ANTIRACIST WHITES, BAD FAITH, INEQUALITY
It would perhaps be a happy coincidence if racialized inequality could be resolved primarily (or exclusively) by focusing on those who hold ‘unenlightened’ racial beliefs and attitudes, those who fail to vote the ‘right’ way, etc. – i.e. requiring little-to-no change from the ‘good whites’ and how they live their lives. In reality, the main obstacle to a more just distribution of resources and opportunities today may be those who acknowledge racism, identify with the left, and aspire to be (or view themselves as) allies to those from historically marginalized and disenfranchised groups. Consider:
America’s wealth is being concentrated in urban, coastal regions, particularly the West Coast (Seattle through San Diego), Chicago, and the Northeast Corridor running from Boston, through New York to Washington D.C. (Manduca 2019; Frank 2018; Time Labs 2015). These regions also serve as hubs for the most lucrative and essential industries in today’s economy – finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine (Yang 2018). Perhaps unsurprisingly, college graduates from around the country are increasingly flocking to these cities as well (Dougherty et al. 2018; Florida 2016). Indeed, these regions hosts the ‘heart’ of academia, including all of the Ivy League schools, the ‘public ivies,’ the elite liberal arts colleges, and a plurality of R1 schools.[3] Media institutions have been consolidated into the same hubs, and increasingly cater to these elite constituencies’ interests or preferences at the expense of virtually everyone else (Shafer & Doherty 2017).
Minorities and immigrants have been heavily concentrated into these metropolitan areas as well. America’s cities are more diverse than ever, yet they remain heavily segregated along racial and ethnic lines (Williams & Emamdjomeh 2018). The places where wealth is being concentrated also happen to be the most unequal places in the United States — with an ever-growing share of denizens classifying as either extremely well-off or impoverished (Galka 2017; Sassen 2018, pp. 235-72).
Although these areas do tend to have significantly higher taxes (Kiernan 2019) – largely to fund more generous social safety nets, infrastructure projects, and government services (Cohn 2012) – state and local tax revenues tend to be extracted at significantly higher rates from people in the lower quintiles of the income distribution (Cohen 2015). That is, it is the poor and middle classes who disproportionately fund the more generous social safety nets in these states and municipalities. Put another way, wealth is being concentrated into the hands of elites in these regions at a far higher clip than it is being reallocated to the disadvantaged.
In short, when we look at who we would have to reallocate wealth and opportunity from – whose lifestyles or behaviors would have to be adjusted in order to achieve a more equitable distribution — it would primarily be relatively well-off whites who live in or around major metropolitan areas. And not just the super-rich. Since Occupy Wall Street, most discussions about elites have focused on the top 1% of U.S. wealth-holders – often maligned as ostentatious, greedy, materialistic and entitled (Sherman 2017). Yet, as Richard Reeves (2017a) put it:
“The rhetoric of ‘We are the 99 percent’ has in fact been dangerously self-serving, allowing people with healthy six-figure incomes to convince themselves that they are somehow in the same economic boat as ordinary Americans, and that it is just the so-called super rich who are to blame for inequality.”
In fact, Reeves (2017b) shows, it is the upper and upper-middle classes who are responsible for the declines in social mobility and increased concentration of wealth in the uppermost quintiles. In their efforts to preserve their socioeconomic position and help their children advance further up the ladder (or at least, avoid sliding ‘down’), upper-middle class families have effectively “captured” key sources of social capital, and zealously defend their hold on them. Because this “new American aristocracy” is overwhelmingly white (Stewart 2018), this hoarding of wealth and opportunity has not only exacerbated inequality, it has reinforced its racialization as well. It is estimated that the black-white income gap would have closed by roughly 30 percent over the last 50 years were it not for these consolidations (Manduca 2018).
Critically, those most responsible for this racial stratification trend left politically. These are the whites who most fervently denounce Donald Trump and his supporters for their alleged racism and xenophobia (al-Gharbi 2018a); they are the whites most likely to produce and consume antiracist content in academia or the media.[4] In fact, highly-educated white liberals have come to be more ‘woke’ in their racial attitudes than the average black or Hispanic (Kaufmann 2019a; Yglesias 2019) – even to the point of expressing more positive sentiments towards racial or ethnic ‘others’ over their fellow whites (Goldberg 2019); they are the only U.S. racial or ethnic subgroup to exhibit such tendencies. That is, the whites who seem most preoccupied with racialized inequality also happen to be among those most responsible for its persistence.
