All this takes place, of course, against the backdrop of an economy that—for white people as well as for black—has become more and more unequal over the last half century. The Gini index (a measure of inequality in which zero means we all have the same while one means one person has everything) has gone from .397 in 1967 to .485 today. (By contrast, the worst current score in Europe is basically what ours was a half century ago.) And most of the people—at least on the left—who worry about racial disparity no doubt believe that inequality between classes is a problem too. Indeed, they may well believe that attacking racism is also a step in the direction of attacking the gap between the top decile of American wealth and everybody else.

But they are mistaken. In fact, not only will a focus on the effort to eliminate racial disparities not take us in the direction of a more equal society, it isn’t even the best way of eliminating racial disparities themselves. If the objective is to eliminate black poverty rather than simply to benefit the upper classes, we believe the diagnosis of racism is wrong, and the cure of antiracism won’t work. Racism is real and antiracism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn’t what principally produces our inequality and antiracism won’t eliminate it. And because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it.

What makes racism look like the problem? The very real racial disparities visible in American life. And what makes antiracism look like the solution? Two plausible but false beliefs: that racial disparities can in fact be eliminated by antiracism and that, if they could be, their elimination would make the U.S. a more equal society. The racial wealth gap, because it is so striking and commonly invoked, is a very good, not to say perfect, illustration of how, in our view, both the problem and solution are wrongly conceived.

It is well known by now that whites have more net wealth than blacks at every income level, and the overall racial difference in wealth is massive. Why can’t antiracism solve this problem? Because, as Robert Manduca has shown, the fact that blacks were overrepresented among the poor at the beginning of a period in which “low income workers of all races” have been hurt by the changes in American economic life has meant that they have “borne the brunt” of those changes.1 The lack of progress in overcoming the white/black wealth gap has been a function of the increase in the rich/poor wealth gap.

In fact, if you look at how white and black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10 percent of white people have 75 percent of white wealth; the top 20 percent have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10 percent of black households hold 75 percent of black wealth.

That means, as Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project recently noted, “the overall racial wealth disparity is driven almost entirely by the disparity between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of black people.” While Bruenig is clear that a discernible wealth gap exists across class levels, he explored the impact of eliminating the gap between the bottom 90 percent of each group and found that after doing so 77.5 percent of the overall gap would remain. He then examined the effect of eliminating the wealth gap between the bottom 50 percent—the median point—of each population and found that doing so would eliminate only 3 percent of the racial gap. So, 97 percent of the racial wealth gap exists among the wealthiest half of each population. And, more tellingly, more than three-fourths of it is concentrated in the top 10 percent of each. If you say to those white people in the bottom 50 percent (people who have basically no wealth at all) that the basic inequality in the U.S. is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the black people in the bottom 50 percent (people who have even less than no wealth at all), they also know you are wrong. It’s not all the white people who have the money; it’s the top ten percent of (mainly) whites, and some blacks and some Asians. The wealth gap among all but the wealthiest blacks and whites is dwarfed by the class gap, the difference between the wealthiest and everyone else across the board.

As a diagnosis, identifying disparities is taxonomic and rhetorical, not etiological. Insisting that we understand those inequalities as evidence of racism is a demand about how we should classify and feel about them, not an effort to examine their specific causes. While the wealth gap reflects the effects of racism, both past and present, it does not explain how exactly the gaps are produced, up and down the income and wealth distribution. For example, between 1968 and 2016 black Americans made significant advances into occupations and job categories to which they’d previously been denied access. Consistent with that expanded opportunity, in the paper we mentioned above, Manduca found that during that period black/white disparities in income rank—where median group income falls in the national income distribution, measured in centiles—narrowed by nearly a third. That was nowhere near parity but a definite improvement. (Black median income rose from the twenty-fifth centile to the thirty-fifth.) However, during the same period the overall black/white income gap was virtually unchanged. The reason was the extreme concentration of income at the top during that period. In fact, black median income at the twenty-fifth centile in 1968 equaled 55 percent of the national mean, but in 2016 income at the thirty-fifth centile equaled only 48 percent of the national income average. It’s not racism that was responsible for that relative decline; it’s neoliberal capitalism.

Even as a program for addressing racial disparities, antiracism is not much of a remedy for inequality. If the racial wealth gap were somehow eliminated up and down the distribution, 90 percent of black people would still have only 25 percent of total wealth, and the top 10 percent of blacks would still hold 75 percent. And this is only to be expected because in a society with sharp and increasing overall inequality, eliminating racial “gaps” in the distribution of advantages and disadvantages by definition does not affect the larger, and more fundamental, pattern of inequality.

That inadequacy becomes clearer when we consider the argumentative sleight-of-hand that drives disparity discourse. What we’re actually saying every time we insist that the basic inequality is between blacks and whites is that the only inequalities we care about are those produced by some form of discrimination—that inequality itself isn’t the problem, it’s only the inequalities produced by racism and sexism, etc. What disparity discourse tells us is that, if you have an economy that’s getting more and more unequal, that’s mainly generating jobs that don’t even pay a living wage, the problem we need to solve is not how to reduce that inequality and not how to make those jobs better but how to make sure that they aren’t disproportionately held by black and brown people.

It’s true, as political scientist Preston H. Smith II has shown, that in the form of what he calls “racial democracy,” some black people have championed the ideal of a hierarchical ladder on which blacks and other nonwhites would be represented on every rung in rough proportion to their representation in the general population.2 But the fact that some black people have desired it doesn’t make racial democracy desirable. As we have noted, separately, together, and repeatedly, the implication of proportionality as the metric of social justice is that the society would be just if 1 percent of the population controlled 90 percent of the resources so long as 13 percent of the 1 percent were black, 14 percent were Hispanic, half were women, etc.

Complaints about disproportionality are liberal math. And a politics centered on challenging disproportionality comes with the imprimatur of no less a Doctor of the Church of Left Neoliberalism than economist Paul Krugman, who asserted in his role as ideologist for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that “horizontal” inequality, i.e., inequalities measured “between racially or culturally defined groups,” is what’s really important in America and dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ elaborate program for social-democratic redistribution as “a pipe dream.”3

It’s the fixation on disproportionality that tells us the increasing wealth of the one percent would be OK if only there more black, brown, and LGBTQIA+ billionaires. And the fact that antiracism and antidiscrimination of all kinds would validate rather than undermine the stratification of wealth in American society is completely visible to those who currently possess that wealth—all the rich people eager to embark on a course of moral purification (antiracist training) but with no interest whatsoever in a politics (social-democratic redistribution) that would alter the material conditions that make them rich.

By contrast, the strain in black politics that converged around what Smith calls the social- (rather than racial-)democratic ideal proceeded from the understanding that, because most black Americans are in the working class—and disproportionately so, partly because of the same effects of past and current racism we allude to above—black people would also benefit disproportionately from redistributive agendas that expand social wage policies and enhance the living standards and security of working people universally. The tension between those two ideals of social justice, as Smith indicates, was, and is, a tension arising from differences in perception and values rooted in different class positions.

Thus the fact that, over the last half century (as American society has reached new heights of inequality and as Democrats have done very little more than Republicans to combat it), the racial-democratic principle in black politics, and in the society in general, has displaced the social-democratic one, has been a victory for the class—black and white—that has supported it. In its insistence that proportionality is the only defensible norm and metric of social justice, antiracist politics rejects universal programs of social-democratic redistribution in favor of what is ultimately a racial trickle-down approach according to which making more black people rich and rich black people richer is a benefit to all black people.

