RacIaL exPLoItatIoN ( 133 )class, the role of group interests in determining consciousness, which was
Marx’s hoped- for engine of proletarian revolution, is far more convinc-
ingly borne out, at least in the United States, for race than it is for class.)
Rational white perception of their vested group interest in the established
racial status quo can then be understood as the primary reason for their
resistance to change.
But, as with orthodox left theory, a materialist or at least realist privileg-
ing of group interests as the engine of the social dynamic also opens up
the possibility of progressive social change. The natural constituency is,
of course, the population of color, who would be the obvious beneficia-
ries of the end or considerable diminution of white supremacy. But given
their minority status both in straightforward quantitative terms, and, more
important, the qualitative dimension of access to social sources of power,
they will clearly not be able to do it on their own. I suggest there are two
main political strategies for recruiting a larger or smaller section of the
white population to the struggle.
The centrist strategy would try to appeal to the white population as a
whole, the argument being that in a sense racism hurts everybody, given the
costs of racial exclusion (the expenses of incarcerating the huge, dispropor-
tionately nonwhite prison population; the untapped resources of marginal-
ized racial groups), and that from an efficiency point of view, the overall
GDP would be greater in a non- racist United States.
The left strategy comes in a classic Marxist version as well as a milder,
left- liberal/ social- democratic version. The plan here would be to disag-
gregate the white population and target in particular those whites who
benefit less from white supremacy: the working class, the poor, the unem-
ployed. One would try to persuade them that they— or perhaps they and
their children (the appeal might be more convincing in terms of long- term
outcomes)— would be better off in an alternative non- racial social order
that combined “class” justice with “racial” justice. For classic Marxism,
this would have been socialism/ communism; for left- liberals, it would be
a social- democratic redistributivist capitalism (“socialism” as “democratic
socialism”) that centrally incorporated measures of corrective racial jus-
tice.^28 So the idea would be to appeal to group interests as well as justice,
since justice, alas, has historically proven itself to be not that efficacious
as a social prime mover. White workers, for example, would be asked to
compare their present situation not to blacks in this actual racist system
but to what their situation (and that of their descendants) would be in a
counterfactual non- racial system, the presumption being that a convinc-
ing case can be made that though they do gain in this present order, they
lose by comparison to an alternative one. Given the tremendous transfer of
wealth to the upper echelons of society in recent years, which has provoked