The Right to Exclude

Cheryl Harris presents a brilliant and compelling account of whiteness as property within the United States through a detailed account of the history of racial discrimination and accrued inequalities.

I have two questions to ask:

1. If, according to our discussion around Locke, government exists to protect individual property rights and the vast majority of currently owned property in the United States is a result of illegitimate, systematic, government sanctioned racism - then, since the acquisition of this property necessarily infringed on the property rights of others (non-white), is it not the duty and only end of our government to protect those violated in the form of reparations?

2. I would like to understand Harris' argument about (d) The Absolute Rights to Exclude on page 1736.

Harris states that "the right to exclude was the central principle ...  of whiteness as identity; for mainly whiteness has been characterized, not by an inherent unifying characteristic, but by the exclusion of others deemed to be 'not white.' The possessors of whiteness were granted the legal right to exclude others from the privileges inhering in whiteness; whiteness became an exclusive club whose membership was closely and grudgingly guarded" (1736).

Harris' claim is accurate - whiteness was created in opposition to blackness and formed this exclusive club she talks about. When Locke talked about the right to exclude, he references eating a berry. According to Locke, when a man eats a berry off a bush the berry “must be his” and thereby "excludes the common right of other men" because “another can no longer have any right to it before it can do him any good for the support of life” (sec 26). In the berry example, by eating a berry, I exclude your right to eat the berry simply because it is physically impossible for both you and I to derive benefit from the berry. At first glance, whiteness could not be like this berry - by being white, you don't thereby veto another's ability to be white - there is no physical limit on this. But, as Harris points out, the value of whiteness is not in whiteness - it is in the creation of an exclusive club. It seems similar to the value accorded to intellectual property - the actual value of intellectual property is the right to exclude others. Is granting the right to exclude for 'whiteness' like granting a right to exclude others from eating any berry simply because you ate one berry? The property is the right to exclude others?