The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 spurred a “racial reckoning”: a surge of interest not only in reforming policing, but also in challenging us to understand the role of race in our lives, in interpersonal interactions, and in the nation’s life. Brilliant and engaging scholars and activists at the forefront of this new consciousness-raising have urged us to “never consider ourselves finished with our learning” (Robin DiAngelo), to confront the “dominant cultural beliefs that make normal what is deeply and alarmingly inhumane” (Tema Okun), to commit, contractually, to “keep doing the work” (W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz), and to put knowledge “to the struggle for power” (Ibram X. Kendi). These prominent thinkers admonish us to begin to break apart the synapses that bind us into prejudice and challenge us to ponder the question, as one anti-racist educator put it, “What will you risk to be anti-racist and pro-Black?”

Their ideas have proven popular and influential. Kendi and DiAngelo have both become bestselling authors and household names. The movement’s commitment to changing Americans’ beliefs is also reflected in the continued expansion of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industry. While attempts to address inequities within businesses and institutions of higher learning go back decades, the penetration of DEI efforts is now extensive: In a 2023 Pew survey, 52 percent of respondents said there were DEI trainings or meetings at their workplaces, and the industry, which was worth $4.3 billion in 2022, is expected to grow about 14 percent annually in the United States in the coming years.

However, while confronting our individual racism is necessary, it is far from sufficient. As Rachel Poser put it in The New York Times last June, “Kendi and DiAngelo write less about the workings of systemic racism than the ideas and psychological defenses that cause people to deny their complicity in it. They share a belief in what Kendi calls ‘individual transformation for societal transformation.’” Kendi and DiAngelo speak of “confession” and “antiracism as a kind of conversion experience,” Poser wrote. We fear that the sometimes exclusive focus on individual consciousness-raising, rather than on the institutions and policies that generate structural racism, has not and will not lead to the elimination of pervasive and persistent racial inequities: disparities in health, life expectancy, wages, employment, housing, poverty, wealth, and so much else.

Institutional, systemic, and structural racism are what drive racial disparities. Efforts primarily focused on cultural matters or eliminating interpersonal racism do not offer a path to identifying what creates persistent inequalities and eliminating them. Introspection can be a useful part of a racial reckoning, but none of the guides we see map out how understanding one’s own white privilege and the pervasiveness of white supremacist thinking actually leads to disrupting the powerful actors and institutions that create racial inequities. As shown below, some of the consciousness-raising efforts steer activists toward further introspection and not toward fighting for anti-racist policies. This is a missed opportunity, because fighting racist outcomes will require a collective, multiracial effort that transforms policies and institutions.

Why Consciousness-Raising Isn’t Enough

Let’s review how leading proponents of racial consciousness-raising recommend introspection without any link to anti-racist political mobilization.

One of the core texts of the consciousness-raising movement is DiAngelo’s White Fragility. In her conclusion, DiAngelo writes, “Our institutions were designed to reproduce racial inequality.” So far, so good. But she doesn’t examine how institutions reproduce racial inequality—nor does she provide guidance on how to disrupt the mechanisms generating it. Instead, she focuses on personal behavior and introspection: “To continue reproducing racial inequality, the system only needs white people to be really nice and carry on, smile at people of color, be friendly across race.… Niceness will not get racism on the table and will not keep it on the table when everyone wants it off.… ‘Where do we go from here?’ I offer that we must never consider ourselves finished with our learning.”

Along with this emphasis on introspection, anti-racist discourse also focuses on culture and language. Tema Okun has been a leader in this field since the publication of her article “White Supremacy Culture” (now broadened into a website) in 1999. On the website, Okun writes, “White supremacy culture is a devastating force in all our lives, used by ruling class power brokers to maintain vast and violent structural inequality.” She goes on to assert that this culture is “reflected in the current realities of disproportionate and systemic harm and violence directed towards BIPOC people and communities in all aspects of our national life.” (BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color.) But just as DiAngelo fails to explain how personal beliefs create the harm and violence of racial disparities, Okun does not explore how white supremacy culture does. Corporate and government policies do not appear in this cultural narrative.

