Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Robert B. Williams. Funding White Supremacy: Federal Wealth Policies and the Modern Racial Wealth Gap. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 320 pp.

Review by Zheng Wang

14 August 2025

The racial wealth gap in the United States—long dismissed as the unfortunate residue of slavery or redlined housing—is increasingly understood as an actively maintained system of resource allocation. Recent work has moved decisively beyond culture-of-poverty narratives, emphasizing structural, institutional, and legal frameworks that perpetuate racialized economic disparities. Robert B. Williams’s Funding White Supremacy enters this critical space by offering a comprehensive analysis of federal wealth policies as not merely complicit in but constitutive of racialized economic domination.

Williams brings both intellectual gravitas and ethical urgency to his book, arguing that federal tax policies systematically funnel public resources toward predominantly wealthy, white households, thereby fortifying structural inequalities inherited from overt racial oppression. The book’s intellectual scaffolding is built on stratification economics, which foregrounds the structural mechanisms reproducing racial inequality across generations. While Williams focuses heavily on racialized economic outcomes, he is careful not to conflate wealthy with white. Rather, drawing on stratification economics, he explicitly examines how wealth functions as a racialized structure of advantage. In this framework, class-based mechanisms—such as tax expenditures—are shown to have racially disparate effects due to their interaction with historically entrenched racial privileges. Thus, Williams attempts to analytically distinguish race and class while emphasizing their structural interdependence. Building on this distinction, he unpacks the ideological façade of neutrality surrounding federal fiscal policies, revealing them as intentionally engineered wealth-distribution mechanisms. Rejecting individualized or meritocratic explanations, he situates wealth accumulation within a historical continuum of state-sponsored racial privilege stretching from land grants and slavery to modern tax expenditures.

Williams’s core conceptual contribution lies in reconceiving the tax code not as a neutral fiscal instrument but as a racializing apparatus. Notably, the book does not suggest a simplistic transition from slavery to neoliberalism. In a critical analytical move, Williams shows how federal tax expenditures—such as mortgage deductions, retirement savings incentives, and capital gains exemptions—function, in effect, as a system of subsidized white wealth accumulation. He devotes substantial attention to federal wealth-building policies in the twentieth century—including the New Deal, the GI Bill, and mortgage subsidies—that redistributed public resources in racially exclusionary ways. As Ira Katznelson puts it, these policies amounted to affirmative action for white people, because they “provid[ed] most white Americans with valuable tools to advance their social welfare" while "most Black Americans were left behind of left out.”[1] These historical interludes, far from mitigating racial wealth disparities, often deepened them by ensuring that redistributive gains accrued primarily to white households. Thus, the book situates the modern racial wealth gap as a legacy not of absent redistribution but of racially structured redistribution. His analysis makes clear that such policies disproportionately benefit affluent white households, thereby reinforcing rather than redressing the racial wealth gap. By unveiling these hidden redistributive mechanisms, Williams dismantles the neoliberal rhetoric of universality and fiscal neutrality, exposing a persistent structure of racialized economic advantage.

The author’s most significant intellectual contribution lies in his trenchant ideological critique. He dissects the deeply embedded myths of meritocracy and individual responsibility, demonstrating how cultural narratives actively obscure systemic injustice. Williams’s rhetorical insistence on naming the phenomenon “white supremacy” powerfully reshapes discourse, directly confronting ideological evasion. The book’s advocacy for reparations and race-conscious fiscal reforms represents a powerful ethical and political challenge to conventional liberal incrementalism. Williams argues that reparative policies must directly acknowledge historical injustices and explicitly address contemporary inequities. His proposed policies—such as baby bonds, targeted asset-building initiatives, and radical inheritance tax reform—are not merely technocratic solutions but moral imperatives rooted in historical redress and structural justice.

The book’s critical edge is amplified by Williams’s trenchant prose. In one of its most incisive passages, he writes: "Yes, the rising tide of the American economy has lifted many boats, but it has elevated White yachts more fully" (p. 6). Such potent metaphors punctuate the data-heavy analysis, crystallizing systemic injustice into visceral language that demands reader engagement. By illuminating the ongoing complicity of federal policies in perpetuating structural racism, Williams reconfigures prevailing understandings of racial inequality and extends scholarship on racial capitalism and wealth disparities. His analysis contributes meaningfully to debates about how class-based instruments such as taxation can operate as vehicles of racial subordination when embedded within historically unequal structures. In doing so, the book makes a sustained effort to address the intersection of race and class analytically rather than collapsing one into the other.

[1] Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 2005), p. 23.