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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2025
Racial justice is widely seen as a central moral and political ideal of our time, especially on the liberal-egalitarian left. And racial justice goes hand in hand with racial equality. The centrality of these ideals would be hard to justify if they had no bearing on material or economic inequality, or applied solely to semiotic and cultural issues. But we argue that, at present, the only plausible basis for understanding racial equality as a distinctive aim for the economic domain—rather than a mere implication of more general egalitarian or progressive principles—rests on minimal state, right-libertarian foundations. As such, racial equality is a strange focus for the left.
Thanks to Brian Berkey, Mitch Berman, Juliana Bidadanure, Larry Blum, Ryan Doerfler, Ben Eidelson, Richard Fallon, Noah Feldman, Kim Ferzan, Daniel Fryer, John C.P. Goldberg, Randy Kennedy, Erin Kelly, Sandy Mayson, Jennifer Morton, Mickaella Perina, Debra Satz, Gina Schouten, Tommie Shelby, Alex Walker, Daniel Wodak, and participants at the Penn Law & Philosophy Workshop, the Harvard Law & Philosophy Workshop, the Queens University Colloquium in Legal and Political Philosophy, and the Stanford Political Theory Workshop for helpful feedback on previous drafts.
For replication code, see github.com/ausmani23/currencyrj
1 In philosophy, perhaps nobody has done more to advance this perspective than Charles Mills. In a distinguished body of work, Mills pressed the claim that the social contract tradition (often represented by Rawls’ Theory of Justice), and Anglo-American political philosophy more generally, is inadequately sensitive to the history of racial injustice. See, e.g., Charles Mills, Theorizing Racial Justice, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2020), 48-49; Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice? A Critique of Tommie Shelby, 1 Critical Philosophy of Race 1 (2013); White Supremacy as Sociopolitical System, ch. 7 of Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003); Racial Justice, 92 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 69 (2018).
2 Mills uses the terms “civic political status,” “one’s entitlement to fair (race-independent) professional and economic opportunities for careers and the accumulation of wealth,” and one’s “socially recognized personhood.” Mills, Theorizing Racial Justice, 48-49.
3 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984); T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (1950); Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); Lauren Rivera, Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms, 77 Am. Soc. Rev. 999 (2012); Martin Gillens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, 12 Perspectives on Politics 564 (2014).
4 See, e.g., Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class and Race (1948); Nancy Fraser & Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition (2003); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1992); Iris M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990); Axel Honneth, Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas (2020).
5 John Rawls, a Theory of Justice (1971); for an intellectual history of post-Rawlsian analytical political philosophy, see Katrina Forester, In the Shadow of Justice (2019).
6 See, e.g., Chris Lebron, The Color of our Shame (2013); Mills, Charles W., White Supremacy as Sociopolitical System, ch. 7 of Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003)Google Scholar; Charles Mills, Racial Justice, 92 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 69 (2018); Elizabeth Anderson, What is the Point of Equality?, 109 Ethics 287 (1999); Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (2010).
7 Anderson, for example, explicitly states that at least a certain level of income and wealth may serve as preconditions to equal civic participation or democratic citizenship. Elizabeth Anderson, What is the Point of Equality?, 109 Ethics 287 (1999). Satz argues, similarly, that what constitutes an adequate education for democratic citizenship depends partly on what educational opportunities others have, so the threshold of adequacy must have a partly egalitarian element. Debra Satz, Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship, 117 Ethics 623 (2007).
8 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971).
9 See, e.g., Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (1992); Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (2009).
10 See, e.g., Andrew Jebb et al., Happiness, Income Satiation and Turning Points Around the World. 2 Nature Human Behavior 33 (2018).
11 By “progressive,” we mean to include sufficientarian, utilitarian, and democratic egalitarian principles. Civic standing or democratic citizenship is the fundamental equalisandum in democratic egalitarian theories of justice. But those theories do have implications for the distribution of income and wealth, and democratic egalitarians (often drawing on the British sociologist T.H. Marshall) emphasize that some threshold of income and wealth can be an important precondition for achieving equal civic standing. See Anderson, What is the Point of Equality 287. So, with respect to income and wealth, democratic egalitarianism has much in common with Sufficientarianism—both are “threshold” views.
12 All data are from the 2022 edition of the Survey of Consumer Finances.
13 See, e.g., Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2018); Melvin L. Oliver & Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (1995); William A. Darity & Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty First Century (2020).
