Whiteness As Property by Cheryl I. Harris pg.1774

There is little to commend the notion that beneficiaries of historical wrongs are holders of inviolable rights or interests. The underlying premises of much of the law disputes such an assumption. For example, the family of an embezzler who occupies a house or possesses goods purchased with stolen funds is not considered to have a normatively secure claim to the goods merely because they did not actively perpetuate the wrong. See FISCUS, supra note 263, at 45 ("[P]ersonal guilt or innocence is irrelevant to the claim of right, as when a party innocently comes into possession of stolen goods; the claim on those goods by the rightful owner is not forfeited because of the innocence of the current possessor."); WILLIAMS, The Obliging Shell, in ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS, supra note 5, at 101 ("If a thief steals so that his children may live in luxery and the law returns his ill-gotten gain to its rightful owner, the children cannot complain that they have been deprived of what they did not own.").
-Whiteness As Property by Cheryl I. Harris Harvard Law Review
Volume 106, June 1993, Number 8, pg.1774