Black Rights - White Wrongs the-critique

RacIaL exPLoItatIoN ( 127 )

transactions other than labor; (f ) typically involves the intervention and/
or collusion of the state; and (g) could in theory be eliminated within a
capitalist framework.

THE PAYOFF OF WHITENESS

The discussion so far has been very abstract. Let us now move to the level
of the concrete.

Specific Examples of Racial Exploitation

In the United States, the members of the privileged race, the R1s, are, of
course, whites. There will be a core whiteness that is relatively clear- cut
and a penumbral whiteness that is fuzzier. A significant part of the bur-
den of the whiteness literature over the past two decades has, of course,
been the emphasis on the historically variant character of whiteness, and
various books— most famously Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became
White but also Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks, Matthew
Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color, and, more recently, Nell
Irvin Painter’s The History of White People— have tracked the shifting
boundaries of the (fully) white population.^23 And part of the motivation
for aspiring to and becoming white is precisely so that one can benefit
from this exploitation, as manifest not just in the wages of whiteness but
whiteness as property, whiteness as a joint- stock company, the interest
on whiteness, the rent on whiteness, the profit on whiteness, the residu-
als on whiteness, the returns on whiteness, and so on. The point is that
racial exploitation is manifest in many more economic relations than just
that of wage labor.
Let us now go through some concrete examples to put some flesh on
these abstractions.

• Native Americans are cheated out of their land. They are not given a
  fair price in the first place, or the original deal is reneged upon, or their
  understanding of what they were signing away was mistaken because of
  deliberate deceit, or the land is simply expropriated, and so on.


• Africans are enslaved at a time when slavery is dead or dying out in the
  West. (Obviously, if Africans were enslaved in the ancient and medieval
  world, as they were, there was nothing racial about this, since race played
  no role in their enslavement— indeed, at the time they did not even have
  a race.)^24