1) There was an article in LBO a while back in an issue I have unfortunately lost. (Maybe Doug can dig it out.) It made some strong statistical arguments that -- in the case if racism anyway -- whites gain more from racism than from a partial reduction in racism. The argument here is that a while racial divisions reduce worker bargaining power and thus reduce working class income as a whole, there is also an actual transfer of income from racial minorities to whites in the U.S. And because work is sectorial (Whites tend to be conceentrated in certain industries and job functions, non-whites in others) lowering racism does not neccesarily translate in a high enough increase in bargaining power to make up for the reversal of this transfer.
I'm not advocating this point of view. I hope it is not true. But as a suppporting statistic, I also seem to remember that economic figures just prior to the current recession seemed to support that this was happening. Wasn't there a period with real growth in non-white wages and no growth in white wages?
Doug, please can you dig up these numbers -- or tell me that I've contracted a minor case of false memory syndrome?
And if these numbers are as I've remembered them, I would still love to see a fatal flaw found in either the numbers, or the reasoning behind them. If whites, short of the overthrow of the capitalist system, do in fact benefit from racism it makes our job much harder. On the other hand if it is the case, I would rather know than not know...
Incidentally -- the same thesis could not be supported for sexism. Most men live in households with women wage earners. So an increase in Womens wages that does not increase mens wages is still a net gain for the household.
I have not dealt with "psychological" benefits of racism and sexism, because I think that this kind of argument divides into A) non-falsifiable hypothesis B) examples that can be refuted by counter-examples of psychological BENEFITS of reductions in racism and sexism...