Since its inception, the federal government sought to “secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” The constitutional protections for slaveholders and the subsequent ban on the international enslaved trade are evidence of this impulse. A further example are the homesteading laws that targeted Whites alone. During the nineteenth century, cheap land and enslaved wealth brought economic security, at minimum, and immense wealth, at maximum, to millions of White Americans. Most were able to leverage this advantage and offer their children expanded educational and occupational opportunities.

In the twentieth century, education and homeownership took on increased importance as the USA became more industrial and urban. While Supreme Court rulings like Cumming v. Richmond County concluded that school districts need not provide secondary education to non-Whites, there was a massive expansion in secondary education among Whites, preparing them for skilled employment.

Amidst the housing crisis in the 1930s, the federal government offered loan guarantees to long-term, fixed-rate mortgages that rescued the housing market and encouraged homeownership. Federal agencies used residential maps that targeted this generosity to areas identified as “White only,” leaving other areas credit starved.

All of these policies functioned to secure the blessings of White Americans.

What do fantasy football managers want? Critics have suggested that they harbor dreams of front-office management and perhaps racial dreams of managing Black bodies. Chapter 6 suggests an alternative theory: that fantasy football doesn’t sell users on an identification with management but a disidentification with forms of labor – manual, high-risk, short-term – once associated with Black people, people of color, and immigrants but now carried out by more and more white people of a declining middle class. From Rotisserie League Baseball in the 1980s to daily fantasy sports in the 2010s, the fantasy hasn’t been to win in the market but to get out of it.

Sometime in 2021, the US economy became capable of making every American household a millionaire if wealth is spread equally. Of course, it is not. Indeed, it is one of the most unequally divided economies in the world. Whereas the typical Black household earns 60 percent of what Whites make, Blacks typically hold less than 10 percent of the wealth of Whites.

The tight link between wealth and race that is exhibited in the current racial wealth gap is simply the reflection of our nation’s history. From the earliest beginnings through constitutional protections of chattel slavery, disparate land policies, support of legalized segregation, and redlining, federal policies have created and cemented the link between wealth and race.

For many reasons, White Americans fail to acknowledge the yawning gulf that is the modern racial wealth gap. This failure along with the innate power that personal wealth brings creates a system that meets the requirements of Wilkerson’s caste system as well as offering a case study in stratification economics.

In 2020, two retired NFL players sued the league for “explicitly and deliberately” discriminating against Black players who filed claims for damages in the league’s billion-dollar concussion settlement. The league had, their suit revealed, directed clinicians to implement a practice known as race norming, which built into the evaluation process an assumption that Black retired players had lower preexposure cognitive functioning than their white peers – and increased the likelihood that their claims would be denied. The epilogue contextualizes the scandal in relation to the career of one of the plaintiffs, the former defensive lineman Kevin Henry, to reveal how norming – of race, gender, compensation – had pervaded his athletic life long before the NFL denied his claim.

In the summer of 2010, LeBron James announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and, as he put it during an ESPN special, taking his talents to the Miami Heat. Cavs fans burned their LeBron jerseys in the street, and team owner Dan Gilbert, the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans, wrote an open letter to Clevelanders condemning the two-time NBA MVP. “You simply don’t deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal,” he wrote. “You have given so much and deserve so much more.” What had fans given LeBron? And what did he owe them? The introduction outlines a theory of the relation between athletic talent and social debt, observing how the assignment of giftedness has reflected and created racial ideas about advantage and deservedness since the civil rights era. It is a theory not of elite athletes but of how the way we imagine elite athletes affects the rest of us. From Bernard Malamud’s classic baseball novel The Natural to the career of the fastest woman of all time to Gilbert’s open letter, the image of the gifted athlete has changed while the assumed debt has grown and resurfaced in other domains of American life.

Like many Americans, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew overestimates the significance of disciplined saving and financial literacy in determining one’s wealth status. While it is true that households accumulate wealth either from help from family, saving some of their current income, or realizing gains from appreciating assets, it is important to understand the circumstances in which households find themselves.

Economic orthodoxy insists that wealth accumulation follows a life cycle pattern. Interested in maintaining a high but stable level of consumption, households dissave when young as they invest in their education, save prodigiously during midlife in anticipation of retirement, and then dissipate their wealth as they approach death. In this view, wealth is seen merely as a store of future consumption.

Yet, wealth is a source of power. Its possession allows one to avoid unexpected harm, take advantage of unforeseen opportunities, influence public policy, and assure the prospects of one’s offspring. The Wealth Privilege model insists that holding wealth makes it easier to accumulate more wealth, whether through saving, asset appreciation, or family transfers. It predicts that a system of wealth disparities is fully capable of promoting economic stratification as wealth is transferred across generations.

