Racial disadvantage compounds because everyday and structural discrimination interact cumulatively.

Evidence

Study after sociological study has shown that white teachers treat the comparable expressive behavior of black students considerably more harshly or dismissively than that of white students. Schools attended largely by black and Latino children – those in inner-city neighborhoods – offer far fewer college eligible courses than dominantly white (neighborhood) schools. This makes access to better colleges more challenging for black and brown students than for whites (for one, it depresses their matriculation year grade point average, thus rendering them academically less competitive). George Lipsitz has insightfully characterized these sorts of privileges as the “possessive investment in whiteness.” Affirmative action was a relatively soft intrusion into reversing these constraints, but the increasingly strident attack on supposed preferential treatment over the past 15 years has dramatically limited the program’s (potential) impact. This exemplifies the cumulative weight resulting from the interaction between everyday and structural racisms that linger long in societies so deeply marked by histories of racial exclusion and humiliation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 423

Categorization

• XREF: The compounding/path-dependence logic mirrors the reputation-and-trust mechanisms in the Milgrom law-merchant passages — small initial asymmetries amplifying through feedback. — connects to: Everyday teacher bias and structural school resourcing interact to accumulate racial disadvantage. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 423
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘possessive investment in whiteness’ framing plus the compound-effect mechanism is a genuinely dense way of thinking about durable inequality that resists one-line summary.