Market based reforms will never end the racial inequality.

Even if it were possible for Black wealth to grow faster than white wealth despite the headwinds identified by Piketty, it would still take unbearably long. Last year, Ellora Derenoncourt, an economist at Princeton University, and three colleagues at  German universities that examined the evolution of the racial wealth gap since the end of the US Civil War. The paper’s authors estimate that even if Black and white wealth grew at the same rate—that is, with equal capital gains, rates of return, and savings rates, all unlikely outcomes of a system where having money helps generate more money—it would take over 200 years to close the racial wealth gap (2). Using more realistic assumptions that project forward the economic patterns of the past 50 years, the authors add that the answer to when the racial wealth gap will close, “strikingly, is never” (15). In response to these dire predictions, Hamilton has proposed that the federal government provide each child that does not already have a trust fund with such a fund upon birth. Children born to families with the least wealth would get the biggest endowments, up to $60,000. When they turn 18, account holders could access the funds for investment—to pay for college, buy a home, or start a business. While this would certainly make a significant dent in the racial wealth gap, it does not directly address the Piketty principle: so long as white fortunes are growing faster than Black ones, the racial wealth gap will persist. Darity and his coauthor, A. Kirsten Mullen, have made a more ambitious proposal advocating for reparations for Black Americans for slavery, Jim Crow, and current racial discrimination. This proposal calls for the US federal government to make direct payments, totaling $10 to $12 trillion, to each Black descendant of Africans enslaved in the US (controversially, the program would exclude Black immigrants). Putting aside whether such a proposal will ever gain majority support in Congress, would it actually close the racial wealth gap for good? While it would immediately close the wealth gap, such a proposal would not guarantee that the racial wealth inequality would not re-emerge. Again, so long as the returns to white wealth remain higher, then white wealth will eventually outpace Black wealth. The problem, as Piketty demonstrates, is that capitalism is an inequality-producing machine. One of the threads uniting the Black radical tradition is the assertion that it is impossible to achieve racial equality in a capitalist society. For at least a century, Black Marxists like WEB DuBois, CLR James, and Claudia Jones have argued that capitalism cannot survive without racism, which allows capitalists to “divide-and-conquer” the working-classes. Emphasizing racial divisions hinders workers from organizing stronger unions, lowering the wages of both white and Black workers.  Without racist ideas to justify glaring social inequalities, a capitalist social order would be a lot more unstable and susceptible to radical challenges. As historian and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore states bluntly, “capitalism is never not racial.”Even if promoting Black capitalism could close the racial wealth gap, is our vision of a just society in the US simply one where the top one percent is roughly 13 percent Black, 18 percent Latinx, six percent Asian, and 1.5 percent Native American—ie, one where the elite looks more like the mass of workers it exploits? Is massive wealth inequality justified so long as it is not racialized? Are poverty wages less miserable because your boss is Black? Is substandard housing less dangerous because your landlord is Black? Are monopoly prices any more affordable because the company is Black owned?There is something deeply ahistorical underlying current efforts that ignore and indeed reproduce previous efforts to combat racial inequality by employing the strategies of Black capitalism as the primary path. Even if Black capitalism can ultimately “deliver” racial equality, the data suggests it would take centuries do so. Moreover, our horizon for social justice should be far more profound than simply diversifying the elite. As long as capitalism remains an “inequality producing machine,” it will prevent racial equality. Fred Hampton, the charismatic young leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party who was murdered by Chicago police and the FBI in 1969, explained this succinctly: “We’re not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.” Black communities have long pursued an alternative approach to racial equality founded on collective ownership and democratic management of businesses and housing. As economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard details in her book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Thought and Practice, Black cooperatives are rooted in the mutual aid efforts of the formerly enslaved during Reconstruction. While Booker T. Washington was preaching Black capitalism, WEB DuBois published a book in 1907 titled Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans, advocating for more Black cooperatives. Several prominent leaders of the civil rights movement, like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, were members of the Young Negro Cooperative League in the 1930s. Now grouped under the banner of the “solidarity economy,” these initiatives promised a more egalitarian society by directly challenging capital’s concentrated ownership. A movement that seeks economic justice without addressing race and other forms of inequality would surely fall grossly short of the mark. But that very same observation, I contend, also applies in reverse: employing Black capitalism as the primary path for achieving racial justice is certain to disappoint. Liberation will only come if we are expansive enough in our vision to address inequality in all its forms.