Almost immediately after the Civil Rights legislation, influential Whites encouraged a pause in redressing racial disparities. Moynihan encouraged a period of “benign neglect” while a Commentary article forecast the “march toward statistical parity.” Economic orthodoxy largely agreed as Becker’s taste-based discrimination model predicted that competitive markets would eliminate disparities over time. This left mostly Black economists willing to challenge this view.

Recent carefully conducted research demonstrates little likelihood that Black households can overcome the racial wealth gap, even if they persist in outsaving their White peers.

This chapter offers a different direction. It proposes to replace our current estate tax system with a simpler and more transparent inheritance tax. It recommends elimination or severe curtailment of the discussed tax expenditures to redirect assistance to those most in need. It suggests implementation of a Baby Bonds program, a doubling of Pell awards, and the enactment of guaranteed retirement accounts (GRAs). These three programs would enable far more households to reach the wealth pathway thresholds and benefit from the privileges of wealth.

Acknowledging that even these efforts are inadequate, the chapter calls for the enactment of a reparations program that effectively would eliminate the racial wealth gap.

Since the mass integration of college football in the late 1960s, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has drawn a careful distinction between two kinds of college athlete: the amateur and the student-athlete. Amateur had been a class marker in the age of Jim Crow. Student-athlete, a term the NCAA introduced in 1956, reconstituted it as a racial marker in the age of civil rights. Chapter 4 tells the story of how the student-athlete’s labor came to subsidize the amateur’s idealized commitment to a balanced academic life and how the distinction between the running back and the rower has framed debates over affirmative action and who deserves a college education.

When Roberto Clemente debuted with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1955, baseball writers, Black and white, hailed him as the next great Black outfielder. When the Afro–Puerto Rican died on the last day of 1972, they remembered him as a Latin legend. Chapter 2 shows how – before the Immigration Act of 1965, before the addition of the “Spanish/Hispanic origin” question to the census form – Major League Baseball institutionalized a Black/brown color line. Management set Black and Latino teammates against one another, and Afro-Latinos found themselves, in Clemente’s words, “between the wall.”

Over the twentieth century, a college education increasingly functioned as a ladder to professional occupations and ample-paying employment. Until the GI Bill, access to college remained tightly limited, although the expansion mostly served White matriculants.

In the 1970s, tuition, room, and board (TRB) rates remained beyond the financial grasp of talented young adults from low-wealth families. Lois Dickson Rice, herself a first-generation college student, worked tirelessly to expand access to college and eventually persuaded Congress to fund what became known as Pell Grants. These awards were distributed inversely to household income and given directly to the recipients, who could then decide where to enroll.

At one time, maximum Pell awards could finance nearly 40 or 80 percent, respectively, of the TRB costs of attending a private or public four-year college. Over the past half century, the Pell Program has assisted tens of millions of students from marginalized communities enroll and graduate from college.

This chapter examines how the promise of Pell unraveled. Middle-class parents wondered why their kids did not benefit. The Clinton Administration shifted emphasis toward using tax policies to assist families with the cost of college. Enrollment management strategies shifted institutional aid from need-based to merit-based aid.

Six tax expenditures can trace their existence to the enactment of the federal income tax. Swept into office after nearly a half century of Republican control, Democrats moved quickly to enact a tax on incomes. Tasked to write a draft law, Rep. Cordell Hull (D-TN) wrote a fifteen-page bill that experienced modest resistance and was largely adopted. Simultaneously, the Wilson Administration was moving to segregate the federal bureaucracy as lynchings and Confederate monument building reached their apex across the country.

While all the tax expenditures clearly favored the wealthy, almost all were enacted for other equally persuasive reasons. Life insurance benefits and charitable giving were given preferential treatment as they would limit demands on public services. Preferences given to state and local bond income as well as state and local tax payments were made in deference to constitutional concerns.

Over time, these tax expenditures have taken on increased value and generated powerful allies. Attempts to close the estate step up in basis exclusion and later the exclusion on capital gains were quickly rescinded.

Most of the changes over the past half century of supposed racial reconciliation has been to make these expenditures more valuable to wealthy, mostly White households.

In 1980, the fledgling Entertainment and Sports Programming Network delivered the first live television coverage of the NFL draft. The draft would become one of the biggest events on ESPN’s and the NFL’s calendars and demonstrate to the emerging cable industry that talk sold – sometimes better than the thing being talked about. Chapter 5 recounts how ESPN, for years the leading cable channel, built a multibillion-dollar business by nurturing an obsession with scouting athletic giftedness. The talent talk allowed the network to bridge the two dominant racial ideologies of the time, color blindness and multiculturalism, and model for other cable networks and media how to turn commentary into mass entertainment.