( 118 ) Black Rights/White Wrongsthe decline in overt racism in the white population, the real issue for a long
time has not been individual racism but, far more important, the repro-
duction of wrongful white advantage and unjust nonwhite (particularly
black and Latino) disadvantage through the workings of racialized social
structures. Insofar as, since Rawls, our attention as philosophers concerned
about justice is supposed to be on the “basic structure” of society and its
functioning, the concept of white supremacy then forces us to confront the
possibility that the basic structure is itself systemically racialized and thus
unjust. Corrective measures to end racial injustice would therefore need to
begin here.
However, the term also has one major and perhaps insuperable disadvan-
tage. Apart from sounding “extremist” to white and some black audiences,
it will just seem flagrantly inaccurate, a description that (if this much is con-
ceded) may once have been true but is no longer so. White supremacy for
most people will be identified with slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, “White” and
“Colored” signs, legal segregation and discrimination, police dogs attack-
ing black demonstrators, and so on. So considerable spadework will have
to be done to argue that the key referent of the term is white domination
and unfair white advantage, which can persist in the absence of overt non-
white subordination, white terrorism, and legal persecution (indeed, even
in the presence of a black president!). But there is a sense in which such
spadework would have to be done regardless of the term chosen, inasmuch
as individualist analyses of the socio- political order are hegemonic in the
American popular mind, denying the existence of structures of domination
not just for race but in general. So this would be an ideological obstacle to
be overcome no matter what language is used. And in the case of race, by
contrast with class and gender, one should in theory at least face a some-
what easier task in convincing people since it cannot be denied that people
of color were long legally suppressed. Even if whites are reluctant to con-
cede the continuing existence of white supremacy, the concession that it
once existed provides at least some theoretical foothold, since one can then
make an argument that it would of necessity have left some legacy.
RACIAL EXPLOITATIONI now want to turn specifically to the idea of racial exploitation and draw
a comparison between racial and class exploitation since it will be illu-
minating for us to consider both their similarities and their differences.
Exploitation is, of course, central to Marxist theory since what distin-
guishes his analysis of capitalism from the analysis of liberal theorists is that
he sees it as an exploitative system. Exploitation is not a matter of low wages
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