Far across the sea, there’s a certain land in which curious practices began to emerge some time ago. These practices began with the idea of documenting the work people were doing. Someone had the brilliant idea to ask each person to fill out a form to show how much they had done at such and such a time. It was never clear that the information so collected had any bearing on the work or the people involved, but the form was beautiful and quickly evolved from a few simple questions into a formidable document.

Soon, it was decided that forms would be useful in health care, asking all kinds of questions about the body, regardless of whether that information would be used. There were then forms for voting, for taxes, for getting a job, for running a business, for schools, for shopping, for clubs, for religion, for travel, for sports, for software, indeed for every aspect of the people’s lives. In the early stage, the typical form would fit on a sheet of paper. But that stage was short-lived. The forms began to grow, soon needing special, long sheets of paper, or multiple sheets. Then, online forms appeared, with checkboxes, open fields, Previous and Next buttons and all sorts of other helpful features.

An especially useful feature was “Are you absolutely sure that the information you have entered is accurate and complete? Severe penalties for non-compliance will ensue.” This one was good because the forms were inevitably obscure and self-contradictory, making it a challenge to know what one had just filled out, much less whether it was accurate and complete.

A major advance in the practice of forms was to create forms to determine whether you were filling out other forms properly. Ethics compliance forms were established to check that other activities, inevitably themselves involving forms, were properly conducted. As with the other uses of forms, the genesis was quite understandable. For example, people had been incorrectly filling out forms to issue driving licenses, thus endangering the public. A new form arose to ensure more ethical behavior. The fact that ethical abuses escalated following the introduction of the new ethical form led to a now-familiar phenomenon: The form was expanded. Again, the link between ends and means was tenuous at best.

An especially interesting aspect of the forms culture was that some forms could not be completed without first doing another form. Completing the second form would lead to the production of a control number to be entered on the first, assuming of course that it, the second one, could be properly completed, submitted, and reviewed. This practice reached its zenith with the realization that form number two could itself require the completion of another form, and so on.

In this way, the forms began to come alive, each connected to the others though a complex, essentially unknowable rhizomatic network. Forms naturally spawned other forms in an ever-growing ecology of forms in multiple media.

As the forms ecology grew, some people began to raise questions about whether it was possible to complete a form if doing so entailed completing other forms in an endless succession. Fortunately, there were philosophers and mathematicians to weigh on on this question. One school of thought, the Infinitists, began to argue that the chains of forms were infinite, meaning that some forms were uncompleteable, a seeming tragedy in the forms world. Others claimed that the total number of forms had to be finite, but that there were circular chains such that a form could be completed only by being already completed.

This latter view is reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s demand on the reader in his The World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer says that his book has but one idea. That idea is an organic whole that cannot be expressed by a book with “a first and a last line.” His compromise solution to this conundrum is to ask the reader to read the book twice or not at all. The Circularists,  as those who believed in the circular chains of forms came to be called, adopted a similar view: They argued that although the circular topology prevented the form from ever being completed, repeated revisitings could lead to a kind of oneness with the form akin to groking Schopenhauer’s one organic idea.

Pragmatists, of the Peircean variety were quick to see the ever-increasing complexity of the forms ecology, with its convoluted topologies and possible lack of finitude. But they emphasized an additional wrinkle that had passed by even some of the great connoisseuers of forms. The forms were not static; they could change in small and large ways at a moment’s notice. This meant, among other things, that having completed a form on one day was no assurance that one would not be required to complete it again the next.

There was also a curious aspect of the storage of forms data. I’ve remarked on the separation of the forms from the dally life and purposes they purported to address. But beyond that, they spoke to themselves in what some deemed to be a fractured dialect. Forms completed at a doctor’s office could not communicate with the apparently similar form at the physical therapy facility whose purpose was to implement the doctor’s prescription. And neither of those forms could speak to the pharmacy forms or those of the medical supply.  This occurred even when the facilities were all part of the same organization.

On the other hand, even though the forms were disconnected from daily life and each other, they had a remarkable ability to retain and communicate data in a dysfunctional fashion. For example, no matter how grudgingly and circumspectly people had revealed details of their lives or how many assurances had been made, these details were regularly transmitted throughout the land. The word for “privacy” disappeared from the language, as it no longer had a use.

Despite the massive accumulation and dissemination of data engendered by the forms, people seemed to know less and less about one another or the concrete problems they faced in their lives. The reason was clear: Police spent time on forms, not on preventing crime; health providers likewise became adept at forms, but not at ensuring health; teachers knew every line and checkbox, but had little time for details such as students.