It is instructive in this regard that the racial wealth gap has become the gold standard, as it were, of racial injustice. For one thing, the academics, NGO functionaries, media commentators and the like who stress it as a matter for public concern are themselves typically rooted in the professional-managerial strata among which it is most visible and experienced most acutely. Complaints about white co-workers whose parents provide them with down payments on $700,000 condos do not much exist in the working class. Not only is the gap mainly an upper-status affair; defining it as a crucial marker of racial inequality, as Manduca’s work illustrates, naturalizes the forces that produce the larger, more consequential framework of capitalist inequality within which wealth is produced and distributed. Indeed, fixation on the wealth gap is so thoroughly marinated in neoliberal fantasies that accumulating individual wealth is the route to security, dignity and self-respect and that racism is the only impediment to realizing those fantasies, that it obscures the more proximate sources of racial inequality, as well more direct and concrete responses to that inequality. Dionissi Aliprantis and Daniel Carroll, in a report for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, found that the most important source of the persisting racial wealth gap is the income gap. They indicate, based on a sophisticated model of wealth accumulation that adjusts for different patterns of saving across the life cycle, that, if current trends persist, it would take 259 years for black mean wealth to equal 90 percent of the white mean. Adjusting the model to assume that black/white income equality had been attained in 1962, they find that median black family wealth would have reached 90 percent of white family wealth by 2007.

Policies of social-democratic redistribution that reduce the effective income differentials between top and bottom, combined with serious anti-discrimination measures and increased public investment that restores and expands the public sector where black and brown workers are disproportionately employed, it turns out, would do more to reduce even the racial wealth gap than genuine pipe-dream proposals like reparations or other Rube Goldberg-like asset-building strategies. Resistance to such an approach throws into relief the extent to which antiracism as a politics is an artifact and engine of neoliberalism. It does a better job legitimizing market-based principles of social justice than increasing racial equality. And a key component of that work of legitimation is deflection of social-democratic alternatives.

We can see how this works in a recent report from the National Women’s Law Center, which, in the context of the current health crisis, found not only that “Black women are disproportionately represented in front-line jobs providing essential public services” but also that the black women doing these jobs “are typically paid just 89 cents for every dollar typically paid to white, non-Hispanic men in the same roles.”4 For example,the median hourly wage for white, non-Hispanic personal care aides, home health aides and nursing assistants (at the very front of the front lines) is $14.42; the median hourly wage for black women doing the same job is $12.84. When the authors of the survey say that “This difference in wages results in an annual loss that can be devastating for Black women and their families that were already struggling to make ends meet before the public health critics,” they are right. And this is precisely the kind of injustice that the battle against disparity is meant to address.

But it is also precisely the kind of injustice that reveals the class character of that battle.The white men are making $14.42! Disparity tells us the problem to solve is the $1.58 an hour difference between the black women and the white men. Reality tells us that the extra $1.58 won’t rescue those women from precarity. The men are also being paid starvation wages! In fact, everyone receiving an hourly wage of less than
$20 an hour is in a precarious economic position. And the problem here is not just that this report makes no reference to the need to raise the wages of all the workers in front-line occupational categories. Every time we cast the objectionable inequality in terms of disparity we make the fundamental injustice—the difference between what front-line workers make and what their bosses and the shareholders in the corporations their bosses work for make—either invisible, or worse. Because if your idea of social justice is making wages for underpaid black women equal to those of slightly less underpaid white men, you either can’t see the class structure or you have accepted the class structure.

The extent to which even nominal leftists ignore this reality is an expression of the extent of neoliberalism’s ideological victory over the last four decades. Indeed, if we remember Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul,” the weaponizing of antiracism to deploy liberal morality as the solution to capitalism’s injustices makes it clear it’s the soul of the left she had in mind. Thus, for example, the reception of Raj Chetty and his coauthors’ widely discussed 2018 study of intergenerational economic mobility made it clear that their most shocking finding was the degree to which rich black people are less likely than their white counterparts to pass their status on to their children, especially their male children. As if the difficulty rich people might experience in passing on their expropriated wealth is made into a left issue by the fact that the rich people in question are black.5 Of course, the study’s authors aren’t necessarily responsible for how news media represent its significance, but they are totally responsible for the fact that their work largely disconnects economic mobility—and racial disparities—from political economy, in both diagnosis and proposed remedies. For them “the critical question to understand the black-white gap in the long run is: do black children have lower incomes than white children conditional on parental income, and if so, how can we reduce these intergenerational gaps?” Their idea of the basic problem really isn’t that unfair advantage is being passed from generation to generation but that it’s being passed more effectively between white people than between blacks.

And their solutions, which center on the putative effects of factors like family and neighborhood, are primarily focused on the souls of both black and white folk. As historian Touré Reed has argued, their “three specific remedies: ‘mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given area’” are “centered largely on cultural tutelage” and “interracial understanding.”6 And, as Reed also points out, they downplay the effects of any actual redistribution, “—including ‘cash transfer programs,’ and, curiously, ‘minimum wage increases’”—on the grounds they will only “improve economics for a single generation” (166). (It’s as if Workers of the World Unite has turned into don’t give the man a fish, teach him…)

Both the study itself and the public splash it generated underscore the extent to which contemporary antiracism presumes the Thatcherite ideological victory. Chetty and his coauthors treat the neoliberal economic order as given, unassailable nature. They don’t take account of the policy interventions since the 1960s—on the one side, expansion of anti-discrimination enforcement and opening of occupational structures; on the other, public sector and social wage retrenchment, decline in unionization, and four decades of regressive income and wealth transfer—that have substantially affected black economic mobility. Nor do they consider whether the relative recency of that increased upward mobility might have consequential intergenerational effects, especially in an overall context of wage stagnation and regressive transfer. That’s why they can imagine redistributive policy only in the form of weak tea interventions like increasing the minimum—not living—wage, which they immediately dismiss as inadequate. Their stress on intergenerational mobility within that narrow context buttresses the view that racial inequity should be the inequality central to our concern. And their reduction of the universe of possible intervention echoes Thatcher’s other notorious dictum: “You know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and individual women and there are families.” And she would have been fine with Chetty et al.’s additional reification of individuals and families as neighborhoods—“It is our duty to look after ourselves, and then, also, to look after our neighbours.”

The overall trajectory of their account—from the study’s initial formulation of the problem through its conclusions and recommendations—is that fixing the disparities requires fixing people. That construct has been a standard deflection from the broader and deeper mechanisms driving inequality proceeding from the English Poor Laws through Chicago economists’ propagation of “human capital” ideology in the 1950s and anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s invention of the culture of poverty (rechristened in the 1980s and 1990s as the urban underclass) until it was formalized as policy through the victory of the culturalist, rather than redistributive, vision that defined the War on Poverty. That’s pretty much how it has to be if political-economic structures and, specifically, capitalist class relations are defined out of the picture. The emptiness of the authors’ recommendations for addressing the supposed mobility gap mirrors the emptiness of antiracism as a political agenda, even when it comes to actually fixing disparity.

