"The Cause is the Consequence”: Biden's Nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson & The Right to Include" (co-authored with Corinne Mitsuye Sugino; In the 2024 book Rhetorical Economies of Whiteness: Power, Privilege, & Neoliberalism.

In considering how whiteness resecures itself in relation to difference, we place Cheryl Harris’s notion of whiteness as property in conversation with Frantz Fanon’s theorization of racial fetishism. Harris highlights how whiteness and property both contain the “right to exclude” as an organizing principle, while Fanon considers how whiteness is invested with a transcendent status that obscures its dependence on anti-Blackness for coherence.6 Drawing on this scholarship, we argue that the Jackson nomination highlights how whiteness also relies on the right to include to sustain itself in relation to racial difference. That is, whiteness relies on a larger rhetorical economy grounded in anti-Blackness that stabilizes categories of difference in relation to whiteness to shore up its violent boundaries. In this way, white liberal celebrations of diversity frame Blackness within a limited set of predetermined conceptual options that are, from the outset, sterilized of any potential to challenge the foundations of American society. The term economy is instructive in context of the ancient Greek term οικονομία (oiko-nomia) insofar as it highlights how rhetorical notions of race circulate in ways that maintain the “family” and “property,” or οίκος (oikos), of whiteness through adaptive “management,” or νέμειν (nemein), in the face of crises. We are not arguing that Jackson or other marginalized people become white. Rather, we suggest whiteness relies on the rhetorical management of difference in which it seeks to control the terms of how racial difference is imagined and staticized in relation to whiteness. Put differently, the right to include describes how whiteness not only works by excluding racial others from its privileges and conceptual nucleus but also by co-opting, defining, and wielding racial difference in its own image.