Another example is the 2022 book Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book by W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz. Bell is a prominent documentarian who explores racial issues in his excellent CNN series United Shades of America, and Schatz is a bestselling author, public speaker, educator, and political organizer. The authors write that the book is “for all the people overwhelmed by racial injustice and white supremacy in America, who’ve taken some action and know they can do more.”

What, then, do Bell and Schatz say people should do? Once again, the focus is on personal beliefs. The book asks readers to fill out an “Antiracism Contract,” which acknowledges “that the United States of America was founded on a system of white supremacy by privileged, Christian, white men” and asks for a commitment to “keep doing the work.” On completion, readers sign, “I am a practicing antiracist.” But the actual mechanisms that create inequities are unexplored, and the contract does not ask for any commitment to organize politically or to challenge policies and institutions.

One DEI consultant offers her beliefs which prioritize eliminating interpersonal bias in the struggle against racist disparities: “Racism is the oppression of people due to the social construct of race” so that “While structural racism is the foremost barrier to equity in the U.S., systems are comprised of individuals; therefore, individuals must change to dismantle racism.”

Notably, Ibram X. Kendi appears to agree with us. “Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power,” Kendi writes. “Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change.” He rightly insists that racism is institutional, structural, and systemic. Yet in How to Be an Antiracist, his most famous work, Kendi provides no on-ramp for his readers to identify how to think about changing power and policies. This is a huge vacuum.

Self-reflection has a place in the fight to end racial disparities. Personal understanding of the role of race in your life, in interpersonal interactions, and in the nation’s life can provide useful insights and facilitate action. Forestalling microaggressions and interrupting racist acts can improve the daily living experience of Black people. Better understanding the dynamics of race can enable white activists to better operate in multiracial spaces seeking social justice. Last, improved consciousness can hopefully motivate more people to take action.

However, personal introspection and never-ending learning—the key tasks to ending racism for DiAngelo and the others mentioned—are not sufficient. White supremacist beliefs on their own, disconnected from power over consequential decisions and resources, do not cause inequities. White supremacy culture alone does not create the harm and violence of racial disparities. If 25 million white people renounced their white privilege one weekend and did nothing further, how would that eliminate the racial gaps in wages, income, employment, health, and wealth?

To understand the role of individual consciousness-raising in battling racial inequities, it is helpful to review the various types of racism that have been usefully identified by the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. The first type, interpersonal racism, occurs between individuals and features bigoted or prejudicial acts that are motivated by hostile feelings or incorrect beliefs, respectively. This is the kind of racism that the consciousness-raisers aim to root out. By contrast, institutional racism occurs within institutions, creating racially unequal outcomes through corporate, governmental, or organizational policies and practices that might appear to be race-neutral. Systemic racism describes how racial disparities can spread throughout an entire system, e.g., the health care system or the criminal justice system, and finally, structural racism focuses on how entire systems interact, enabling racial inequities to flow from one arena to another. An example is the way that segregated communities in the residential housing market face underinvestment in public infrastructure and services, segregated schools, food deserts, and inadequate public safety and health care resources, all of which reinforce inequities. The critical point is that institutional, structural, and systemic racism do not depend on the prejudice or bigotry of individual people—and so changing people’s beliefs alone will never be enough to dismantle them.

These leaders of racial consciousness-raising have good intentions and are appropriately angry at persistent racial injustice. But we must look beyond their intent to the impact of their guidance. They make no call to organize, to take collective action within institutions, or to generate bold policies. They neglect policy demands such as those of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which demanded jobs for all at a fair wage. As Algernon Austin wrote for the Economic Policy Institute on the march’s fiftieth anniversary, “Two of the formal demands of the march were for a federal jobs program that would provide training and jobs for all unemployed workers and a decent national minimum wage.” As such, the new consciousness-raising is, at best, the sound of one hand clapping.

The consciousness-raising movement also fails in other ways. First, one of its key teachings is that race is a social construct, invented to validate and affirm slavery and Jim Crow laws and to divide populations who might challenge anyone with wealth and power. However, the movement ignores this very insight when it chooses not to engage in political mobilization and instead remains fixated on introspection as a way to overcome inequities. Indeed, racial thinking supports preexisting political and economic hierarchies, and so one must ask how better understanding race as a social construct, or even eliminating that construct, could conceivably dismantle these hierarchies.

Second, racist politicians are not afraid of anti-racist efforts focused solely on interpersonal bias. It is ironic that the consciousness-raising movement mirrors the conservative, reactionary attacks on teaching about race—both insist on a sole focus on interpersonal racism or bias. Consider Florida’s much-discussed limits on how race can be taught in schools. An amendment approved by the Florida State Board of Education in 2021 dictates that topics must be “factual and objective,” and it specifically prohibits “the teaching of Critical Race Theory, meaning the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” In other words, while it is fine to talk about personal prejudice, talking about institutional, systemic, or structural racism is off-limits.

Learning From Black Economists

Will the momentum toward a new reckoning on race result in multiracial collective action to challenge structural racism? Will the reckoning focus on power and policies shaping institutions and systems? For success, we need to understand how race operates in the economy, identify the necessary policy interventions, and then put them into action. A starting point is to learn from the analyses developed by Black economists called stratification economics. The origins of stratification economics can be found in the pioneering scholarly contributions of William E. B. DuBois and Eric E. Williams, but innovative research produced by a circle of economists affiliated with the National Economic Association (the association of Black economists) has fueled its development as an important subfield within economics.

Stratification economics makes a definitive break with the individualist perspective on persistent intergroup disparities in socioeconomic outcomes. Individualists are wedded to the notion that intergroup disparities are causally linked to differences in individual behavior, values, cultures, and genetic endowments (IQ or “ability”). Instead, stratification economists argue that persistent intergroup differences in socioeconomic outcomes are the result of at least four structural elements of the U.S. political economy.

First, there are persistent differences in intergroup wealth and power. While they are alive, wealthy parents assist their children in multiple ways: funding an elite education, providing a down payment to purchase a home, supplying equity to start a business, helping their children develop relationships with people in positions of authority with control over resources, and so on. When they pass, wealthy parents leave inheritances for their children: financial assets, real estate, businesses. This assistance from wealthy parents to their children allows dominant groups to transfer group privilege across generations.

Second, group identities are social norms, and the formation of social groups is based on differential access to resources, not individual and family differences in “culture”—that is, market-functional values and behavior such as deferred gratification and future orientation, achievement orientation, personal control and responsibility, aspiration-ambition, economizing behavior, social trust, attitude toward hard work, and prudent behavior. Both ability and culture are equally distributed across social groups; individual differences in ability and culture can explain some individual inequality within social groups but cannot explain inequality between them. There is even empirical evidence that generations of racism have taught African Americans that they must put forth supra-normal effort in order to uplift the group; this supra-normal effort facilitates achieving greater education than white people with the same ability and resources.

Over the decades of enslavement, Jim Crow, and de facto racism, white identity in America has been defined by important assets: full personhood, full citizenship, preferential immigration, superior wealth, and greater access to public and private managerial authority. Black identity in America has been defined by a more limited set of these assets: restricted personhood, limited citizenship, biased or limited immigration, lower wealth, and restricted access to managerial authority. These differences in identity affect the productivity of a host of important relationships where racial identities differ, like manager-worker, official-citizen, or manager-customer. Racism is difficult to eliminate because it affects the microfoundations of our society.

Third, market discrimination against subordinate groups is instrumental—that is, discrimination is practiced because it provides material benefits to dominant groups exercising control over political economic decisions. In particular, labor market discrimination is profit-increasing and thereby is an element of competitive managerial strategies by firms.

Finally, managers have social identities, and the manager-subordinate identity match (white employers matched to Black employees) influences decision-making and resource allocation. Dominant groups are disproportionately represented among public and private managers, the very people with control over organizational decisions and allocations of managerial resources. Managers have discretionary authority in their decision-making, and social group identity influences the nature and extent of their use of discretion. That discretion determines how policies are enforced, who receives managerial assistance, how resources are allocated, and how policies are evaluated. (A deeper exploration of stratification economics’ analysis of systemic racism can be found in Patrick Mason’s The Economics of Structural Racism: Stratification Economics and US Labor Markets, and in the recent “Symposium on Race and Economic Literature” in the Journal of Economic Literature.)

How to Address Racial Disparities

There is no silver-bullet policy. Rather, there is a need for a broad-based policy program to end racial disparities that is attentive to the racial impacts of all policies. A policy agenda to erase racial economic inequities would focus on persistent full employment, expanded worker power, a robust social safety net, and social insurance—policies that would lift all low-income and middle-class workers and households and thereby erode overall inequality and racial inequities. These policies must be supplemented by efforts to eliminate racial discrimination in housing, employment, and other venues, and some form of reparations.

Start with universal policies that provide benefits for everyone but especially benefit low- and middle-class Americans (e.g., minimum wages, full employment). As noted earlier, full employment was a key priority of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which demanded a federal program to “place all unemployed workers—Negro and white—on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.” Budgetary, monetary, and public investment policies can be used to achieve persistent low unemployment, as can schemes for guaranteed jobs or the use of the federal government as the employer of last resort. The beneficial impact of persistent low unemployment has been demonstrated over the last few years, during which the United States achieved historically low Black unemployment and shrank the Black-white employment gap—important progress, even as Black unemployment remains too high.

The suppression of wages since the late 1970s has been driven by policies that have diminished the power of workers relative to their employers. Rebuilding the labor movement, raising labor standards like minimum wage and overtime rules, and improving their enforcement are key to lifting all workers and will disproportionately assist Black workers.

Properly designed place-based policies aimed at businesses and individuals (e.g., job training) in localities with high unemployment will help both rural and inner-city communities and be particularly beneficial for Black people.

Because Black people are more vulnerable to poverty, illness, and economic insecurity, greater provision of social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and safety net programs (nutrition, housing, health care, and energy assistance) is particularly important. So is the continuation and expansion of tax relief options like the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Credit, which provide income assistance to low-income households.

Another group of policies are termed “targeted universalism.” These are policies with universal goals coupled with targeted processes to ensure that more vulnerable and disadvantaged communities benefit or disproportionately benefit. That is, these policies consider what the economist Bill Spriggs calls the “social location”—the geographic, demographic, and industry/occupation realities—and needs of Black people. Congressman James Clyburn pursued such a strategy to ensure programs in President Obama’s early legislation benefited Black people as follows: “When we drafted the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, I fought to ensure that no communities were left behind by including a provision that directed at least 10 percent of Rural Development investments be made in persistent poverty communities, counties where 20 percent or more of the population had lived below the poverty line for the last 30 years.”

Other targeted universal efforts could include student debt relief focused on those with exceptional financial needs with the knowledge that this would disproportionately benefit Black students. President Biden’s original plan would have canceled $10,000 per eligible student debtor with an additional $10,000 for those who had Pell Grants, which are need-based. “Nearly 71 percent of Black undergraduate borrowers are Pell Grant recipients, twice the share of White borrowers,” according to The Washington Post. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which zeroed in on climate change and clean energy, followed a similar playbook by targeting funds to help Black and low-income communities because they are the most heavily impacted by climate change. A major component of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022—the Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs program—ensured that funding would be equitably distributed nationwide by investing in women and Black, Latino, Native American, low-income, and other underrepresented communities. The bill also strengthened the research and education capacities at historically Black colleges and universities.

Diminishing residential racial segregation and providing moderate-income housing would chip away at the ramifications of decades of discriminatory housing policies. A “baby bonds” program, in which the government deposits funds into accounts for every infant in the country, would provide the largest amounts to children from the lowest-wealth families. Upon reaching a certain age, the recipient could use the funds for a wealth-building purchase like tuition or a home.

