Justice Entails Ending White Privilege

The debate about racism in America today revolves around achieving diversity. But focusing on diversity means questions of history and power go unasked and unanswered. Without an unflinching understanding of the history of racism in America, and the enduring imbalances of power and wealth, status and privilege, further progress toward racial justice is unlikely.

Racial oppression is a set of strategies for social exploitation. The institutions of slavery and Jim Crow apartheid were established in order to secure benefits for white people at the expense of African slaves and their American-born descendants. One way to think about the benefits of exploitation is in terms of racialized social privilege -- patterns of social privilege and benefit, including exemptions from harm and burden, which accrue to racial groups at the expense of others. The shorthand term for these patterns in American society is "white privilege".

Economic benefits are at the core of white privilege. The captive pool of labor provided by chattel slavery, from which both Northern industrialists and Southern planters benefited, is one of the founding sources of the American economy. African Americans still struggle today with the economic legacy of an unjust history. Some 35 years after the civil rights movement destroyed the most obvious, formal structures of racial oppression, the substantive legacy of those structures endures.

According to the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, non-white Americans own 10 or 11 cents of wealth for every 100 cents of wealth owned by white Americans. And, even more troubling, the wealth gap between whites and non-whites expanded 21% from 1998 to 2001. The racial injustices of American history do not fully explain wealth disparities, but they are impossible to understand without reference to historical advantages and disadvantages.

Poor and working class whites object to the idea of white privilege, pointing out that not every white person is wealthy or powerful. But other benefits accrue to white people, including one which W.E.B. DuBois called the "psychological wages of whiteness". Membership in the privileged group, even for whites on the bottom economic rung, confers a social status and recognition which is denied to all but the most powerful members of oppressed groups.

Even today, as Glen Loury suggests in his recent book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, African Americans suffer from a racial social stigma unknown to even the poorest white Americans, who share in many of the privileges of being white, no matter their economic disadvantage.

And so the other pattern of racially-dispensed benefit and harm is political. Slavery and Jim Crow were accompanied and supported by a political ideology which stigmatized African Americans and other non-whites by suggesting that only white people were fully human and that white people are the norm by which others are to be judged. These assaults on the dignity and self-respect of African Americans cause long-lived, public, even generational harms which are not easily or quickly overcome.

Most of the central, large features of the history of racial oppression in America are not disputed. What is disputed is whether, or to what extent, 400 years of oppression continues to harm African Americans and their life chances unjustly; and, conversely, whether that history of oppression continues to benefit white Americans unjustly. No one establishes systems of oppression unless they intend to benefit thereby. There is no reason to believe, a mere 35 years after dismantling the formal props of an oppressive system, that social institutions and power structures no longer dispense benefits and harms racially.

When we examine the way benefits and harms are apportioned in the U.S. -- including wealth and income, equality of treatment in court and from police, access to colleges, universities, and even the political symbolism of state flags -- what we see are exercises and expressions of white privilege. As a group, white people have more wealth, more income, more political representation and access, more power, more status, and more social reinforcers of their human dignity and self-respect.

We white people have and enjoy these privileges unjustly, as a result of an unjust and still largely unaddressed history. The promise of American democracy will remain unfulfilled until the legacy of American racism is addressed and overcome.