The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States

Why does racial inequality in America persist? In this new textbook, Michelle Holder and PERI’s Jeannette Wicks-Lim answer this question by introducing readers to the innovative field of stratification economics.

Stratification economics offers an antidote to conventional economics’ hyper-focus on individuals and disregard for how politics shapes the economy. It spotlights how groups – such as racial groups – compete to gain favorable positions in society through political and economic domination. The book fuses stratification economics with intersectional theory to illuminate how gender and ethnicity intertwine with racial oppression. Holder and Wicks-Lim argue that anti-Black racism developed and persists because it protects the interests of a politically dominant social group: White Americans. This argument is demonstrated across multiple arenas: education, employment, wealth, and the criminal legal system. Policy intervention – through government action spurred by social movements – is necessary for achieving racial equity.

Reviews

“Holder and Wicks-Lim’s exceptional volume provides a long overdue reckoning with the central role of anti-Blackness in the US economy. The Political Economy of Racism challenges popular mythology about racial outcomes by providing a theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded analysis of the history of anti-Black racism and its persistence in stratifying the US into a racial order that provides structural advantages on the basis of Whiteness and disadvantages of Blackness. As a beacon of light at the end of a very dark tunnel into which the US is rapidly moving.”
— Nina Banks, Bucknell University

“This is a landmark publication in stratification economics – an approach that examines socioeconomic and wealth inequality within and between social groups. From this perspective racial groups differ according to their access to resources, not biogenetic characteristics. It is a must-read for a wide audience: an undergraduate introduction, a reference text for graduate students, an important source for activists and policymakers, a guide for theorists, and it provides for general readers a highly informative text on inequality.”
— Patrick L. Mason, University of Massachusetts Amherst