Michael Kingsley Brown

The question of economic justice for Black Americans continues to be the subject of contentious political debate. Here, Michael K. Brown examines the meaning of racial equality during three transformative periods when economic opportunity appeared to be a real possibility: Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Political leaders who believed slavery and Jim Crow degraded Black people enacted policies to rehabilitate formerly subjugated individuals. Black Americans, on the other hand, repudiated the idea that they were damaged people in need of repair. Repeatedly, Black people’s vision of economic justice was based on antiprivilege egalitarianism, the idea that a just restitution for their oppression required abolishing the political and legal privileges whites had acquired. Black opposition reveals what was at stake at each historical moment and what might constitute economic justice in the twenty-first century.

The question of economic justice for Black Americans continues to be the subject of contentious political debate. Here, Michael K. Brown examines the meaning of racial equality during three transformative periods when economic opportunity appeared to be a real possibility: Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Political leaders who believed slavery and Jim Crow degraded Black people enacted policies to rehabilitate formerly subjugated individuals. Black Americans, on the other hand, repudiated the idea that they were damaged people in need of repair. Repeatedly, Black people’s vision of economic justice was based on antiprivilege egalitarianism, the idea that a just restitution for their oppression required abolishing the political and legal privileges whites had acquired. Black opposition reveals what was at stake at each historical moment and what might constitute economic justice in the twenty-first century.

In an updated new edition of this classic work, a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars scrutinize the resilience of racial inequality in twenty-first-century America. Whitewashing Race argues that contemporary racism manifests as discrimination in nearly every realm of American life, and is further perpetuated by failures to address the compounding effects of generations of disinvestment. Police violence, mass incarceration of Black people, employment and housing discrimination, economic deprivation, and gross inequities in health care combine to deeply embed racial inequality in American society and economy. Updated to include the most recent evidence, including contemporary research on the racially disparate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, this edition of Whitewashing Race analyzes the consequential and ongoing legacy of "disaccumulation" for Black communities and lives. While some progress has been made, the authors argue that real racial justice can be achieved only if we actively attack and undo pervasive structural racism and its legacies.