RacIaL exPLoItatIoN ( 125 )working- class struggle in the United States with the black struggle. The ban-
ner under which the latter has been organized has typically been the banner
of equal rights: for civil rights— indeed for human rights— and for first-
class rather than second- class citizenship. But it would be far more difficult
to represent the struggle for socialism as a struggle for equal rights, since it
would, of course, be denied that capitalist wage relations are a violation of
workers’ rights.
So in the first instance (in the period of overt white supremacy), what
justifies racial exploitation is that the R2s are seen as having less human
worth, or zero worth. They have fewer rights, or no rights. A certain norma-
tive characterization of the R2s is central to racial exploitation in a way that
it is not to class exploitation in the modern period.
But apart from this paradigm form, there is also a secondary derivative
form, which becomes more important over time (so there is a periodization
of varieties of racial exploitation, with the salience of different kinds shift-
ing temporally) and which arises from the legacy of the first form. Here the
inequity does not arise from the R2s’ being still stigmatized as of inferior
status, or at least such stigmatization is not essential to the process. White
supremacy is no longer overt, and the statuses of R1s and R2s have been
formally equalized (for example, through legislative change). Of course the
perception of R2s as inferior, as not quite of equal standing, may continue
to play a role in tacitly underwriting their differential treatment. But it is no
longer essential to it. Rather, what obtains here is that the R2s inherit a dis-
advantaged material position that handicaps them— by comparison with
what, counterfactually, would have been the case if they had been R1s— in
the bargaining process or the competition in question. At this stage, then,
it is possible for them to be treated “fairly,” by the same norms that apply
to the R1 population. Nonetheless, it is still appropriate to speak of racial
exploitation because they bring to the table a thinner package of assets than
they otherwise would have had, and so they will be in a weaker bargain-
ing position than they otherwise would have been. Whites are differentially
and wrongfully benefited by this history insofar as they have a competitive
advantage that is not the result of superior innate ability and/ or effort, but
the inheritance of the legacy of the past. So unfairness here is manifested
in the failure to redress this legacy, which makes the perpetuation of racial
domination the most likely outcome.
I would also contend (and will elaborate in the next section) that
another crucial difference between class and racial exploitation is that the
latter takes place much more broadly than at the point of production. For
insofar as racial exploitation in its paradigm form requires only that the
R2s receive differential and inferior treatment, this can be manifested in a
much wider variety of transactions than proletarian wage- labor. Society is