The Privatization of Racial Responsibility: A Materialist Analysis of Contemporary White Antiracism Under Neoliberal Capitalism

Abstract

Despite the myriad legislative accomplishments of the Modern Civil RightsMovement, structural racial inequality has remained an enduring feature of American life. Tomes have been written attempting to explain why it is that racial inequality in the so-called “post-Civil Rights Era” remains so intractable. Key explanations have centered on the notion that although many white Americans have, since the 1960s, come to express more liberal racial attitudes, they have often failed to support key politics that would ostensibly create a more racially egalitarian society—a phenomenon referred to as the principle-policy gap. This dissertation offers a historical materialist framework for understanding the persistence of the principle-policy gap among white Americans—and contemporary white antiracism more generally—which I term the privatization of racial responsibility. Using historical narrative to show how political elites were instrumental in setting the terms upon which contemporary antiracism rests, and experimental methods to test the hypotheses generated by my theoretical framework, I elucidate the kinds of antiracist behaviors white Americans who are sympathetic to racially egalitarian ideals (in this case, white liberals) will engage in when they must either take responsibility for themselves and their families or take responsibility for racial equality—an arrangement which, I argue, is the primary source of the principle-policy gap among white liberal Americans.