Over time, the people learned that nothing was real in their lives unless it could fit on a form–their wealth, their citizenship, their job, their spouse, and so on. What could not be form-alized did not exist. The forms became the reality they originally sought only to document. They infiltrated every aspect of the people’s lives and slithered with ease across natural and political boundaries. While the forms ecology had a beginning in specific times and places, it warmed the hearts of forms afficianados to know that there was no way to stop their spread.

I welcome comments on this little story. There’s a form below for your convenience.

[Photo from the Camara site]

Dom Helder Camara, the Brazilian archbishop is famous for saying “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

Camara is a volunteer organization in Dublin, Ireland, which empowers communities in Africa by using technology in education.

I’ve written about Camara before in terms of its history and its role in third-level education. As it’s come up in some recent conversations, I thought it was worth a reminder. We should note that Camara has now distributed nearly 14,000 computers in Africa.

Their activities include these from their website:

Miguel de Unamuno says that anyone who invents a concept takes leave of reality. I like that statement both for its literal meaning that reality can nver be fully captured by a single concept, and in the suggestion that concepts imply a kind of madness.

Unamuno’s dictum applies to the question “How useful is the concept of community?”, because community designations betray the individual in two senses. One is that every community designation necessarily strips away the uniqueness of the individuals within. A term such as “immigrants” is clearly impoverished with respect to the many reasons, origins, and experiences of immigrants.

But a community designation can not only strip away individual meaning; it can attach wrong, or even contradictory meanings. For example, if we say that someone is a member of the “elderly community,” we impute a large set of attributes that may be totally off. She might be 90 years old, but rather than suffering “elderly decline,” she might be longing for that iPod we had provided to the “youth community” to share the latest music. There’s even some evidence that the very old are healthier than the somewhat old, because they were the ones who survived past critical health hurdles.

What makes this all even more interesting is that we can’t think without concepts, and we do better when we make use of even faulty information. A member of the “library patron community” may come to the library to get warm, to order some coffee (as at Urbana Free Library), to get a date, to sleep, or a host of other reasons.

Nevertheless, it’s helpful to know that many visitors seek information. Similarly, many immigrants may need help dealing with often absurd regulations that don’t apply to citizens in a country. Many elderly people have special physical or mental challenges well beyond those faced by most younger people.

These thoughts keep bringing me back to the need for dialogue. In so many cases, well-intentioned people make judgments and decisions without really listening to those they’re trying to help. Most examples of community designations betraying the individual, could at least be better addressed by starting with the idea of listening to each others’ experiences first.

References

• De Unamuno, Miguel (1921). Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (The tragic sense of life). New York: Macmillan.

We had to take down a beautiful maple tree at the back of the house that was way too close to the foundation. Still, there are other maples nearby. And look at the dogwoods. Burning bush, pruned by the deer up to nose height. And leaves from yesterday’s storms. We still have plenty of trees. –Susan Bruce

In my last post, I talked about the parable of the blind men and the elephant, concluding that if we want to know how others see the world, “we need to ask.”

But often, simple asking is not enough. John Dewey includes the following story (from Ogden and Richards, quoting J. H. Weeks) in his Essays in Experimental Logic. He obviously liked the story as I do, because he repeats it in his Logic: The theory of inquiry:

I remember on one occasion wanting the word for Table. There were five or six boys standing around, and tapping the table with my forefinger, I asked, ‘What is this?’ One boy said it was a dodela, another that it was an etanda, another stated that it was bokali, a fourth that it was elamba, and the fifth said it was meza.

[It turned out afterwards that] one boy thought we wanted the word for tapping; another understood that we were seeking the word for the material of which the table was made; another had the idea that we required the word for hardness; another thought we wished for a name for that which covered the table; and the last, not being able, perhaps, to think of anything else, gave us the word, meza, table—the very word we were seeking.

References

Ogden, C. K., & Richards, I. A. (1949). The meaning of meaning: A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism, 10th ed. With supplementary essays by Bronislaw Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank (orig. pub. 1923). Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Here are the readings for our philosophy reading group this year (2009-2010). There’s a general emphasis on practice-based theories:

• Bruno Latour, Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
• Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason
• Eddie S. Glaude, jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America
• Optional: Frank Margonis, “John Dewey’s Racialized Visions of the Student and the Classroom Community,” Educational Theory 59, no. 1 (2009): 17-39.
• John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
• Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play
• Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics; there is a cheaper edition but it lacks the Haddock Siegfried intro
• Alasdair MacIntyre, “Idea of an Educated Public”
• Optional: Latour review of Dewey’s Public and its Problems

Other possibilities:

Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Subjectivism
Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life
Joe Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground
Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (or one of his others)
Jonathan Lear, Therapeutic Action
Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals
Theodore Schatski, Social Practices
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries
Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment
Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (or From Ritual to Theater)
and/or modern classics such as Arendt, Collingwood, Gadamer, Goodman, Oakeshott, Wittgenstein.