The states hosting the aforementioned nexus of social and financial capital — and accompanying stark racial and economic inequality — tend to be solidly “blue.” Within those states, districts containing major metropolitan centers where elites tend to work and live trend even further left — and have been growing even “bluer” in recent cycles as a result of the professional class’ tightening alignment with the Democratic Party (Piketty 2018).[5] These regions may now be more homogenously liberal than they have ever been (Enos 2017).[6] Consequently, given the current concentrations of financial and cultural capital — and ongoing demographic trends — it is well within the power of liberal, urban, higher-SES whites to significantly upend the racial distribution of wealth in the United States purely through how they allocate their own resources, manage the organizations and institutions they are embedded in, and leverage the city and state governments which Democrats firmly control. Indeed, a growing body of evidence from the “global south” suggests that direct (especially sustained) transfers of cash or assets may among the most effective and efficient means of eliminating poverty and mitigating inequality (Hanlon et al. 2010; Matthews 2018). However, up to now, these whites have seemed averse to reallocating wealth or opportunities from themselves to the disadvantaged.
For instance, studies consistently show that the Americans who are most likely to give, and who dedicate the largest share of their income to charity, are actually those from the lower quintiles and in rural, suburban and/or “red” districts – particularly those who identify as religious or conservative (e.g. Davis et al. 2017; Zinsmeister 2016; Piff et al. 2010).[7] These are also the donors whose charity is most directly oriented towards addressing poverty and human suffering.[8]
In contrast, wealthier, more-educated, urban donors (who trend left) are more likely to dedicate resources to causes like environmental protection or animal rights, or to organizations like the ACLU or Amnesty International (Callahan 2018). The largest charitable contributions by these donors consistently go to universities, especially elite private schools – and museums or the arts (Stern 2013) – i.e. to institutions which (disproportionately white) elites are, themselves, among the most likely to utilize. Even when these elites invest in public spaces like parks, they often work to tightly restrict access thereafter – particularly with regards to minorities and the poor (Toloudi 2016, Jaffe 2014).
The higher one goes up the socioeconomic ladder, and the larger the individual donations get, the more donors try to leverage their ‘gifts’ into greater social influence (Horvath & Powell 2017). ‘Charity’ is often used to directly promote elite donors’ financial interests[9] (Mukherjee & Banet-Weiser 2012), or to distract attention from the role elites played in creating or perpetuating social problems (Kotkin 2018). In other cases, philanthropy is used to kill more systemic social reforms that may better address the issues elites want to ‘fix,’ but would threaten their financial interests in the process (Giridharadas 2018). Upper-middle class and wealthy taxpayers also tend to be much more aggressive in using charitable donations to reduce their tax liability. This significantly reduces government revenues,[10] thereby undermining state-led efforts to assist the disadvantaged too (Williamson 2019).
Nowhere are these dynamics clearer than with regards to antiracism. Again, given the abundance of coverage on inequality (and racial inequality in particular) among academic and media outlets – primarily produced for, and consumed by, (disproportionately white) social elites – it would be reasonable to assume that those who control most financial and cultural capital in the United States also harbor deep and sincere egalitarian commitments. Yet, even as their actions and interactions both racialize and exacerbate inequality, less than 7% of all philanthropic dollars in the U.S. are awarded to groups that specifically serve ethnic or racial minorities (Brown et al. 2016, p. 9). Out of the 1000 largest charitable foundations in the United States, the overwhelming majority (90%) dedicate less than half of their grant dollars to directly assisting underserved communities; overall, underserved communities receive less than one-third of all charitable foundation funding (Schlegal 2016).[11]
As Jerolmack & Khan (2014) noted, “talk is cheap”: To understand what people really believe, one must look at behaviors. Should we rely on “where and how people invest their resources” as a measure of their priorities and commitments (Becker 1978) – regardless of whether one looks at rates of donation, the share of wealth donated, or the specific organizations/ institutions/ causes supported when these donors do give – it seems as though addressing inequality is simply not a priority for the upper-middle class and wealthy urban (or urban-adjacent) whites who control the lion’s share of financial, social and cultural capital in the United States (and trend politically ‘left’). Addressing the racialization of inequality seems to be even less of a concern.
Nonetheless, it would be overly simplistic to dismiss white elites as merely cynical or deceptive in their antiracist commitments. They often seem genuinely horrified by racialized inequality and its consequences, despite the ways in which they benefit from these dynamics, and despite their own lack of meaningful action to change them. As Jean-Paul Sarte (1956) put it:
“Let us understand clearly that there is no question of a reflective, voluntary decision, but of a spontaneous determination of our being. One puts oneself in bad faith as one goes to sleep, and one is in bad faith as one dreams. Once this mode of being has been realized, it is as difficult to get out of it as to wake oneself up; bad faith is a type of being in the world, like waking or dreaming, which by itself tends to perpetuate itself” (p. 113).
Next, we will explore one key mechanism through which this ‘bad faith’ is maintained: moral credentialing.