The white 2K problem

Abstract

Cornel West observes that it is fundamentally depressing to confront the degree to which race still matters in U.S. society. Although the civil rights movement of the 1960s secured important and lasting victories, people from different races still confront starkly unequal access to housing and health care, to education and employment. Biologists and anthropologists now agree that dividing humanity into different races is fabricated and fraudulent; racial categories are scientific fictions. Yet scientific fictions often become social facts with deadly consequences. Malcolm X used to say that racism was like a Cadillac they make a new model every year. Just as it is impossible to fix a 1990s Cadillac with a 1960s owner's manual, we will not address the racism of the 1990s and beyond with a 1960s philosophy and approach. Our challenge is to develop an anti-racist vision appropriate to our own time, to the challenges presented to us by the injustices inscribed in our everyday lives through racial inequality. A broad range of private prejudices and public policies keep racism alive and functioning in our society, not so much through the direct, snarling, and referential racism of avowedly white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but more through the indirect, institutional, and inferential racism encoded within what I call the possessive investment in whiteness. In my view, the possessive investment in whiteness creates the racialized hierarchies of our society. It determines which families receive home loans and which families remain renters, whose children attend well-funded schools and whose children go to the overcrowded and underfunded institutions with inexperienced teachers and inadequate equipment that tend to be found in non-white neighborhoods. The possessive investment in whiteness determines which people breathe polluted air, ingest lead in their blood streams, or eat fish poisoned by mercury. It determines who can rely on inside information and personal networks to secure one of the 85 percent of all available jobs in the U.S. that never appear in the 'help wanted' section of the newspaper, and influences the racial make-up of the unemployed and under-employed population. It helps shape the tax code in such a way as to give favored treatment to precisely the kinds of income that