There’s more than corn and beans in the farmland here. Last Sunday, we visited an apple farm/orchard in Monticello, Illinois, which had 17 varieties.

Appropriately (for Monticello), one was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite, Spitzenberg. We got a little carried away and bought five half-pecks for $20.

Fortunately, one is a long-keeper, Buff, which is supposed to last until late winter if it stays cold.

If we don’t eat them all, we can feed them to our deer. See this backyard scene, where we played boule at the potluck in honor of John Dewey’s 150th birthday on Tuesday.

[These comments grew out of a discussion in our Community Engagement class.]

The parable of the blind men and the elephant (see also the Wikipedia entry) has been told and retold many times. In that story, blind men feel different parts of the elephant, each concluding that the elephant is only what they directly feel.

For example, as John Godfrey Saxe’s poem re-telling would have it, different men saw the elephant as a wall, a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, or a rope. E.g.,

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, “Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”

The story reminds us that reality may be viewed differently depending upon one’s perspective. But our fascination with it reveals that we, too, see only part of reality, making judgments about blindness based on not seeing actual blind people encountering actual elephants.

In Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, Javier Téllez takes the story in a new direction, by asking blind people to interact with a real elephant. (interview with Téllez and curator Mark Beasley)

As quoted in Greg Cook’s review in The Boston Phoenix, participants said things such as:

“It felt like a tire, a car tire, except it was warm. It wasn’t a good feeling.” “When I first went to touch it, I bumped into it, and I thought it was the wall. It felt like thick lizard skin.” “I felt an ear that felt like a hat and a trunk that felt like a hand.” “You feel the ridges and the bumps. And you can feel the life pulsing through it. You can’t hide it.” “It felt like I was touching some curtains.” “I imagined it to be quite large, but I couldn’t really sense how wide or tall it was. . . . And then I couldn’t tell if the damn thing was breathing or not breathing.”

Despite all the many tellings and re-tellings of that story, the actual blind people saw the elephant in ways not included in the standard versions of the parable. They helped me to see both blindness and elephants in new ways.

It’s good to recognize that people see the world differently, but to know what those different ways really are, we need to ask.

Recently, I listened to an interesting Afternoon Magazine (WILL AM 580) radio interview with Katherine Russell Rich, related to her book, Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language.

It’s her own story of learning language. When Rich lost her job at a New York magazine, she didn’t just file for unemployment compensation, she decided to immerse herself in Hindi and in India, as she says on her website;

I’d recently lost a job, I was watching the business I’d been in and loved, magazines, begin to crumble. My world had been turned upside down. Compounding that was the fact that in the decade before, I’d gotten smacked around twice by breast cancer. I barely recognized my own life anymore. Or the way that I put it in the book was, “I no longer had the language to describe my own life, so I decided to borrow someone else’s.”

There are many examples revealing about Hindi, English, language in general, culture, and Rich herself, e.g.,

…the word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same: kal, from Kali, the goddess of death and destruction. There’s a philosophy embedded in there—it’s only when you’re in today, aaj, that you’re here; if you’re in yesterday or tomorrow, you’re in blackness.

This is old news, but I was reminded of it by a discussion on this weekend. It’s worth thinking about again in these parlous economic times.

Sharma, Tracy, and Kumar (2004) talk about one of the major, but little-discussed reasons for invading Iraq. Is militarism the best way to boost our economy?

What prompted the U.S. attack on Iraq, a country under sanctions for 12 years (1991-2003), struggling to obtain clean water and basic medicines? A little discussed factor responsible for the invasion was the desire to preserve “dollar imperialism” as this hegemony began to be challenged by the euro.

References

Tech-Ex talks about the Google doodle becoming a barcode, and then, how to make your own. That article also includes a little history of the barcode:

The first item scanned was a pack of chewing gum scanned at an Ohio supermarket in 1974. On June 26, 1974, Clyde Dawson pulled a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum out of his basket and it was scanned by Sharon Buchanan at 8:01 AM. The pack of gum and the receipt are now on display in the Smithsonian Institution.

Click here to create your own, and you too could be scanned!: by Barcodes Inc

The Champaign County Regional Planning Commission hopes to apply for a $1.94 million federal grant to coordinate the traffic signals at dozens of intersections in the community, covering major corridors such as Neil Street and Prospect, University, Bradley, Mattis and Florida/Kirby avenues.

