Someone (DH?) wrote:
>The
point is that in a framework where the laws are race neutral, the
economy will work to eliminate economic disparities based on race.<
It would be pretty to think so. It would be better to check out a book like
George Lipsitz' "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness" or Micaela di
Leonardo's "Exotics at Home."
The problem is that racist policies of the past have created disparites,
particularly in wealth, that "race neutral" laws and policies today do
nothing to overcome. For example, the main source of personal wealth for
most middle-class Americans has come from buying and selling homes. But in
the post WWII period agencies like the FHA and the VA implemented policies
that were by no means race-neutral. In fact, they tended to maintain
housing segregation, which meant that whites were able to buy property in
areas where values appreciated significantly, whereas most blacks and
Latinos were confined to areas where values declined or did not
significantly appreciate. Most--not all, of course. But the result of
this--among many, many other such policies--is an enormous discrepancy in
wealth (far greater than in income) between most white and most minority
families. And that translates into continued profound inequality in
opportunity and life chances. It would take years, if not centuries, of
"affirmative action" to overcome such deeply-engrained disparities.
It also, btw, translates into some of the violent opposition in, for
example, white working-class suburbs (see, for example, Thomas Sugrue's and
Mike Goldfield's work) against blacks moving in, since many whites did
believe (wrongly) they were protecting their investments as well as their
jobs. That's the vote Wallace (George, that is) cultivated. If you think
Flint, it's not hard to see how unrestrained corporate greed (aka, the
marketplace) led to a situation in which jobs were being moved out (they
didn't just disappear--people fixed on profits moved them out) precisely at
the same time that blacks were moving in, trying to get out of the racist
and economically crumbling rural South. It don't take a rocket scientist to
understand how the "market" in such instances produces rather than
alleviating economic disparities based on race.
Not to recognize the continuing impact of these and many other
institutional factors is, well, naive at best. Someone else can name the
worst case. Paul
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