What we’ve been talking about so far are different ways of understanding economic inequality, and our point has been that the very commitment to framing the inequality between rich and poor as the disparity between black and white is—if you want a more equal society—mistaken. But money isn’t everything. What about those disparities that may have a class component but where it looks like race or racism plays a significant role and an autonomous role? Examining the limitations and insidious features of how disparity discourse operates in the two other areas in which it is now most prominent—COVID-19 and police killings of civilians—will demonstrate just how class-skewed and counterproductive it is.

We’ve all heard a lot about racial disparities in deaths from the coronavirus—from the standard observation that “black and brown” communities have been hardest hit to Sanjay Gupta (CNN Chief Medical Correspondent) including in a list of biological factors that heighten risk of severe effects from the virus “being a person of color—Black African American, Latino Latinx or Native American.” There’s a sense in which both these observations are true, but there’s a much more powerful sense in which they’re false and in which the way they’re false, first, reproduces some of the most pernicious myths about race (the main one being that such a thing exists) and, second, deploys race and racism in a way that misrepresents the problem and thus misdescribes the solution.

Are persons of color at higher risk?7 Most readers probably already know many of the key risk factors with respect to COVID-19: according to the Centers for Disease Control, among them are asthma; chronic kidney disease being treated with dialysis; hemoglobin (a protein that transports oxygen in the blood) disorders; chronic lung disease; diabetes; immunocompromised status; liver disease; serious heart conditions; severe obesity; age of 65 or older; residence in nursing homes or long-term care facilities. All but the last two categories are specific medical conditions that can affect anyone in the general population. Those conditions have been shown to increase risk of serious harm from infection either clinically, by examination of specific effects the virus can have on people with those conditions, or statistically, by showing that people with those conditions are significantly more likely than the general population to succumb to the worst effects of the virus, or both.

The last two categories in particular are tied also to specific social circumstances, mainly advanced point in the life cycle, which is associated with diminished abilities to fight off disease. But other social circumstances are involved with them, as well as with many of the other conditions. For instance, nursing homes and long-term care facilities not only are likely to house people with conditions that make them especially vulnerable; they typically depend on care-giving workers who are underpaid and exploited and are themselves likely to be at greater risk of infection, and hence to transmit the infection, than the general population. As we all know, these “essential workers” may be celebrated as “heroes,” but in a for-profit healthcare system, where operators of such facilities, increasingly private equity and other investment firms, are likely to cut corners to maintain their bottom lines, the heroes are not just badly paid, their health is a secondary concern.

Healthcare workers, and essential workers in general, are disproportionately likely to get sick, and they are disproportionately black. More generally, we know that in the United States, people classified as black and Hispanic are disproportionately likely to be poor and economically marginal, to have inadequate access to healthcare, to work jobs that are hazardous, debilitating, and, in the case of COVID-19, likely to expose them to infection, and to live in relatively congested circumstances and in areas with elevated exposure to environmental toxins—all conditions that undermine basic health. In that sense, race is associated with risk because it is an umbrella category that encompasses relatively high proportions of people who live within the social circumstances that increase risk. It’s a kind of shorthand, a “proxy measure.” Proxy measures are what researchers use to try to get at the effects of a variable when they don’t have direct information on the variable itself. They use other variables that appear to move along with the one they’re interested in but for which they don’t have direct data to try to infer the significance of the category they’re interested in accounting for. Researchers commonly acknowledge using race as a proxy for class.

But why do we need a proxy for class? Why not just use class? Because, more often than not, we can’t. Although Vincente Navarro’s remark (to the 2003 graduating class of the Johns Hopkins Medical School), “The United States is one of the very few countries that do not include class in its national health and vital statistics,” no doubt overstated the case, his observation that the U.S. prefers to collect “health and vital statistics by race and gender” is on target. Comparing E.U. and U.S. approaches to eliminating disparities in health, Elizabeth Docteur and Robert A. Berenson note the E.U. focus on “inequalities between the most advantaged and disadvantaged sections of the population,” that is, “populations with lower education, a lower occupational class, or lower income.” “By contrast,” they go on to say, the U.S. data they analyze presents “health disparities associated with race and ethnicity as the primary focus of its drive to increase health equity.” So, scholars who want to examine class effects of COVID-19, for example, must rely on proxy measures—for example, ZIP codes, education levels, or race—to try to get at the question indirectly. Thus, whatever the role played by race in actually producing the vulnerability of any individual to the virus, the role played by race in explaining that vulnerability is foregrounded: the headline is black and brown communities bear the brunt of COVID-19, not working-class people bear the brunt of COVID-19.

Even when this substitution names essentially the same people, it’s a problem, in several ways.

First, it works to convert race from a proxy for other factors into a substitute for those other factors. Public health scholar R. Dawn Comstock and her co-authors in a 2004 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology surveyed 1,198 articles in that journal and in the American Journal of Public Health published between 1996 and 1999 and found that nearly 86 percent mentioned race but that in most, just over 57 percent, “the purpose for using race or ethnicity as variables was not described” (616) and “only rarely were policy recommendations made on the basis of findings associated with race or ethnicity” (617). That is, researchers often use race as a category for interpreting data simply because it’s already there in the way the data are collected and aggregated. Doing so seems appropriate because it is consistent with the common sense folk knowledge that “race” matters somehow and doing so thus perpetuates the idea that race matters somehow.

Second, the idea that race itself matters perpetuates the false idea that there is such a thing as race. But, biologically speaking, there isn’t. It’s not surprising that researchers once put a great deal of time and effort into looking for biological markers of the differences between races. What is surprising is that, long after the search for such markers has failed and there is consensus that the reason we haven’t found them is because they don’t exist, we continue to organize our thinking around them—as if there were something about the biology of black bodies as a function of their blackness that made them more susceptible to COVID-19. Too many medical practitioners, including doctors, assume that blacks, for example, have distinctive biological characteristics from whites. One recent study found that 50 percent of medical students or residents endorsed at least one false belief concerning racial differences in biology between blacks and whites. A companion study found that nearly three-fourths of a sample of people without medical training endorsed at least one of those false beliefs. It is worth underscoring in this regard that there is greater genetic diversity between two species of chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, living in the same small region of Central Africa than there is within our entire species all over the globe.

There is a long and sordid history of the often tragic harms that folk beliefs about racial differences in biology have caused to people in this country and around the world.8 In the current environment, it’s too easy for people to assume that racial disparities stem from differences in racial biology. And, because racialist thinking is such a cloudy mush of fantasies, the folk belief doesn’t have to attribute the differences to biology. Folk beliefs about “culture” do the same work of planting confusion and misinformation. “Culture” in this context is typically only a polite way of saying race and one that doesn’t require any claims about biology, although it’s often used interchangeably to invoke essential difference. In its own way, a folk view of race as culture can be just as harmful as the biological view because it easily gives rise to victim-blaming arguments according to which people’s vulnerable health conditions are their own fault due to their diets and stereotypical destructive habits attributed to them. That in turn gives rise to arguments that “they” need to exercise greater personal responsibility and that “we” shouldn’t be expected to pay the costs of taking care of them. We’ve seen much of that sentiment during the COVID-19 crisis as well.

Third, what we focus on can make it more difficult to see other, maybe equally or more important patterns. Because public health data are not collected with income as a category for analysis, we can’t determine definitively whether rich people, of whatever race, have been on the average as vulnerable to the worst effects of COVID-19 as poor people of whatever race or whether rich seniors are as vulnerable as poor ones. That would be important information to have if we want to understand more clearly who in our overall population is at greater or lesser risk. We do, however, have clues. A recent study by Les Leopold and the Labor Institute examined a series of factors associated with higher death rates in New York City.

