[nonsite.org] The Trouble with Disparity

long essay, but worth a look. The authors argue "because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it."

https://nonsite.org/article/the-trouble-with-disparity

excerpts:

. . . What we’re actually saying every time we insist that the basic inequality is between blacks and whites is that the only inequalities we care about are those produced by some form of discrimination—that inequality itself isn’t the problem, it’s only the inequalities produced by racism and sexism, etc. What disparity discourse tells us is that, if you have an economy that’s getting more and more unequal, that’s mainly generating jobs that don’t even pay a living wage, the problem we need to solve is not how to reduce that inequality and not how to make those jobs better but how to make sure that they aren’t disproportionately held by black and brown people.

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Complaints about disproportionality are liberal math. And a politics centered on challenging disproportionality comes with the imprimatur of no less a Doctor of the Church of Left Neoliberalism than economist Paul Krugman, who asserted in his role as ideologist for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that “horizontal” inequality, i.e., inequalities measured “between racially or culturally defined groups,” is what’s really important in America and dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ elaborate program for social-democratic redistribution as “a pipe dream.”3

It’s the fixation on disproportionality that tells us the increasing wealth of the one percent would be OK if only there more black, brown, and LGBTQIA+ billionaires. And the fact that antiracism and antidiscrimination of all kinds would validate rather than undermine the stratification of wealth in American society is completely visible to those who currently possess that wealth—all the rich people eager to embark on a course of moral purification (antiracist training) but with no interest whatsoever in a politics (social-democratic redistribution) that would alter the material conditions that make them rich.

By contrast, the strain in black politics that converged around what Smith calls the social- (rather than racial-)democratic ideal proceeded from the understanding that, because most black Americans are in the working class—and disproportionately so, partly because of the same effects of past and current racism we allude to above—black people would also benefit disproportionately from redistributive agendas that expand social wage policies and enhance the living standards and security of working people universally. The tension between those two ideals of social justice, as Smith indicates, was, and is, a tension arising from differences in perception and values rooted in different class positions.

Thus the fact that, over the last half century (as American society has reached new heights of inequality and as Democrats have done very little more than Republicans to combat it), the racial-democratic principle in black politics, and in the society in general, has displaced the social-democratic one, has been a victory for the class—black and white—that has supported it. In its insistence that proportionality is the only defensible norm and metric of social justice, antiracist 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.

It is instructive in this regard that the racial wealth gap has become the gold standard, as it were, of racial injustice. For one thing, the academics, NGO functionaries, media commentators and the like who stress it as a matter for public concern are themselves typically rooted in the professional-managerial strata among which it is most visible and experienced most acutely. Complaints about white co-workers whose parents provide them with down payments on $700,000 condos do not much exist in the working class. Not only is the gap mainly an upper-status affair; defining it as a crucial marker of racial inequality, as Manduca’s work illustrates, naturalizes the forces that produce the larger, more consequential framework of capitalist inequality within which wealth is produced and distributed. Indeed, fixation on the wealth gap is so thoroughly marinated in neoliberal fantasies that accumulating individual wealth is the route to security, dignity and self-respect and that racism is the only impediment to realizing those fantasies, that it obscures the more proximate sources of racial inequality, as well more direct and concrete responses to that inequality. Dionissi Aliprantis and Daniel Carroll, in a report for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, found that the most important source of the persisting racial wealth gap is the income gap. They indicate, based on a sophisticated model of wealth accumulation that adjusts for different patterns of saving across the life cycle, that, if current trends persist, it would take 259 years for black mean wealth to equal 90 percent of the white mean. Adjusting the model to assume that black/white income equality had been attained in 1962, they find that median black family wealth would have reached 90 percent of white family wealth by 2007.

Policies of social-democratic redistribution that reduce the effective income differentials between top and bottom, combined with serious anti-discrimination measures and increased public investment that restores and expands the public sector where black and brown workers are disproportionately employed, it turns out, would do more to reduce even the racial wealth gap than genuine pipe-dream proposals like reparations or other Rube Goldberg-like asset-building strategies. Resistance to such an approach throws into relief the extent to which antiracism as a politics is an artifact and engine of neoliberalism. It does a better job legitimizing market-based principles of social justice than increasing racial equality. And a key component of that work of legitimation is deflection of social-democratic alternatives.
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more at the link

 

solid contribution