RacIaL exPLoItatIoN ( 129 )- Blacks and Latinos do not get a chance to hear about and compete for
certain jobs in the first place because racially exclusionary word- of-
mouth networks restrict notice of these jobs to white candidates. - Federal money earmarked for Native Americans ends up in white hands
instead. - Transfer payments from the state (for example, unemployment benefits,
welfare, the GI Bill) are not extended equally to the black population,
either through overt racial exclusion or because the terms are carefully
designed to exclude certain jobs in which blacks are differentially con-
centrated. The Federal Housing Agency (FHA), established under the
New Deal, discriminates against would- be black homeowners, thereby
denying them access to the main route to wealth accumulation by the
middle class. The Wagner Act and the Social Security Act “excluded farm
workers and domestics from coverage, effectively denying those dispro-
portionately minority sectors of the work force protections and benefits
routinely afforded to whites.”^25
The Diversity, Multidimensionality, and Cumulative
Consequences of Racial ExploitationThere are several things about this (very short) list that should be striking.
One is the diversity of examples of racial exploitation. Far from being a
theoretical appendage or minor codicil to Marxist class exploitation, racial
exploitation is much broader and should long ago have received the theo-
retical attention it deserves. Marx’s focus was on just one relation because
he was working within a framework in which it was assumed (since he
was really talking about the white population) that normative status dif-
ferentials had been eliminated, so that exploitation had to take place in a
framework of the transaction of (formal) equals. Once we reject this crucial
assumption, we should immediately recognize that the relation can mani-
fest itself in any economic transaction, or any transaction with economic
effects, and is thus ubiquitous. And this is one of the very important ways in
which Marxism is Eurocentric: in its failure to conceptualize how broadly
exploitation as a concept can be shown to apply once one takes the focus
off the white population.
Second, notice the cumulative and negatively synergistic effect of these
transactions. It is not merely that blacks (for example) are exploited seri-
ally in different transactions but that the different forms of exploitation
interact with one another, exacerbating the situation. For example, blacks
receive inferior education, thereby losing an equal opportunity to build