14 See, e.g., Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014).
15 Middle-income Black families commonly face a host of neighborhood-level disadvantages from which White families with similar incomes are spared. See, e.g., Mary Patillo, Black Middle-Class Neighborhoods, 31 Ann. Rev. Sociology 305 (2005).
16 Melvin L. Oliver & Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (1995).
17 See, e.g., Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (1997); Charles Mills, Theorizing Racial Justice, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2020); Erin Kelly, The Historical Injustice Problem for Political Liberalism, 128 Ethics 75 (2017).
18 Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, The Atlantic (2014).
19 For ease, we round all dollar values in this paper to the nearest $1,000.
20 William A. Darity & Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty First Century (2020), 94 26, p. 331 (“Ninety-seven percent of white wealth is held above the white median net worth, so targeting median net worth ignores a vast amount of white-owned wealth.”).
21 In the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the total stock of household wealth is around 139 trillion dollars. The real number is larger, but for consistency we base all calculations and simulations described in this paper on the SCF.
22 This helps illustrate why it is insufficient for social scientists to use these properties as a proxy for reasoning about the normative significance of interventions.
23 We borrow the concept of “narrow tailoring” here from 14th Amendment jurisprudence. See, e.g., Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995); Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
24 Though reparations proposals take different forms (including many that are non-monetary), in a recent book on the subject, William Darrity and Kristen A. Mullen argue that the size of the reparations bill should be calibrated by that amount necessary to eradicate the racial gap in mean wealth between Black and White households. William A. Darity & A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty First Century (2020).
25 The kind of race-based reparations we simulate has three features. First, we target the mean Black/White racial wealth gap, rather than calculating the bill by working backwards from the amount of unpaid wages or uncompensated damages. Second, we raise the revenue for it by taxing households at rates equal to the progressive structure of the American income tax (rather than raising it in a flat way). Households with zero or negative net worth pay no tax. Third, we distribute it to Black households as a universal, flat grant (rather than in a progressive way). Later in the paper we discuss the consequences of modifying the third feature, and distributing it in a means-tested rather than flat manner. Note that, in our implementation, the total amount transferred is smaller than the figure we cited earlier as the figure that would be sufficient to raise the wealth of the mean Black household to the level of the mean White household. The reason for this is that some of the gap is closed by the fact that wealth is being taken away from existing households and not simply produced out of thin air. To see this, it may help to consider a simple example. To close a gap between two people who have $10 and $20 respectively, a third party can either give $10 to the first, confiscate $5 from the second and transfer it to the first, or raise $7.50 by taxing both at twenty-five percent and redistributing the proceeds to the poorer of the two people. Our implementation of reparations is like the third of these scenarios, except that the tax is progressive. For more details, see the replication code.
26 Charles Mills, Theorizing Racial Justice, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2020), p. 16-17; Erin Kelly, Redress and Reparations for Injurious Wrongs, 41 Law & Philosophy 105 (2021).
27 Mills, Theorizing Racial Justice, 49. Mills saw these principles as being justified by a modified quasi-Rawlsian thought experiment involving a “veil of ignorance” that would give decision-makers in the Original Position information about the history of racial injustice in the society they are choosing principles for, but still prevent them from knowing their own racial identity, among other things.
28 Mills, Theorizing Racial Justice, p. 53 (emphasis added).
29 See Lipkin Gorman v. Karpnale Ltd (1988) UKHL 12; Peter Birks, Unjust Enrichment (Oxford, 2005); Andrew Burrows, A Restatement of the English Law of Unjust Enrichment (Oxford University Press, 2012).
30 Bernard Boxill, A Lockean Argument for Black Reparations, 7 J. Ethics 63-91 (2003); Bernard Boxill & J. Angelo Corlett, Black Reparations, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016). Unlike Mills, Boxill does not defend the view that racial justice is fundamentally distinct from social or economic justice in general, or that racial equality should be understood as a self-standing ideal, independent from more general egalitarian or progressive principles, however. And his earlier work indeed suggests something closer to the opposite, given that much of it applies standard liberal-egalitarian principles to issues of racial inequality, such school integration and busing programs. See Bernard Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice (1984).
31 Shades of this argument can be seen in contemporary writing, though these writers do not explicitly lay out the normative case in anything approaching the depth that Boxill does. See, e.g., Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, The Atlantic (2014); William A. Darity & Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty First Century (2020); Because we are focused here on the substantive task of analyzing this argument and others, rather than adjudicating their influence or popularity, and given space constraints, we cannot give an exegesis of these works to show in any conclusive way that they implicitly rely on something like Boxill’s normative framework.