Neighborhoods with approximately one-third more African Americans than the average NYC neighborhood have nine more deaths per 100,000, making the average death rate jump from 201 per 100,000 to 210. If the percent of crowded housing also increased by a third, the death rate also increased by about nine per 100,000. Being born in Latin America, a category that includes many undocumented workers, was associated with twice the risk of dying from COVID-19 than that faced by African Americans and those who lived in crowded housing. This is likely because it is far more difficult for undocumented workers, even essential ones, to gain access to medical and financial assistance. Being old, of course is a major risk factor no matter what your ethnicity, place of origin, or income.

But income alone, a key indicator of class, was the most influential characteristic. Lower-income neighborhoods saw an addition of nearly 28 deaths per 100,000, increasing the average death rate by more than 10 percent, from 201 deaths per 100,000 to 229.9

The death rate in census tracts with median annual income below $25,000 was 221.8 per 100,000 population while for the census tracts with median annual income above $240,000 the death rate was 85.7 per 100,000. You were more than two-and-a-half times more likely to die from COVID-19 if you lived in a poor neighborhood than if you lived in a rich one. And “income alone” was “the most influential characteristic.”10

So, fourth, not only does the use of race as a proxy for class produce a misunderstanding of the problem (racism), it also produces a misunderstanding of the solution (antiracism). The correct understanding of the problem is it’s not black and brown workers who are at risk, it’s low-wage workers, especially those who have to go to work during the pandemic. And this would be true even if all the low-wage workers were in fact black and brown. Why? Because even if it’s racism that has caused so many badly paid workers to be black and brown, it’s not racism that causes them to be so badly paid. Krogers and Amazon and McDonalds don’t pay their workers so little because so many of them are people of color. They pay them so little because that’s how they make a profit. If you made the workers proportionately white and Asian, they’d still be underpaid and they’d still be getting sick.

Again, this is not to deny the effects of racism and not to deny racial disparity. Racism helps explain why so many low-wage workers are black and brown. But it doesn’t explain their low wages. And all the antiracism in the world wouldn’t make the slightest contribution to raising those wages. So even if using race as a proxy for class were accurate in the sense that it named the exact same set of people, it would be profoundly misleading. Race can’t be a proxy for class because race tells you the problem is discrimination against the workers while class tells you the problem is getting the maximum value out of their labor. Or, turn it around: the analytic of class tells you the problem is how we treat front-line workers; the analytic of race tells you the problem is that too many black and brown people have to be front-line workers. That’s why the most ruthlessly profit-driven corporations can learn to love the most radical demands for eliminating black/white disparities. To make Jeff Bezos and his stockholders as rich as they are, Amazon needs to underpay its workers. It doesn’t need to care the slightest bit what color they are.

What saves many people from COVID-19 is not that they are white or Asian but that they are rich. And this is even more vividly true of the third person of the disparitarian trinity, police killings. It may be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get himself murdered by the police; but, as with COVID deaths, these deaths are only categorized by race, sex, and age, so we can’t be sure. In any event, no one would think to protest that poor people are disproportionately killed by the police, since controlling poor people is basically what policing is. It’s the disproportionate killing of poor black men that’s the problem.

Part of this can be explained by the fact that, as we’ve already noted, black men are overrepresented among the poor. Indeed, if we were to imagine that the victims in police shootings came from the bottom three intervals in the chart below, then we might conclude that, at least in part, disproportionately being killed by the police tracks disproportionate poverty. The significance of social class here would just be a part of what researchers

https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Income

have shown to be its (increasing) significance with respect to the justice system more generally where, as Adaner Usmani has said, incarceration has not been “defined by rising racial inequalities” but by rising class disparities, and where, in fact, while rates of incarceration have “dramatically” increased for poor black Americans, they actually decreased for “college educated African Americans.”11 A version of this same dynamic has in fact played out in health care where, as Frederick J. Zimmerman and Nathaniel W. Anderson say, between 1993 and 2107, the “black-white gap showed significant improvement” but “income disparities worsened.”12

Still, racism surely plays a significant role. For 2019, Mapping Police Violence records 30 police killings of unarmed black people and 53 killings of unarmed white people. (https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends) And, if not for racism, some of that disproportionality would disappear. It would, for example, be significantly diminished if the police just killed one less black person and one more white person a month. But does anyone believe this would count as a solution, that it’s only the deaths we can blame on racism that matter? Everyone knows George Floyd’s name; neither of us knows the names of any of the unarmed white people killed by the police this year. No one should—and we don’t—deny that the disproportion is significantly an effect of racism. But no one should—and we don’t—think that the problem of police violence is caused by racism or can be solved by antiracism. And yet the whole point of #BlackLivesMatter (the reason it’s called BlackLivesMatter and not WorkersLivesMatter or PoorPeoplesLivesMatter much less the dreaded AllLivesMatter) is to center race and racism—to take the injustice that neoliberal capitalism needs and turn it into an injustice that neoliberal capitalism can eagerly and sincerely deplore.

In other words, every time racial disparity is invoked as the lens through which to see American inequality, the overwhelming role played by the increased inequality in the American class system is made invisible. And this is, of course, true on the right as well as the left—think of all the conservative commentators defending the police by invoking the spectre of black-on-black murder. And then think of the widespread agreement among criminologists that the Gini coefficient “predicts murder rates better than any other variable.” Conservatives who try to blame black crime on race and liberals who try to blame it on racism are both missing the point. If you want to distinguish between the left and the right, the relevant question is not what they think about race; it’s what they think when race is taken out of the equation.

From this standpoint, what we’re seeing today is not how the COVID-19 crisis has helped to reveal the structural inequalities of American life but how it has intensified the process of concealing them. Think of how hard the graph above works to teach us to see and be shocked by the disproportionate number of whites and Asians on the top and blacks and Latinos on the bottom rather than by the difference between the top and the bottom—to shock us with disparity rather than inequality.

And no response today is less convincing than, why can’t we be shocked by both? For one thing, we aren’t. Even though (and here’s where the graph does a little counter-hegemonic work) poor white households are a majority, the gap between rich and poor only gets traction today if it can be redescribed as the gap between white and black. There are no headlines trumpeting the discovery that poor people have worse health care than rich people, much less announcing that they are more often killed by the police. You might as well announce that poor people have less money than rich people. In fact, the commitment to addressing disparities has become so central that even when it’s clear that addressing the problems of poor people rather than black people would be more effective in solving the problems of black people, the move toward universality is rejected as a refusal to “center” black people.

In other words, centering black people has become a way of ignoring poor people—even poor black people! After all, every step in the direction of universal redistribution advances, however minimally, equality between rich and poor and works toward correcting racial disparities. No step in the direction of reducing disparities advances equality between rich and poor and, without universal redistribution, even the steps we do take toward reducing disparities are minimally effective. What does it mean, then, to make disparity the focus of our political agenda?

What we’re trying to do here is show that seeing inequality as disparity is seeing it through a neoliberal lens. (It’s worth recalling in this context that Margaret Thatcher, when asked what she considered her greatest achievement, replied “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”) Of course, many people committed to BlackLivesMatter may understand themselves as committed also to social measures that go beyond rectifying the disproportionality problem. But, if they are, that commitment in no way follows from identification of disparity as the most important metric of inequality. And, as we have argued, that commitment, no matter how earnestly felt, is not borne out by the substance of antiracist political practice. For the record, this means that those who assert a “both/and-ist” posture—from the most self-satisfied, moralizing youthful enthusiasts to the most decrepit troglodytes steeped in their nostalgic Trotskyite fantasies—to denounce advocates of political-economic analysis and working-class politics as “class reductionists” are trying to delude either themselves or the rest of us, or both, regarding the extent to which they’ve capitulated to neoliberal vision.

Finally, although some antiracists—and certainly many liberals—express indifference toward or disdain for poor and working-class whites, it is practically impossible, as generations of black proponents of social democracy understood clearly, to imagine a serious strategy for winning the kinds of reforms that would actually improve black and brown working people’s conditions without winning them for all working people and without doing so through a struggle anchored to broad working-class solidarity.

And if it were possible, it would be wrong. A society where making black and white people equal means making them equally subordinate to a (mainly white but, really, what does it matter?) ruling class is not a more just society, just a differently unjust one. That’s the trouble with disparity.

Until the appearance of her new poem “Weather” on the first page of the June 15^th New York Times Book Review, Claudia Rankine had not been particularly prominent on the many reading lists about antiracism that surfaced in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Nonetheless, despite being published six years ago, Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric may be the book most representative of the current moment in terms of its possibilities and limitations. Indeed, Rankine’s insistence on the perduring nature of racial injury and her embrace of a politics that is at best what Cedric Johnson has called “a militant expression of racial liberalism” may qualify her as poet laureate of antiracism.2 National Book Award finalist, Citizen appeared in the year following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, which was also the event that precipitated the founding of #BlackLivesMatter. Although the poem and the organization emerged independently of one another, BLM couldn’t have found a more apt literary avatar than Citizen had they contrived to design one on an app. A mélange of personal vignettes, reproductions of images and photographs, observations on Serena Williams’s career-long battle against racist officials and competitors in professional tennis, and most poignantly, tributes to black victims of police and vigilante violence, Citizen lends poetic form to the rhetorical politics of Black Lives Matter (and the allied #SayHerName campaign, which emerged after the death of Sandra Bland) in which intoning the names of an ever-growing list of the victims and of instances of violence produces an expression that seems at once intensely personal and immediately collective.

Central to Citizen’s genius is the way it harnesses the rhetorical power of iteration, particularly in the context of memorialization. In some ways, the poem brings to mind Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose glossy black walls cleanly etched with the names of the more than 58,000 Americans killed or missing in action from that war express Lin’s hope that “These names, seemingly infinite in number… [could] convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals as a whole.”3 Faced with memorializing a controversial war, Lin sought to make a work that could affect any viewer regardless of their opinion of the war. Although her design was initially met with significant objection from some veterans, it has largely succeeded in displacing the problem of the war’s meaning with individual feelings of personal connection to the dead—in Lin’s words, “creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present.”4 But where Lin’s recitation of names intended to evacuate the political from the personal, Rankine’s poem operates through insisting on the identity of the two.

What is also crucial to the book’s use of iteration is its recognition of the way that the milieu of social media and 24-hour television—the world of tweeting/retweeting, posting/reposting, tagging, texting, and sharing—has become implicated in the aesthetics of memorialization, creating a sensation of living repeatedly through incidents, seemingly infinite in number, constituting a barrage that can leave one at once depleted and on the verge of striking out. Beginning with what its narrator assumes is a familiar sense of enervation, “When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows,” the poem nonetheless finds itself drawn repeatedly, incessantly, to mediated—whether through television or radio—moments of outrage that carry the force of immediate affronts.5 Woven into these mediated encounters are relatively brief narrated moments of “everyday” racism—a comment from a colleague about affirmative action or a moment when the speaker’s first visit with her therapist provokes what is now described as a “Karen” incident, a histrionic reaction by a white woman to an unexpected or unwanted encounter with a black individual—that themselves have the quality of the kind of vignette made for retweeting, sharing, or reposting.

The success of, and possibly the ceiling for, this politics and aesthetics of iteration—the recitation of names and moments—can be gauged, as Cedric Johnson has noted, by the astonishing rapidity with which BlackLivesMatter has gone from being a provocation to a slogan embraced by different class layers, emanating as “facile expressions of unity in endless memes and viral videos of police-civilian line dances conceal substantive political differences among protestors and within broader U.S. publics.”6 And while any one of these instances of iteration might serve to exemplify this dynamic, perhaps the most emblematic occurred on June 2 when none other than U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, came perhaps as close as he ever has been to eloquence in addressing the murder of George Floyd on the Senate Floor. McConnell intoned:

This is an hour of great pain and unrest in our country. Americans from coast to coast have been grieved and horrified by the killings of African American citizens: Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Breonna Taylor in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and George Floyd in Minneapolis. In each disturbing situation, investigations and reviews are ongoing…We need the truth, and we need swift justice under law.

But here’s something that requires no investigation: In no world whatsoever should arresting a man for an alleged minor infraction involve a police officer putting his knee on the man’s neck for nine minutes while he cries out “I can’t breathe” and then goes silent. To me, to a great many of my fellow Kentuckians, and to millions of outraged Americans, these disturbing events do not look like isolated incidents. They look more like the latest chapter in our national struggle to make equal rights and equal justice under the law into facts of life for all Americans rather than contingencies that sometimes depend on the color of one’s skin. Obviously, this struggle remains incomplete. Our nation cannot deafen itself to the anger, the pain, or the frustration of black Americans. Our nation needs to hear this.7

McConnell, of course, went on to flash his credentials as a longtime supporter of Civil Rights, despite his recent role as the point of the spear for a rightwing assault on the U.S. federal courts and then to condemn the looting that occurred in some cities where protests were staged, calling upon state and local authorities,and ultimately the federal government, “to crack down on outside agitators and domestic terrorists,” making it apparent that he was equally, if not more, disturbed by the looting that ensued after the police murders than he was with the event that precipitated this recent crisis. But the fact that McConnell could run the BLM/Say Her Name playbook—calling the victims by their names, repeating Floyd’s desperate words before he lost consciousness, making apparent the role of racism in these deaths, insisting that these events were a part of long, unfinished story, and acknowledging the imperative of listening to the pain of black Americans—without first being blinded on the road to Damascus is an important part of this story.

The politics of BLM is a politics of expression, premised on a contention that the refusal to name the names of the victims and to say “Black Lives Matter,” is both symptomatic and causal. “Silence = Violence” (or as Rankine notes in “Weather,” “white silence equals violence”) is a common subtitle on the “Black Lives Matter” signs that now dot lawns and windows across the country. From this standpoint, the refusal to acknowledge the individuality of the victims of police violence and the failure to speak out betoken an indifference towards these killings that constitutes an act or posture of complicity.  And while every activist associated with this movement will insist that the words need to entail a commitment to act, the fact that McConnell and a host of major retailers (as I began writing this I received in my inbox an email from the CEO of a public relations consulting firm with the subject line, “One White Woman’s Lamentations,” the second paragraph of which consists solely of the sentence, “Black Lives Matter”) have said the words and committed to a variety of actions cannot, a priori, be dismissed as mere lip service. They are, in some fundamental way, unfolding the logic of BLM. Saying certain words and repeating phrases and slogans cannot be a matter of indifference.

In admonishing his audience to listen to the anger, pain, and frustration of black Americans, McConnell, whether wittingly or unwittingly, identified a distinctive feature of the politics and poetics of BLM, namely its hyperattention to bodily response—not merely the pain felt by George Floyd as Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck, but the pain felt by those who saw and continue to see the incident on one of their devices, and more specifically, the pain engendered by a felt, embodied knowledge that one’s ancestors and those perceived to be like oneself were either subjected to, or are statistically more likely to be subjected to, like treatment. This notion of historical and statistical embodiment is vividly displayed in Rankine’s Citizen, as the narrator recounts separate instances of watching Serena Williams at the U.S. Open, the 2004 semifinal against Jennifer Capriati, and the 2009 semifinal against Kim Clijsters. In the former, Williams was subjected to a series of bad calls by the chair umpire Mariana Alves so egregious that John McEnroe “‘was shocked that Serena was able to hold it together after losing the match’” (27). Serena did express her outrage after losing to Capriati, saying, as the poem recounts, “‘I’m very angry and bitter right now. I felt cheated. Shall I go on? I just feel robbed’” (27).

But the point of the first instance is that Serena does, “hold it together,” her relative poise leading the narrator to remark, “And though you felt outrage for Serena after that 2004 US Open, as the years go by, she seems to put Alves, and a lengthening list of other curious calls and oversights, against both her and her sister, behind her as they happen” (28). It takes the second match, the 2009 semifinal against Clijsters, when a rare foot fault is called against Williams, for Rankine to drive the key point home. This time, in reaction to the lineswoman’s call, which was at best overzealous and more likely wrong, Williams explodes, shouting at the lineswoman, “I swear to God I’m fucking going to take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat, you hear that? I swear to God!” (29). For Citizen’s speaker, Williams’s outburst is almost cathartic. She remarks, “It is difficult not to applaud her for reacting immediately to being thrown against a sharp background. It is difficult not to applaud her for existing in the moment, for fighting crazily against the so-called wrongness of her body’s positioning at the service line” (29).

The poem doesn’t read the outburst simply as an instance of Serena being fed up with the unfair treatment she’s received over the years and finally deciding that enough is enough—a common human experience for which “the straw that broke the camel’s back” has become a stock phrase. Rather, Citizen seeks to make the point that Williams’s body itself has become the repository of not only the incidents that have happened to her, but the injustices visited upon black people for centuries. As the poem unfolds further, Williams’s body—and by extension all black bodies—become the bearer of experiences that set black people apart from their fellow citizens. The poem’s speaker asserts:

Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games. (28)

In any case, it is difficult not to think that if Serena lost context by abandoning all rules of civility, it could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief—code for being black in America—is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but by a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules. Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context—randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to God!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship. (30)

To be black, according to the logic of the poem is to exist within a body “governed” by those “lived through” moments of capriciousness in which others’ perception of one’s body as black dissolves into one’s own experiencing of oneself as black. The lesson to be learned from Williams’s ordeal is that to “understand” what has happened to her “is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background” (32).

Although the purported target of concern is the treatment of “any” black person and the fact that events like this happen all the time to people whose mistreatment never comes to our attention, the paradigmatic quality of Williams’s experience depends on the contrast between the outsized nature of her achievement and the contempt for her person conveyed by the slights against her. Arguably the best athlete in the world over the last decade, Williams’s treatment at the hands of these court officials demonstrates that “[n]either her father nor her mother nor her sister nor Jehovah her God nor NIKE camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world” (26). In order to make its point that it is the “black body” that matters, Citizen must highlight the dangers to and the indignities visited upon high-achieving black Americans. In an interview with Lauren Berlant in Bomb Rankine described her

conscious decision to inhabit my own subjectivity in this book in the sense that the middle-class life I live, with my highly educated, professional, and privileged friends, remains as the backdrop for whatever is being foregrounded. Everyone is having a good time together—doing what they do, buying what they can afford, going where they go—until they are not.8

In order to show that race—which is to say, the confrontation with blackness—and not something else prompts the interaction, the poem’s early scenes happen within the domain of the professional managerial class. The salience of the assault, whether psychic or physical, depends on a prior sense of wellbeing among those who are reasonably well off. Rankine also notes that this sense of wellbeing is illusory—the “eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic” outlook of highly successful black people who continue to play the game” (28). These assaults are not merely inconveniences but potentially life and death matters. The members of this class suffer from what has been called “John Henryism,” defined as a malady specific to those “people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure” (11). The body, however, knows what the mind tries to hide from itself. As the narrator observes later, “You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you” (63).

So that while John McEnroe, as we have seen, feels outrage on Serena’s behalf and even expresses surprise at the restraint of her response during the Capriati semifinal, his feelings and those of the poem’s speaker are not the same because his body cannot remember—has not become the repository of—historical outrage. Indeed, the riots that follow the Rodney King verdict and the murder of Trayvon Martin lead the narrator to contemplate how “the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives” (89). The effect of this accumulation leads the speaker to wonder ambiguously, “How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?” (116).

At least two beliefs that were once staples of racist thinking have now become rallying cries of antiracism. The first is that centuries of living under and through adverse conditions have set black people somatically and psychically apart from their fellow citizens. The second, to quote from Madison Grant’s racist 1916 The Passing of the Great Race is that “race lies to-day at the base of all the phenomena of modern society, just as it has done throughout the unrecorded eons of the past and the laws of nature operate with the same relentless and unchanging force in human affairs as in the phenomena of inanimate nature.”9 Frank Wilderson, the scholar most prominently affiliated with the idea of Afro-Pessimism asserts that this doctrine “is premised on an iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness.” He elaborates:

Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a prior meta-moment of plenitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life. Blackness, as a paradigmatic position (rather than as an ensemble of identities, cultural practices, or anthropological accoutrement), cannot be disimbricated from slavery. The narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic slave who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line, what Hortense Spillers (2003) calls “historical stillness”: a flat line that “moves” from disequilibrium to a moment in the narrative of faux equilibrium, to disequilibrium restored and/or rearticulated. To put it differently, the violence which both elaborates and saturates Black “life” is totalizing, so much so as to make narrative inaccessible to Blacks.10

Combining the ideas of separateness and historical persistence, Wilderson and his epigones, some of whom don’t fully share in his pessimism, nonetheless insist that the first step in understanding social reality is to acknowledge the singularity of the condition of black Americans.

These scholars derive a variety of implications from this acknowledgement. Yet one stipulation holds constant across these formulations: Black people, regardless of their social positioning, face an existential threat not present for other people, and that all forms of social and economic organization—liberal or neoliberal capitalism, socialism, or Marxism–that do not stipulate this distinction will be insufficient to the task of bringing about justice for black people. By invoking “blackness” as a condition or a modifier, critics, commenters, activists, and scholars invest the people designated by the term with an existential radicality—they exist outside of, against, in excess of, fugitives from any norms that typically structure social and political life. More importantly, unlike the disparitarian discourses of liberal and neoliberal antiracism, which at least concern themselves with redressing those material inequalities produced by discrimination, the existential radicality of Afro-Pessimism actually turns out to be dismissive of the efficacy of ending any form of economic inequality. The prevailing conviction of Wilderson and company is that the commitment to antiblackness is fundamental and impervious to amelioration or erosion by conditions of material equality. Hence, as the key moments in Rankine’s poems reveal,  the incidents that matter most in their considerations are those that manifest intraclass difference between blacks and those of other races who hold the same jobs, earn roughly the same salaries, live in the same neighborhoods, and send their children to the same schools. To the extent that these individuals can feel that their victimization serves no purpose other than to express or enforce antiblackness they can present themselves as the paradigmatic figures of an abiding blackness. As a consequence even the most well-heeled black individual can, in an instant, be transformed into a voice of radical dissent. Bertolt Brecht once quipped, “The idea of race is a petty bourgeois’s way of trying to become an aristocrat. At a stroke he acquires a set of ancestors and has something to look back—and down—upon.” Brecht’s adage still holds, but for the current moment we might also add the following paraphrase: “The idea of Blackness is a petty bourgeois’s way of trying to become an activist. At a stroke they acquire a radical tradition and the posture of speaking truth to the very power they themselves exercise.”

Blackness, then, is a claim of exceptionalism masquerading as radicalism. This exceptionalism is derivative of a belief that the U.S. and the West, even without recourse to discredited theories of social Darwinism, have fully realized Madison Grant’s dream of making race the prime mover of history and social reality such that white supremacy has become the hooded ghost in every imaginable social machine. Ostensibly indicating a concern with those most victimized, those whose voices and needs have been ignored, “Blackness” substitutes claims of shared experience for structures and practices of democratic governance and accountability. Personal feelings confer authority on anyone who can attest to certain experiences to speak on behalf of a collectivity presumed to feel exactly the same way. And those who speak the loudest are those for whom commentary on matters of race is a part of their job description.

But where do these racial disparities actually take place?

Amidst this moment of reckoning the South, cast as the cradle of racism, seems to come in for special criticism. Antebellum Southern slave patrols are regularly name-checked as an origin of American policing. Confederate monuments are toppling, as they should. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. A Nation writer decried “stupid” Southerners for flouting social distancing at a bacchanalian redneck vehicle jamboree on the beaches of Galveston, Texas. A Washington Post columnist asked rhetorically if Donald Trump wasn’t actually the last president of the Confederacy. And, let’s admit it, most of the country thinks of the South as profoundly backward.

Given this vibe one might be surprised by the actual regional demographics of police killings. What follows is a very preliminary, incomplete, back-of-the-napkin sketch of data on police killings. My main source on police killings is the Guardian’s Counted Project. Economic and demographic data come from the U.S. Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Kaiser Family Foundation. I am rounding numbers with decimals up and down. For a discussion of the sources used see the first two footnotes.2

The South

Let’s start with Tennessee, the state that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan. It seems reasonable to assume that the cops in Tennessee kill African Americans at a disproportionately high rate.

In 2016, police in Tennessee killed 25 people. Of these, nineteen, or 76 percent of the total, were white. Meanwhile, whites were 78 percent of the state’s total population. Tennessee police killed three black people, which was 12 percent of the total. However, African Americans were 17 percent of the state’s total population.

In other words, African Americans were, relative to their proportion of the state’s total population, actually 29 percent “underrepresented” in the stats on police killings. White people were 2 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.

Thus, Tennessee cops actually killed whites at a higher rate than they killed black people even as both whites and blacks were “underrepresented” in the police homicide stats. Latinos and Pacific Islanders each suffered one police homicide, and because they make up small percentages of the state’s population, were “overrepresented” in the police stats.

In Kentucky the cops killed 22 people. Of this total nineteen, or 86 percent, were white. The state’s population, as a whole, was 87 percent white. Two of the Kentuckians killed by cops that year were black, meaning they were 9 percent of the casualties. Meanwhile, African Americans were 8 percent of the state’s total population. One of the victims of Kentucky police homicide was Latino.

This means white people were slightly underrepresented among those killed by police while Latinos and African Americans were overrepresented relative to their proportion of the state’s population. But the black victims of police homicide in Kentucky were 12 percent overrepresented, not 100 percent overrepresented as they are in the national stats.

What about the Deep South where a greater percentage of the population is black? For example, take Mississippi—it doesn’t get any more “Deep South” than Mississippi.

In 2016, cops in Mississippi killed eleven people: six, or 55 percent, of these were white and five, or 45 percent, were black. The state’s population was 59 percent white and 37 percent black. This means Mississippi cops killed black people at a rate 49 percent higher than their prevalence in the state’s total population. Thus, we can say Mississippi displays a racist pattern as regards police killings. But it is only half as racist as the national numbers.

In Louisiana, cops also killed black people at disproportionately higher rates than they kill white people. African Americans were twelve of the 22 people killed by police. They were 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but were 54 percent of those killed by police in 2016. That ratio gets closer, but is not all the way, to the national aggregate numbers.

Florida is also closer to, but not at, the national average. In the Sunshine State African Americans were 16 percent of the population yet constituted 25 percent of those killed by cops in 2016. Cops in Florida thus killed African Americans at a rate that was 56 percent greater than the African-American percentage of the state population.

In Georgia cops killed thirty people in 2016. African Americans, being 17 of these victims but only 31 percent of the population, were 19 percent overrepresented. Latinos were 17 percent of police homicide victims but only 9 percent of the population and were thus almost 100 percent overrepresented. Whites on the other hand were 28 percent underrepresented in such stats, being only 43 percent of those killed by cops despite constituting 60 percent of the state population.

However, if we cross the Savannah River into South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, the patterns change. In 2016 Palmetto State cops killed eighteen people. Of this total, four (or 22 percent) were African American even as they constituted 28 percent of the state population. This meant black people were 27 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats. White victims of police homicide numbered fourteen (or 78 percent of the total) even as whites were only 67 percent of South Carolina’s population.

In other words, white South Carolinians were 16 percent overrepresented in the police homicide stats and they were significantly more likely to be killed by cops than were black South Carolinians.

I could go on with similarly weird and counterintuitive Southern examples but I will spare readers the jumble of numbers.

So then, where do cops kill black people most disproportionately?

Yankeedom 

One of the worst offenders as regards the disproportionate killing of black people—that is to say, the state with some of the most anti-black cops in the country—is liberal Massachusetts.

The Bay State—which during the Civil War produced the ultra-heroic, all-black 54th Regiment about which the fantastic film Glory was made—has police that kill black people at five times, or 500 percent the rate at which black people appear in the state’s total population. No wonder people joke about “up South in Boston.”

In 2016, police in Massachusetts killed fourteen people: five were white, five were black, and four were Latino.

White people are 79 percent of the population but only 35 percent of those killed by cops, and were thus 56 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.

Massachusetts police also kill Latinos at a very high rate. Latinos were 11 percent of the state population in 2016, but they were 28 percent of those killed by police. Thus, Massachusetts Latinos showed up in the police killing stats at a rate of 254 percent their proportion of the state’s total population, or 154 percent greater than the Latino share of the population.

The key number, however, is this: Only 7 percent of Massachusetts’s residents are black, yet they constituted 35 percent of people killed by cops. African Americans therefore appear in Massachusetts police homicide stats at five times the rate, or with 400 percent greater frequency, than do they appear in the state’s total population count. Now we are beginning to see where the national average comes from.

Illinois has a similar profile. In 2016 Illinois cops killed 29 people: nine of them (or 31 percent of the total) were white, while 61 percent of the state’s total population was white. Latinos were 27 percent of those killed by cops despite being only 17 percent of the state’s population.

