Hoarding without hoarders: Opportunity hoarding in the absence of exclusionary behaviors

This paper seeks to clarify the concept of opportunity hoarding as it applies to Black-White educational inequalities. Two prevailing interpretations stand out: a group-disparity interpretation, which treats opportunity hoarding as any process generating group differences, and an exclusionary-behaviors interpretation, which emphasizes how White actors secure advantages through exclusionary practices. I argue that the former is too broad — remaining vague about the underlying mechanisms — and the latter too narrow, overlooking what I term hoarding without hoarders, i.e., opportunity hoarding that arises even in the absence of exclusionary behaviors. I define opportunity hoarding as the relational processes that generate racial penalties in access to resources, i.e., disparities unexplained by previously formed individual differences. Using an agent-based model of racial disparities in advanced course-taking, this paper shows how network diffusion — under segregation, consolidation of race and socioeconomic status, and temporal constraints — can produce racial penalties even when behaviors are race-neutral. The framework highlights the need for scholars and policymakers to look beyond exclusionary acts in the hoarding of valuable resources.