32 Charles Mills, Theorizing Racial Justice, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2020), 49; Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, The Atlantic (2014); William A. Darity & Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty First Century (2020); Erin Kelly, Redress and Reparations for Injurious Wrongs, 41 Law & Philosophy 105 (2021).
33 Rothstein, The Color of Law.
34 See, e.g., Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2018); Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 (1993); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (2008).
35 See, e.g., Akhil R. Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (2005); Noah Feldman, The Broken Constitution, Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America (2021).
36 See, e.g., Jules L. Coleman, Corrective Justice and Wrongful Gain, 11 J. Legal Stud. 421 (1982); Donoghue v. Stevenson, [1932] UKHL 100.
37 For a defense of the Nordic model on roughly Rawlsian grounds, see Lane Kenworthy, Social Democratic Capitalism (2020), and Lane Kenworthy, Would Democratic Socialism Be Better (2022). Rawls himself argues that his theory of justice is incompatible with “welfare-state capitalism,” and condones only a “property owning democracy” or “liberal socialism.” John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement §41 (Erin Kelly, ed., 2001). But cf. Jeppe von Platz, Democratic Equality and the Justification of Welfare-State Capitalism, 131 Ethics 4 (2020)
38 See, e.g., Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (2011); David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (1981); Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America (2010).
39 See, e.g., James S. Coleman, Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital, 94 Am. J. Soc. S95 (1988); Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2003); Robert D. Putnam, Out Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015); Thomas Piketty & Gabriel Zucman, Wealth and Inheritance in the Long Run, in Handbook of Income Distribution, Vol. 2 (Anthony B. Atkinson & Francois Bourguignon, eds.) (2015).
40 See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (2009); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (2022). Others disagree. See Kevin Kenny, Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study 90 J. Am. Hist. 134 (2003); Barbara J. Fields & Karen E. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America (2012).
41 National wealth data is disaggregated by race, but not ethnicity. But Asian-Americans in general are wealthier, on average, than White Americans. Chinese-Americans tend to have higher incomes, on average, than other Asian-Americans. See Rakesh Kochhar & Anthony Cilluffo, Income Inequality in the U.S. Is Rising Most Rapidly Among Asians (Pew Research Ctr., 2018). And household income is strongly correlated with household wealth. See Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998, 118 Q.J. Econ. 1 (2003).
42 This problem arises in Mills; Darity and Mullen; Coates, and Kelly. In Boxill’s framework, these implications could be viewed as a “feature” rather than a “bug,” however.
43 Note that we here grant Boxill his solution to The Overinclusiveness Problem, even though it is not obvious that he supplies principled reasons for focusing on slavery. Our point in this section is that, even if we could devise some such solution, it would greatly reduce the size of the reparations bill (and thus, not ensure anything like racial equality), unless it is taken in the direction of the inheritance-based arguments reviewed in the next section.
44 Michael Levin, Reverse Discrimination, Shackled Runners, and Personal Identity, 37 Phil. Stud. 137 (1980); Christopher Morris, Existential Limits to the Rectification of Past Wrongs, 21 Am. Phil. Q. 175 (1984); Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984). (Parfit did not conceive of this problem as an objection to reparations.)
45 Levin, Reverse Discrimination; Morris, Existential Limits.
46 Stephen Kershnar makes this somewhat related argument in The Inheritance-Based Claim to Reparations, 8 Legal Theory 243 (2002).
47 Bernard Boxill & J. Angelo Corlett, Black Reparations, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016); George Sher, Transgenerational Compensation, 33 Phil &. Pub. Aff. 181 (2005); Andrew I. Cohen, Compensation for Historic Injustices: Completing the Boxill and Sher Argument, 37 Phil & Pub. Aff. 81 (2009).
48 Bernard Boxill & J. Angelo Corlett, Black Reparations, Section 7.
49 See, e.g., Harry Brighouse & Adam Swift, Family Values (2014); Harry Brighouse & Adam Swift, Legitimate Parental Partiality, 37 Phil. & Pub. Aff 43 (2009); Harry Brighouse & Adam Swift, Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family, 117 Ethics 80 (2006).
50 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), 160.
