Enablers of White Supremacy
I have some hope that the current protests will be a watershed for race in America. It is far from certain, but it seems reasonable to hope for a change of the same magnitude as has happened as a result of the #metoo movement in the domain of sexual depredations.
One of the books that many people are reading right now—including me—is White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, by Robin DiAngelo. (See Jeff Trachtenberg’s June 5, 2020 Wall Street Journal article “Readers Flock to Books About Race Relations.”) Robin DiAngelo’s answer to the implicit question in the subtitle is this:
Prejudice is foundational to understanding white fragility because suggesting that white people have racial prejudice is perceived as saying that we are bad and should be ashamed. We then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them. In this way, our misunderstanding about what prejudice is protects it.
In other words, it is hard for white people to talk about racism because, for most white people, the only alternative they can see to being innocent of racism is that they are a “racist” like the racists who commit hate crimes killing black people or other people of color. This dichotomy doesn’t leave much room for recognizing whatever racism we not-obviously-horrible white people have inside us and trying to reduce its effects on us—and more importantly, reducing its effects on the world.
As a book that draws on academic ideas, White Fragility comes from the perspective of sociology, so it takes some translation to draw out of it the lessons for economists without too much distraction from side-issues related to the different perspectives of sociology and economics. Let me discuss two particular passages from White Fragility (bullets added):
When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.
People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual.
I find the phrase “only whites can be racist” needlessly confusing. “Racism” is too well established as having a default common usage focusing on individual traits to clearly mean “systemic racism” without the addition of the adjective “systemic,” or some other modifier that does the same job. On the other hand, I understand the need for a powerful—even shocking—word in order to get people to take it seriously. So, let me use the phrase “white supremacy” to refer to systemic racism. Here are some proposed definitions:
white supremacy (noun): a set of social structures that advantage whites and disadvantage non-whites that are durable, including the capacity to adapt to a changing situation in a way that leads to another set of social structures in the same category of white supremacy. (This notion of adaptation as one of the defining features of white supremacy is influenced by the impressive documentary “13th.”)
white supremacist (noun): someone who advocates white supremacy as desirable.
white supremacism (noun): the activities of white supremacists
white supremacy (adjective): having to do with white supremacy
white supremacist (adjective): having to do with white supremacists
Let me introduce one more concept: enabling white supremacy. Few of us are white supremacists, but almost all white people are enablers of white supremacy in the same sense that someone who makes excuses for an alcoholic and makes it easier for them to continue in their alcoholism is an enabler of that alcoholic’s alcoholism.
To make clear what I am saying, I need to discuss a concept that, to an economist, is the elephant in the room for Robin DiAngelo’s book: statistical discrimination. (Statistical discrimination is treating a group differently only because, given the way the world is, they are in fact different on average—at least in superficial, but practically important ways.) A world in which there were only statistical discrimination and no other form of discrimination would be one in which disadvantaging of people of color resulted from people pursuing their private interests with no racist preferences. Given those non-racist preferences, if the world started in a steady state of racial equality it would stay in that steady state of racial equality. However, if the current social situation in not in that steady state of racial equality, convergence toward that steady state of racial equality could be very slow, if there is any natural tendency toward convergence at all.
To make this more vivid, remember that in a very literal sense, our society was designed over centuries by powerful men who in every sense of the word were white supremacists. This is pretty obvious in the historical documents. It is only since the 1960s that being a white supremacist has been considered a bad enough thing that relatively few people openly advocate white supremacy as a desirable state of affairs. There are very long-lasting effects of past white supremacy (which in turn gained a lot in power because of past white supremacism). For example, the health of parents can easily affect the health of a child.
Although one might hope that racial equality would entail large benefits for everyone (important figures have argued that white supremacy is damaging enough to the souls of white people that there is a Pareto improvement to be had), it is logically possible that a transition from where we are now to a steady state of racial equality could entail non-withes becoming better off and whites becoming worse off than staying in the current situation of white supremacy. A claim that doing only statistical discrimination is not really white supremacy is setting the standard that while we should expect people to give up their racist preferences—or duplicate what would happen if they didn’t have racist preferences, we shouldn’t expect people to sacrifice anything else in order to move toward a situation of greater racial equality. I think that is ethically wrong. It is reasonable to expect people who are now advantaged to sacrifice something beyond just racist preferences in order to get a situation of greater racial equality.
I expect to do more posts based on my reading of White Fragility, but today I will end with that idea even if no one had racist preferences, and people had a very high level of understanding of the racial situation, that those unwilling to pay their fair share of the costs of transition to a steady state of greater racial equality can appropriately be called “enablers of white supremacy.” They might have words to defend their choice to be enablers of white supremacy, but that would be an accurate description of their position.
There are many other ways to be an enabler of white supremacy.
Postscript: Let me attempt a translation using the definitions I have made of this passage I quoted above:
When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.
My translation is simply that no one can be an “enabler of black supremacy” because black supremacy is not a real thing in the world for anyone to enable. Anyone who was trying (without success) to bring black supremacy into existence would be more than an enabler. By contrast, being an “enabler of white supremacy” in one of the many ways it is possible to be an enabler of white supremacy is a real and present danger for most of us.
I also have a discussion of racism and anti-racism in: