"Two persons - one white and the other black - are playing a game of poker. The game has been in progress for some 300 years. One player - the white one - has been cheating during much of this time, but now announces: ‘from this day forward, there will be a new game with new players and no more cheating.' Hopeful but suspicious, the black player responds, ‘that's great. I've been waiting to hear you say that for 300 years. Let me ask you, what are you going to do with all those poker chips that you have stacked up on your side of the table all these years?' ‘Well,' said the white player, somewhat bewildered by the question, ‘they are going to stay right here, of course.' ‘That's unfair,' snaps the black player. ‘The new white player will benefit from your past cheating. Where's the equality in that?' ‘But you can't realistically expect me to redistribute the poker chips along racial lines when we are trying to move away from considerations of race and when the future offers no guarantees to anyone,' insists the white player. ‘And surely,' he continues, ‘redistributing the poker chips would punish individuals for something they did not do. Punish me, not the innocents!' Emotionally exhausted, the black player answers, ‘but the innocents will reap a racial windfall.'"
Seen against the backdrop of Brooks' living "racial windfall," there is something significantly racist about the widespread white assumption that the white majority society owes African-Americans nothing in the way of special, ongoing compensation for singular black disadvantages resulting from past explicit racism. Roy Brooks' surplus "chips" are not quaint but irrelevant hangovers from "days gone by." They are weapons of racial oppression in the present and future. Given what is well known about the relationship between historically accumulated resources and current and future success, the very distinction between past and present racism ought perhaps to be considered part of the ideological superstructure of contemporary white supremacy functioning as an ongoing barrier to black advancement and equality.
It is important to remember that the explicit and overt racism that made it impossible for a black man to seriously consider running for higher office in the not-so distant past was about more than the sadistic infliction of racial terror in and of itself. That racism served and enforced the economic exploitation and material subordination of blacks Americans. That long exploitation gave rise to a steep, living and historically cumulative racial wealth and power gap whereby stark contemporary disparities are deeply fed by past inequalities. Such is the deep and dark reality behind what Barack "The Conciliator" Obama calmly terms the tendency of "even the most fair-minded of whites...to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country"
