( 120 ) Black Rights/White Wrongswrong” characterizing individual transactions, “much of the best contem-
porary political philosophy tends to focus on macro- level questions, such
as the just distribution of resources and basic liberties and rights.”^14 (The
presumptive contrast in this last point arguably vindicates my earlier claim
about the racially sanitized picture of the United States dominant in main-
stream normative political theory. Don’t macro- level questions about the
unjust “distribution of resources and basic liberties and rights” arise from
the long history of American racism, a history of indigenous expropriation,
African slavery, and de jure or de facto segregation?)
On the other hand, where Marxists have looked at race, as Gary Dymski
points out in a left- wing anthology on exploitation, they have typically
reduced it to a variant of class exploitation: “Race has been virtually ignored
in Marxian theorizing about exploitation. Race is assumed to enter in only
at a level of abstraction lower than exploitation; and anyway, since minori-
ties are disproportionately workers, racial inequality is simply a special case
readily accounted for by a racially neutral exploitation theory.”^15 And this of
course is part of a larger problematic pattern of Marxist theory: its failure
to recognize race as a system of domination in itself.^16 Racial domination is
subsumed under capitalist domination, and no separate theorization of its
distinctive features is seen to be necessary. Even when race is cashed out in
terms of super- exploitation, the process is still assimilated to class exploita-
tion in that the “race” in question is thought of as a differentially subor-
dinated section of the working class and the exploitative relation involves
getting extra value for the bourgeoisie, not for whites as a group.
So neither in mainstream (white) liberal theory nor in oppositional
(white) Marxist theory has racial exploitation been properly recognized
and theorized. In keeping with the shift in the radical academy in the 1980s
from Marxism to post- structuralism, much of the 1990s’ and later literature
on “whiteness” focuses on the discursive, the cultural, and the personal tes-
timonial, as Ashley Doane and Margaret Andersen complain in their intro-
ductory essays in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism.^17 This
is not to deny that whiteness has numerous aspects and that the orthodox
left of the past was deficient (following Marx’s own footsteps) in its han-
dling of what were dismissed as “superstructural” issues. But it is arguably
the material payoff from whiteness, the political economy of race, that is cru-
cial, and the discussion needs to be brought back to these fundamentals.
A growing body of work in the last two decades on such themes as “white-
ness as property,” on the differentials in “black wealth/ white wealth,” on the
“possessive investment in whiteness,” on the “legacies of white skin privi-
lege,” on an unacknowledged history of “affirmative action for whites,” on a
self- reproducing “white racial cartel,” on an ongoing discriminatory “black
tax,” and various other mechanisms of racialized dis/ advantage and wealth
http://www.ebook3000.com