Redistributing skin colors has nothing to do with redistributing wealth; a world where every race was proportionately represented at every income level would be exactly as unequal as the one we have now. Arguably, however, it would have both ethical and economic advantages, or at least, that’s what its advocates believe. The problem with discrimination is that it generates what economists call “bad” inequalities. If a white male gets promoted over a Latina despite the fact that the Latina was doing a better job, that’s a bad inequality and it’s bad in two ways. It’s ethically bad because it’s unfair (the white man is being chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with merit) and it’s economically bad because it’s inefficient (since the white man wasn’t chosen for merit, the job is probably not being done as well as it could be). What anti-discrimination looks to do, then, is solve both the ethical and the economic problem—to make sure that all groups have equal opportunity to succeed and thus also to help make sure that the jobs are being done by the people who are best at doing them. Which has absolutely nothing to do with eliminating economic inequality.
5 In fact, it’s just the opposite: the point of eliminating horizontal inequality is to justify individual inequality.
This is why some of us have been arguing that identity politics is not an alternative to class politics but a form of it: it’s the politics of an upper class that has no problem with seeing people left behind as long as they haven’t been left behind because of their race or sex. And (this is at least one of the things that Marx meant by ideology) it’s promulgated not only by people who understand themselves as advocates of capital but by many who don’t. Even the Marxist anti-racist David Roediger thinks that “anti-capitalists” shouldn’t “sneer at” the goal of “evenly distribut[ing]” “poverty and inequality…across racial lines.” From his perspective, the problem is that “corporate embraces” of diversity “mask desires for the surplus value” it produces
6 and “shift the terms of struggles against racism”—as if
real anti-racism would get the job done. But if the job is a redistribution of wealth that will produce something other than horizontal equality, real anti-racism, just like real anti-discrimination of all kinds, not only won’t get it done but doesn’t even try to do it. Indeed, what it does instead is provide an account of failure—either you’re the victim of discrimination or you’re not a victim—so persuasive that even when it’s obviously not true, people believe it.