Champaign-Urbana Urbanized Area Transportation Study…says the proposed “traffic signal energy efficiency and conservation strategy” could reduce the typical motorist’s annual travel times by 20 to 50 percent, cut fuel consumption by 14 percent and reduce carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen dioxide emissions by 13.3 percent.

via The News-Gazette.com: Re-timing of traffic signals could be first stage in overhaul.

Saving energy, reducing pollution, reducing travel time, all sound good. But synchronized signals along University Avenue may have an insidious consequence.

It’s already the case that University Avenue marks and maintains racial divisions in the cities of Champaign and Urbana. Some people south of University, especially whites, view “north of University” as an area they don’t want to be in. And some blacks north of University may view south of University as an unwelcoming place. The busy traffic corridor with miserable access for pedestrians reinforces the view that these two domains are separate, and necessarily so.

As an already busy traffic corridor, University Avenue makes it difficult for alert, athletic adults to cross from one area of town to another on foot or bicycle. It’s positively unsafe for children or anyone without well-honed defensive faculties. Drivers already go too fast and are inattentive to pedestrians and cyclists. This could become worse with synchronization.

Could the street become safer with synchronization? Maybe. But I doubt that will happen if the only concerns considered are overall vehicular traffic flow.

I’m not sure in the final analysis whether the proposed changes should be done or not, but I do believe that we’d be better off if we were to understand better the symbolic and material consequences of slashing through our community.

John Dewey is not even mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Logic. That’s an oversight that I’m tempted to remedy, but it also reflects the fact that the 20th century development of logic in the tradition of Frege, (early) Wittgenstein, Russell, Gödel, and Tarski has largely ignored Dewey’s work, conceiving it in various ways, but above all, as not part of Logic. His idea that logic is the theory of inquiry is deemed to be a non-starter.

Dewey’s new logic

Bertrand Russell, in particular, took pains to explain why Dewey’s logic (1938) was not real logic, how it failed to address the fundamental questions of truth conditions or the relation between propositions and meaning, an idea that Tarksi had already developed in his model theory. Logicians should focus on concepts such as truth conditions, consistency of logical systems (that not all statements are provable), and completeness (that true statements are provable).

The development of model theory as a basis for semantics meant that the direct connection with the world was severed; logicians could now focus on the structure and operation of logical systems per se, without concern for real world consequences. In the terms of academic logic, it’s clear that Russell won the battle; Dewey’s “new logic” as Russell demeaned it, especially with its insistence on connection to lived experience, is now judged irrelevant by virtually all mathematical logicians, and most philosophical logicians.

However, despite the great achievements of Tarski and others to follow, the standard account of logic has encountered obstacles. Kurt Gödel proved that any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. For most systems of greater complexity, it’s not possible to say what consistency and completeness even mean.

Logicians began to see that formal logic was inadequate for the goals that David Hilbert, Russell and Whitehead, and others had proposed. Moreover, it was completely inadequate for that part of the universe that isn’t elementary arithmetic, i.e., social relations, history, culture, language, art, learning, nature, and all the other things that most people care about.

In recent years, these inadequacies of the formal semantics approach have led to a reconsideration of Dewey’s theories. Thomas Burke, among others, has called for a critical, re-examination of logic as the theory of inquiry. In Dewey’s new logic: A reply to Russell, he analyzes the debate between Russell and Dewey that followed the publication of Dewey’s Logic: a theory of inquiry in 1938. He concludes that although Russell won the battle, Dewey won the war, in the sense that his logic holds more promise for the future, especially as a a logic for work in the social sciences and humanities, or for practical concerns.

Dewey’s unread book

In the preface to his 1938 book on logic, Dewey says,

This book is a development of ideas regarding the nature of logical theory that were first presented, some forty years ago, in Studies in Logical Theory; that were somewhat expanded in Essays in Experimental Logic and were briefly summarized with special reference to education in How We Think.

There are many proposed encapsulations of Dewey’s vast body of work. If I had to choose one, it might be logic, which Dewey himself saw as a 40-year project. His early training, an academic context that sought a logical basis for knowing and life, and the ways in which his logic integrates across his ideas in art, education, political theory, morality, and other areas, suggests to me that logic could be the strongest connective thread.

As he develops his logic, one can see the core behind many of Dewey’s major ideas, such as warranted assertions, situation, ends-in-view, habits, the continuum of inquiry, facts and meanings, and the relation between natural and social science. He also confronts major issues in logic as they are conceived by Russell et al., but always with a twist, which not surprisingly, makes his views unacceptable to that community. Nevertheless, I agree with Burke et al. that Dewey offers us the best option for a usable logic for the problems of today.