51 Unlike Darity and Mills, Boxill does not defend the idea that the monetary reparations owed to present-day African-Americans would be sufficient to close the racial wealth gap.
52 One might wonder whether the Inheritance Argument is vulnerable to its own kind of Overinclusiveness Problem. Have there not been other forms of historical injustice that require redress on libertarian grounds? Our view is that the only plausible case is the case for reparations to Native Americans. Other examples (e.g., White indentured servants) represent, from a right-libertarian perspective, something like voluntary exchange in a market with unequal bargaining power. And even though the libertarian case for Native American reparations is probably sound, we do not think it affects the argument of this paper very dramatically. First, for a tragic reason, the payout is probably less significant than it might first appear. The majority of the original inhabitants of the continent do not have descendants. Those descendants who have survived do have a claim to their per capita share of the correct payout (whatever that is), but not also to the claims of those descendants who did not survive. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Native Americans are still a distinct, non-white racial group. So, even if it is the case that both Black descendants of slaves and Native American descendants of the original inhabitants of North America are both entitled to reparations, those reparations would still be race-based. In other words, this would still be a matter of racial justice, specifically.
53 See, e.g., Thomas Cramer, Estimating Slavery Reparations, 96 Social Science Quarterly 639 (2015); Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani, The Libertarian Case Against Property (unpublished manuscript, 2024).
54 Cf., e.g., George Sher, Transgenerational Compensation, 33 Phil. & Pub. Aff. 181 (2005); Andrew I. Cohen, Compensation for Historic Injustices: Completing the Boxill and Sher Argument, 37 Phil & Pub. Aff. 81 (2009).
55 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), 160.
56 See, e.g., Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, et al., Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies, 326 Science 682 (2009); Thomas Piketty, On the Long-Run Evolution of Inheritance: France 1820-2050, 126 Q.J. Econ. 1071 (2011); Edward N. Wolff, Inheritances and Wealth Inequality, 1989-1998, 92 Am. Econ. Rev. 260 (2002).
57 See, e.g., Susan N. Gary, The Probate Definition of Family: A Proposal for Guided Discretion in Intestacy, 45 U. Mich. J.L. Reform 787 (2012); Adam J. Hirsch & William K.S. Wang, A Qualitative Theory of the Dead Hand, 68 Ind. L.J. 1 (1992).
58 This menu is meant to be representative rather than exhaustive.
59 The compounding inegalitarian effects of inheritance is what inspired the “Rignano” scheme of progressive taxation, under which inherited wealth can be taxed more heavily when it is passed down across multiple generations. See Daniel Haliday, The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath (2018).
60 Id.
61 See, e.g., Gary S. Becker & Nigel Tomes, Human Capital and the Rise and Fall of Families, 4 J. Lab. Econ. S1 (1986).
62 See Douglas Holtz-Eakin et al., The Carnegie Conjecture: Some Empirical Evidence, 108 Q.J. Econ. 413 (1993).
63 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 152-153.
64 See Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani, The Libertarian Case Against Property (unpublished manuscript, 2024).
65 We use the term “intersectional” loosely here. For the canonical statement and development of “intersectionality” as a theoretical framework for analyzing how race, class, gender, and other overlapping aspects of social identity work together in employment discrimination, among other contexts, see Kimberle Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, U Chi. Legal Forum 139 (1989).
66 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971).
67 See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986); Elizabeth Anderson, Practical Reason and Incommensurable Goods, in Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason (Ruth Chang, ed.)(1997); Michael B. Gill & Shaun Nichols, Sentimentalist Pluralism: Moral Psychology and Philosophical Ethics, 18 Phil. Issues 143 (2008); Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 17 (1985).
68 See, e.g., Jeppe von Platz, Democratic Equality and the Justification of Welfare-State Capitalism, 131 Ethics 4 (2020); Jeppe von Platz, Social Cooperation and Basic Economic Rights: A Rawlsian Route to Social Democracy, 47 J. Soc. Phil. 288 (2016); Liam Shields, Just Enough: Sufficiency as a Demand of Justice (2016).
69 See, e.g., Lane Kenworthy Social Democratic Capitalism (2019); Lane Kenworthy, Would Democratic Socialism Be Better? (2022).