It will not be possible to eliminate racial disparities without some race-specific policies, including laws that hold employers accountable for race (and gender) discrimination, and affirmative action in university enrollment to offset what the scholar Richard Rothstein describes as the “unlawful and unconstitutional public and private policies of the past that were explicitly designed to maintain [African Americans] in a subordinate status.”

Finally, we can fight for reparations to compensate African Americans. Reparations would not only help to eliminate racial inequities: There is a simple moral fairness to acknowledging the sin, confessing the sin to those sinned against, and correcting the sin. Reparations are sometimes misunderstood as being payments for slavery, but in fact their vision is broader—a way to compensate for all the policies that have subjugated Black Americans since emancipation, from Jim Crow to racial, residential, and occupational segregation, and government policies and programs (labor laws, the G.I. Bill, etc.) that were designed to exclude Black people.

Some reparations proposals stress payments to individuals. However, one-time payments cannot undo the racism embedded in our institutions, systems, and structures, and will not achieve racial equity. For instance, co-author Patrick Mason, along with James B. Stewart and William Darity, found that achieving racial equity requires coupling reparations with equality of opportunity. Therefore, the suite of policies delineated above, both universal and targeted universal, need to be advanced as well.

A reparations program can lead to racial healing, but it will take an enormous amount of public education and political organizing for it to be accepted.

(Further work on policies that address racial disparities can be found in the Black Economic Alliance Foundation’s “Policy Agenda to Advance Black Work, Wages, and Wealth” and in co-author Larry Mishel’s article “We Can and Should Address Racial Disparities” in The American Prospect.)

From Reflection to Action

Consciousness-raising about race is essential, but it is only an initial step in guiding people to the work that actually dismantles racist systems or diminishes racial disparities in employment, health, wealth, education, housing, voting rights—the list goes on. A great virtue of consciousness-raising is that it constitutes emotionally resonant and accessible work—such as policing language, interrupting microaggressions, and perusing our personal history—that we can dive into now, deeply and without excuses. On the other hand, changing policies may seem distant, abstract, and beyond our ken. But that’s not really so. We are all thinkers, but we are also fighters, and the policy challenge is a call to battle the most entrenched, powerful forces in our society. The policy agenda focuses on building worker power, providing a robust safety net and social insurance system, and achieving persistent low unemployment. Accomplishing these things means beating the corporations, the billionaires, and the top 1 percent on the political battlefield.

Take full employment. President Biden has said, “Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want…the companies to compete to attract workers.” Who doesn’t want workers to have this leverage? Employers and large corporations, that’s who, and their actions demonstrate this.

Moreover, to weave a robust social safety net requires more revenue and, in turn, higher taxes on the rich and corporations. It is worth remembering that during the fight for Biden’s Build Back Better agenda—which included free preschool, cheaper child care, an expanded Child Tax Credit, clean energy investments, lower prescription drug costs, and an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit—the most fervent opposition was not about the spending but about the taxes on the rich and corporations to pay for the programs. (The revenue was to be collected through a new surtax on the incomes of multimillionaires and billionaires, a 15 percent global corporate minimum income tax, and beefed-up auditing of the rich.)

Reforming our labor laws to enable workers to readily choose collective bargaining is no cakewalk, either. Every effort to do so dating back to the 1960s has been defeated by corporations successfully lobbying the Senate to kill the legislation via the Senate filibuster, the primary tool for blocking any civil rights and labor legislation. Employers under billionaire control like Starbucks, SpaceX, Trader Joe’s, and Amazon are now challenging on constitutional grounds the collective bargaining laws that for nearly a century have been woven into the fabric of the American way of life. These political battles are, of course, racialized, as opponents of progress portray the gains as accruing not to everyone but only to Black people and other minorities, and the most extreme opposition comes from Southern states with large Black populations who would gain the most from greater worker power and safety net programs.

These are no easy fights. We would have a more powerful army if all of those participating in consciousness-raising about race joined these intersectional battles of race, class, and gender.

Dr. King taught that only legislation could guarantee racial justice. “It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated,” he said. “It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”