Reading Dewey’s Logic: A theory of inquiry

Some of Dewey’s Logic: a theory of inquiry can be a slow read. Published 71 years ago, the style is often pedantic. Dewey’s characteristic lack of references, diagrams, compelling metaphors, and good examples doesn’t help. His attempts to speak to the world of Russell and Tarski often get in the way. Nevertheless, the ideas are powerful, and deserve the reconsideration mentioned above.

Much of the book can seen as explaining one of the few definitions Dewey ever provides:

Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.

The book is 556 pp. (my copy), divided into four parts. Part I is probably the most useful for most readers. It’s here that he provides the rationale for conceiving logic as inquiry, and discusses topics such as common sense in relation to scientific inquiry.

Part II defines inquiry and explores the construction of judgments. Part III on propositions and terms is a shorter section, and probably the most technical in the book. It’s also the one that speaks most to Tarski, although in a way that I suspect he rejects. Part IV focuses on mathematics and science. I found it to be the most interesting, especially as it deals with scientific methods, scientific laws, theories of knowledge, and social inquiry.

My recommendation on reading is to slow-read Part I, in order to understand what Dewey is trying to do. Use Part II as a way to see how the theory plays out, but devoting effort to chapters differentially, e.g., I find chapter 8 on understanding and inference to be especially good. Part III could be left for a more advanced read. Part IV is very good, especially the last three chapters.

Table of Contents

Here is the TOC for Logic: a theory of inquiry. The links are to the Past Masters collection at the University of Illinois (login required).

part one: introduction: the matrix of inquiry

part two: the structure of inquiry and the construction of judgments

part three: propositions and terms

part four: the logic of scientific method

References

• Burke, F. Thomas (1994). Dewey’s new logic: A reply to Russell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Burke, F. Thomas; Hester, D. Micah; Talisse, Robert B. (Eds.) (2002). Dewey’s logical theory: New studies and interpretations. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
• Dewey, John (1938). Logic: a theory of inquiry. New York: Henry Holt.
• Talisse, Robert T. (2002). Two concepts of inquiry. Philosophical Writings, 20, 69-81.
• Tarski, Alfred (1983). Logic, semantics, metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938 (2nd ed.). Hackett, Indianapolis: Hackett.

[murmur] is a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We collect and make accessible people’s personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them. In each of these locations we install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number on it that anyone can call with a mobile phone to listen to that story while standing in that exact spot, and engaging in the physical experience of being right where the story takes place. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze…

All our stories are available on the [murmur] website, but their details truly come alive as the listener walks through, around, and into the narrative. By engaging with [murmur], people develop a new intimacy with places, and “history” acquires a multitude of new voices. The physical experience of hearing a story in its actual setting – of hearing the walls talk – brings uncommon knowledge to common space, and brings people closer to the real histories that make up their world.

Being cellphone-impaired, and far from Toronto, I’m reduced to listening to the stories on the website, but they still convey a sense of the city and its history. The site’s a well-designed example of integrating oral history, geographic information systems, and mobile phones.

Peggy McIntosh’s essay, White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack” (1990) provides a very accessible discussion of race/racism, in particular, how whites have trouble even seeing it. She identifies 50 daily effects of white privilege, “conditions that…attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location” per se.

McIntosh predicts that if you’re White you’ll answer “yes’” to most of these, and if you’re Black, you’ll say “no” to many of them. Try it yourself. For example,

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my race.

25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.

34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.

John Berry (2004) adapts these for the library profession. I like both of these articles, and can imagine ways to use such lists to spark a discussion.

I would have to answer yes to most of the statements myself. Then I imagined it for my time in Ireland (thinking more about nationality, than about race per se). Still mostly yes, but some no’s and some harder to answer. When I thought about my stay in Turkey, there were fewer yes’s. For Haiti, fewer still.

But what was most interesting to me is that even for Haiti, I could still say yes to most of the statements, even though I’m the outsider there in terms of race, nationality, language, culture, and above all, economic class. The fact that I can take myself mentally to Haiti, and still possess White Privilege shows even more to me why it’s such a powerful social construct. It also reveals why it’s so hard to understand and accept that one possesses that unfair privilege.

In a Harvard Law Review article, Cheryl Harris (1993), takes this concept further, arguing that racial identity and property are deeply intertwined. She examines “how whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law.”

References

• Berry, John D. (2004, June 15). BackTalk: White privilege in library land. Library Journal.
• Harris, Cheryl I. (1993, June). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1707-1791.
• McIntosh, Peggy (1990, Winter). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack”. Independent School.