Cambridge University Press has contracted with Bob Williams, Sulon Bibb Stedman Professor of Economics, to publish his next book as part of their Stratification Economics series. His work is currently titled Funding White Supremacy: Federal Wealth Policy and the Modern Racial Wealth Gap.
In the book, Bob documents the widening racial wealth gap in the U.S. over the past 60 years, a period that fully includes the legal dissolution of Jim Crow and the post-Civil Rights era. He argues that the growing concentration of wealth among white households ensures that economic power will remain disproportionately split along racialized lines. Indeed, due to its easy transfer across generations, wealth functions as the ultimate source of racial stratification and persistent white power.
He demonstrates that much of the racial wealth gap is the result of past and present federal policies. Federal support of slavery and du jure segregation along with federal laws encouraging land ownership, homeownership, and a college education — to name just a few examples — that explicitly favored white Americans explain much of the racial wealth gap. More surprisingly, he finds that a dozen tax deductions like the capital gains exclusion now total more than $1 trillion annually. He explains how these policies are designed to funnel most of their largesse to (already) wealthy households, most of which happen to be white as well.