel examined climate change, migration, education, and potential strategies to disrupt entrenched systems.

“The panel illuminated how unfettered capitalism built on white supremacy has not only infiltrated and harmed many of our institutions but has been protected by our legal system,” Marshall said

Panelists included Tonya Brito of University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School; Carmen Gonzalez of Loyola University Chicago School of Law; Angela Harris of Seattle University School of Law; Renee Hatcher of University of Illinois Chicago Law School; and Thalia González, a UC Law SF professor and co-director of CREJ.

González emphasized the symposium’s role in fostering discussions on topics frequently absent in legal education—conversations that help future lawyers, scholars, and leaders understand the complex ties between race, capitalism, and law.

“In a time of accelerated attacks on higher education, the Center on Racial and Economic Justice remains committed to advancing access to robust and historically accurate legal curriculum regarding the intersection of race and law,” she said. “This prepares law students to address the most pressing challenges in racial and economic justice.”