Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

( 130 ) Black Rights/White Wrongs

human capital, thereby losing out in competition with white candidates,
thereby having to take inferior jobs, thereby having less money, thereby
being disadvantaged in dealings with banks that are already following pat-
terns of mortgage discrimination, thereby being forced to live in inferior
neighborhoods, thereby having homes of lesser value, thereby providing
a lower tax base for schooling, thereby being unable to pass on to their
children advantages comparable to whites, and so on. It is not a mat-
ter of a single transaction, or even a series, but a multiply interacting set,
with the repercussions continually compounding and feeding back in a
destructive way.
But what has been negative for blacks has been very beneficial for whites.
Utilizing the political- economy category of “exploitation,” as against just
talking with a liberal vocabulary about the “unfairness” of discrimination
against nonwhites, brings home the importance, as emphasized at the start,
of shifting the discussion from the personal to the social- structural, so that
we can start seeing white supremacy as itself a system for which this pay-
off is the motivation. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro’s prizewinning
Black Wealth/ White Wealth, judged by many to be one of the most impor-
tant books on race of the last two decades, argues that to understand racial
inequality, its origins, and its reproduction, wealth is a far better investiga-
tive tool than income. As they point out:

Whites in general, but well- off whites in particular, were able to amass assets and use

their secure economic status to pass their wealth from generation to generation. What is

often not acknowledged is that the accumulation of wealth for some whites is intimately

tied to the poverty of wealth for most blacks. Just as blacks have had “cumulative disad-

vantages,” whites have had “cumulative advantages.” Practically, every circumstance of

bias and discrimination against blacks has produced a circumstance and opportunity of

positive gain for whites. When black workers were paid less than white workers, white

workers gained a benefit; when black businesses were confined to the segregated black

market, white businesses received the benefit of diminished competition; when FHA

policies denied loans to blacks, whites were the beneficiaries of the spectacular growth

of good housing and housing equity in the suburbs. The cumulative effect of such a pro-

cess has been to sediment blacks at the bottom of the social hierarchy and to artificially

raise the relative position of some whites in society.^26

And if one were to go back to slavery and Native American expropriation,
and track the financial consequences of these institutions and processes for
the respectively racialized populations, the size and ubiquity of the white
payoff would be even greater. Whites will sometimes receive the payoff
directly, by themselves participating in these transactions, but far more
often they receive it indirectly— from their parents, from the state and

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