Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels are, of course, exactly right, and it explains why corporate America and the ruling class have gotten squarely behind anti-racist pablum. More from Professors Reed and Michaels:
If the objective is to eliminate black poverty rather than simply to benefit the upper classes, we believe the diagnosis of racism is wrong, and the cure of anti-racism won't work. Racism is real and anti-racism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn't what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won't eliminate it. And because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, anti-racism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it....
It is well known by now that whites have more net wealth than blacks at every income level, and the overall racial difference in wealth is massive. Why can't anti-racism solve this problem? Because, as Robert Manduca has shown, the fact that Blacks were over-represented among the poor at the beginning of a period in which "low income workers of all races" have been hurt by the changes in American economic life has meant that they have "borne the brunt" of those changes. The lack of progress in overcoming the white/black wealth gap has been a function of the increase in the rich/poor wealth gap.
In fact, if you look at how white and Black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10% of white people have 75% of white wealth; the top 20% have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10% of black households hold 75% of black wealth.
That means, as Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project recently noted, "the overall racial wealth disparity is driven almost entirely by the disparity between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of black people." This is not to say there aren't differences almost all the way down the line: poor black people are in the main even poorer than poor white people. But it does mean that when you tell the 80 percent of white people who have less than 15 percent of white wealth that the basic inequality in the U.S. is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the 80 percent of black people in the same position, they also know you're wrong. It's not white people who have white wealth; it's the top ten percent of whites, plus some Blacks and Asians. The wealth gap among all but the wealthiest blacks and whites is dwarfed by the class gap, the difference between the wealthiest and everyone else across the board.
Trying to solve the problem of racial disparity thus has nothing to do with producing economic equality; rather, it replaces the goal of equality with the goal of proportional inequality. The disparitarian ideal is that blacks and other nonwhites should be represented on every rung on the ladder of economic hierarchy in rough proportion to their representation in the general population. Instead of worrying about inequality, it worries about the inequalities that have been produced by racism. Obviously, this does nothing for poor white people. But, also obviously, it does nothing for most poor Black people. In its insistence that proportionality is the only defensible norm and metric of social justice, anti-racist politics rejects universal programs of social-democratic redistribution in favor of what is ultimately a racial trickle-down approach according to which making more black people rich and rich black people richer is a benefit to all black people.
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