Racial inequalities originate in violence and persist through closure strategies tied to class.

Evidence

In the power resources approach, race and ethnicity also have received little attention. Again, however, this need not imply that these factors cannot be brought into the power resources perspective. Thus, for example, systems of inequality based on race and ethnicity typically have their origins in the exercise of means of violence - wars, colonization, and enslavement. These historical roots have been perpetuated via strategies of closure, defining racial and ethnic characteristics as marks of inferiority, inequalities to which differentially distributed rewards have been added. As argued by William J. Wilson (1978), race has a close relationship to class. — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface, 21

Categorization

• DEFINE: Extends ‘power resources’ to race/ethnicity via violence-origins plus closure strategies.
• XREF: Connects to Gilens & Page’s finding that policy influence tracks economic resources, and to the reader’s question of whether control deficits scale with felt grievance. — connects to: Racial inequality stems from violence and closure strategies, not markets alone — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface:…, 21