RacIaL exPLoItatIoN ( 121 )extraction has brought a newfound analytic and academic respectability
to a concept that would once have been associated only with controversial
black radical figures.^18
Objections and RepliesBefore getting into the analysis, though, we have to deal with some prelimi-
nary objections.
To begin with, one objection might be that racial exploitation cannot
exist because races do not exist. If, as the growing scholarly consensus in
anthropology and genetics agrees, races have no biological existence, then
how can they be involved in relations of exploitation or for that matter any
other relations? And here, of course, the standard answer from critical race
theorists is that races can have a reality that, though social rather than bio-
logical, is nonetheless causally efficacious within our racialized world. From
the fact that race is socially constructed, it does not follow that it is unreal.^19
Second, however, it might be claimed that insofar as race is socially
constructed, then it is to the constructing agent that causality and agency
really have to be attributed. In historical materialist versions of this claim,
for example, it might be insisted that class forces, and ultimately the ruling
class, the bourgeoisie, are the real actors. (So we could think of these as two
Marxist reasons— though they come in other theoretical varieties also— to
deny racial exploitation: races do not exist in the first place, or if their social
reality is grudgingly conceded, then, as a fallback position, this reality is
reduced to an underlying class reality.) But even if Y is created by X, so
that there is generating causation, it does not follow that Y continues to be
moved, either wholly or at all, by X, so that there may not be sustaining and
ongoing causation. In other words, even if we concede (and an argument
would be necessary to prove this) that race is originally created by a class
dynamic, this does not mean that race cannot attain what used to be called,
in Marxist theory, at least a “relative autonomy” (if not more), an intrinsic
dynamic, of its own.
Finally, it might be objected that “whites” come in all classes, differ-
ent genders, and divergent ethnicities, that there are power relations and
great power differences among them, and that many or most whites are
exploited also. But the claim that racial exploitation exists does not com-
mit one to the claim that its benefits are all necessarily distributed equally,
so if some whites get more than others, this is still consistent with the the-
sis. Nor does it require that all whites be equally active in the processes of
racial exploitation— some may be both actors and beneficiaries while oth-
ers are just beneficiaries. And as should be obvious, claiming that racial