70 See, e.g., Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982).
71 Indeed, even among the Nordic countries, there is a strong inverse correlation between racial heterogeneity and the generosity of the welfare state. See, e.g., Alberto Alesina & Eliana La Ferrara, Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance, 43 J. Econ. Lit. 762 (2005). Norway has the most generous welfare state among those countries, and the most racially homogenous population (ensured by the most restrictive immigration policies). Alberto Alesina & Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (2004). As Sweden has grown more racially diverse, its social policy spending has also grown more austere. See Vanessa Barker, Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare State (2018).
72 Norway’s discovery of immensely rich oil deposits in the Norwegian continental shelf also played some role in its particularly generous form of social democracy. Lane Kenworthy, Social Democratic America (2014) 117-118, 128-130. From the perspective of political philosophy, the Norwegian oil deposits could be thought of as being like “manna from heaven.” Ronald Dworkin, What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources, 10 Phil. & Pub. Aff. 283 (1981)
73 See, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1992); Fields, Slavery, Race and Ideology.
74 Thanks to Ryan Doerfler for pressing us on this point. A different strategic case for race-based reparations runs through a concern with racial ideology: because race-based reparations would close the gap between Black Americans and White Americans, one might hope that it could weaken the material basis of racial ideology that obstructs the emergence of a robust social democracy. But we suspect, in fact, that reparations might worsen rather than improve race relations. See Adaner Usmani & David Zachariah, The Class Path to Racial Liberation, 5 Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy 51 (2021).
75 Charles Mills Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice?: A Critique of Tommie Shelby, 1 Criticial Phil. Race 21 (2013).
76 Mills, Racial Justice, at 81.
77 See, e.g., James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962); Ralph Miliband, Politics and Marxism (1977).
78 West Germany paid about 3 billion marks to the state of Israel over a period of 14 years. Its total GDP in this period was 3.7 trillion marks (i.e., across all 15 years), which means that it paid only ~1/1250th of its GDP in any given year. Compare this to the fact that social democracies spend something like 1/4th of their GDP on redistributive social programs in any given year. See the replication code for more details.
79 See, e.g., Laurent Dubois, An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic, 31 Social History 1 (2006).
80 Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference (2006).
81 Walter Korpi, The Democratic Class Struggle (1983).
82 See, e.g., Barbara J. Fields, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America, 181 New Left Review 95 (1990); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935); Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell & Maya Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (2018).
83 Lawrence D. Bobo & Vincent L. Hutchings, Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context, 61 Am. Soc. Rev. 951 (1996).
84 Shaun Bowler Keith G. Bentele & Eric E. O’Brien, Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies, 11 Perspectives on Politics 1088 (2013).
85 See Kenneth A. Couch & Robert Fairlie, Last Hired, First Fired? Black-White Unemployment and the Business Cycle, 47 Demography 227 (2010); Adaner Usmani & David Zachariah, The Class Path to Racial Liberation, 5 Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy 51 (2021). In this case, since we are considering whether a cross-class coalition of Black people could win redistribution from a cross-class coalition of White people, it is also relevant that Black people are less likely to own firms (i.e. less likely to be capitalists or shareholders). See Robert W. Fairlie & Alicia M. Robb, Race and Entrepreneurial Success: Black-, Asian-, and White-Owned Businesses in the United States (2008). Ownership of productive assets also confers structural power in a capitalist economy, but there are far fewer Black owners of firms than White owners of firms. This is thus another reason to be pessimistic about the prospects for race-based redistribution.
86 See, e.g., Karl Marx, The Power of Money, in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis (1994).
87 Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (2011); Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizen’s United (2014).
88 See, e.g., Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass 179-181 (1998); Sam and Mark Fossett, Why Racial Employment Inequality Is Greater in Northern Labor Markets: Regional Differences in White-Black Employment Differentials, 74 Social Forces 511 (1995).
89 See, e.g., Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline & Emmanuel Saez, Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 126 Q. J. Econ. 1553, 1608-1612 (2014).
90 See, e.g., John Kain, Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization, 82 Q. J. Econ. 175 (1968).
91 See, e.g., Robert J. Sampson, Patrick Sharkey & Stephen W. Raudenbush, Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children, 105 Proc. Nat’l Acad. Sci. 845 (2008).
92 See, e.g., Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush & Felton Earls, Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy, 277 Science 918 (1997).
93 See, e.g., David M. Cutler & Edward L. Glaeser, Are Ghettos Good or Bad? 112 Q. J. Econ. 827 (1997).
94 See, e.g., Ruth D. Peterson & Lauren J. Krivo, Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide 53-62 (2010).
95 William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (1987).