Illinois cops also killed seventeen black people, (or 58 percent of the total) even as black people were only 14 percent of the state’s total population. In other words, during 2016 Illinois cops killed African Americans at a rate four times (or 314 percent greater than) the black percentage of the population.

Similarly, in Minnesota, cops kill black people at three times their prevalence in the state’s total population: 6 percent of the population versus 21 percent of those killed by cops. In New York police kill black people at three times their proportion of the population: they are only 16 percent of the population but constitute 48 percent of those killed by cops. In Michigan police kill African Americans at a rate about 2.5 times their share of the state population; they are 14 percent of the population but 37 percent of those killed by cops.

Moving west, the cops show anti-black racism in their patterns of killing but not to the level of what we see in the Northeast and Midwest. California fits the northern pattern. Cops killed black people at more than three times their share of the population. But Western police racism, expressed as lethal violence, falls most heavily on Latinos and Native Americans. Measured on a per capita basis no other racial or ethnic group comes near experiencing the appalling level of police violence meted out to Native Americans.

To be fair to the police of Greater Yankeedom, in general, they kill less often than do Southern or Western cops.

The Racialization of Poverty North and South

Why is Northern policing so disproportionately racist? In 1831 Tocqueville noted the peculiar vehemence of Yankee racism: “slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary…. prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.”3

This Northern prejudice often produced state constitutions that simultaneously outlawed slavery and prohibited African Americans settlement. Ohio, for example, outlawed slavery in its original 1802 constitution. But it also aggressively barred black immigration and enforced the ban with mob violence.

Northern tier states were also the first to pass eugenic forced-sterilization laws. By 1926 most Northern states had such laws but none of the Southern states did.

I suspect that modern patterns of “racialized” poverty, which is to say the racial demographics of poverty, does much to explain Northern police racism. Keep in mind, much of what police do is harass the visibly and “disorderly” poor. Disorderly frequently comes down to doing things in public that, if you had more money, you would do in private: drinking, smoking, buying and selling, yelling, arguing, disrobing, sitting down, and sleeping.4

The racism of Northern police also has something to do with the more “racialized” nature of poverty in the North as compared to the South. In the North, people of color tend to be heavily overrepresented in the ranks of the poor, whereas in the South there are higher rates of poverty and more of the white population is very poor. One crude way we see this is comparing the relative gap between white and black poverty rates in the North and South.

In the South the black poverty rate is typically about twice as high as the white poverty rate. But in most of the northern-tier states the black poverty rate is three times as high as the white poverty rate.5 This is not because black people are necessarily wealthier in the South, though the highest black poverty rates do cluster in the north, but rather because there are more poor white people in the South.6

The U.S. Census defines four major regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Of these, the South has the lowest median household income; it also has “the largest share of counties with high income inequality.” The South remains the region with the lowest median wages,7  has “maintained the highest rates of poverty over the past 40 years,” and has “the largest share of Americans living in poverty of all regions.” Food insecurity is highest in the South. It has the highest adult and infant mortality rates and the greatest prevalence of illnesses like cardiovascular disease, obesity, and HIV/AIDS. Southerners suffer higher occurrences of occupational fatalities, and the South has many of the highest rates of incarceration.8

The Political Economy of North and South

The South, from the settling of Jamestown onward, has always been home to a large population of poor whites. The South was intentionally designed to be a land of gentlemen and servants. This plan, if you will, shaped southern land distribution. Huge lots were given to rich men, while very little was made available to the common classes. The Yankee north, despite its many faults, pursued an intentionally more equal distribution of land. These divergent sectional settlement patterns had profound and long-term consequences for later economic development.

This sectional difference in land disposal patterns meant that the South never developed a large class of independent small farmers, whereas that class predominated in the North. As Charles Post has shown in his book The American Road to Capitalism, it was from this stratum of family farmers that American industrial capitalism emerged. During the nineteenth century, these small farmers, increasingly subject to market competition and price signals, began specializing and mechanizing. As subsistence production declined, production for sale increased. As it did, consumption increasingly depended on purchasing commodities with money in markets. Through it all the capitalist division of labor deepened, commodification and what Marx called “real subsumption” spread. With class struggle, in the form of growing unionization and then with the New Deal, the wealth produced by Northern industrialization, even as it made robber barons rich, also helped reenforce older Northern patterns of a more widespread, if modest, prosperity.

In the Slave South, several factors blunted this process. The extremely uneven land holding of the South limited the rise of a class of innovating, increasingly market-oriented small farmers. Uneven land distribution also translated into a lower population density and fewer cities, which meant smaller, less competitive markets. And as John Majewski explains in Modernizing a Slave Economy, weak and acidic soils, which are easily depleted by mono-cropping, encouraged the use of “shifting cultivation,” which in turn further reenforced the pattern of large land holdings, low population density, and class inequality.

Slavery also hindered economic development and industrialization because slaves were a fixed cost that had to be utilized even when not working on the cash crops. Because slaves could not be fired like free workers, slave owners needed to maximize their use of slave labor. This disincentivized and undermined the use of labor-saving equipment, resupply through markets, and the outsourcing of tasks to commercial specialists (like blacksmiths or carpenters). Put simply, instead of buying cheap, well produced bacon on emerging commercial markets supplied by small innovating farmers, slaveowners were incentivized to make their slaves raise hogs when they were not raising cotton. Thus even as slaves produced cash crops for export and plantations ran with capitalistic tools of efficiency, like modern account books, the fixed costs of slavery also encouraged nonmonetized production for use. This meant that in the South a smaller portion of production was governed by the law of value, and what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “gales of creative destruction.”

With large parts of the population (slaves) consuming little and producing much of what they consumed in a nonmonetized, production-for-use fashion, even small yeoman farmers who might have innovated and mechanized along capitalist lines, were for lack of markets effectively held back and stuck in a twilight economy that was capitalist but still heavily governed by the slow logic of production for use. Thus southern industrialization and capitalist “expanded reproduction” were thwarted.

In Slavery and Freedom, James Oakes summarized how slavery underdeveloped the South as follows: “Slavery hindered technological innovation even where its profitability depended on the latest techniques for processing and transportation. It slowed the growth of cities and industry, hampered the growth of a consumer market, reduced the flow of savings, and promoted soil exhaustion and demographic instability by dampening interest in long-term improvements on the land.”9

In the South the pattern of economic development was about cash-crop exports and later also resource extraction. This pattern of economic development reenforced the region’s tremendous class inequality. In the words of the Southern chronicler J.W. Cash, this made the South a society of “Big Men and Little Men, with strict reference to property, power, and the claim to gentility.”10

As a result of the South’s tremendous class inequality, the region’s demographics of poverty have long been less racially skewed than in the North.

In her fine book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt shows that poor, landless whites constituted a full third (some have said one half) of the population of the U.S. South!11 To be clear these were not the hardscrabble small farmers. Rather these were a semi-itinerate, rural Lumpenproletariat, who owned no land and instead lived by occasional day labor, grazing hogs, gathering herbs, cutting wood for sale, stealing, poaching, making and selling liquor, fencing stolen goods, and prostitution. Prone to binge drinking, violence and cavorting with both free and enslaved African Americans (even as they were known for their loudly professed hostility to black people), these poor whites were by most accounts often genuinely dangerous. The planter class hated them. So too, it seems, did much of the smallholding yeomanry.

Prior to emancipation, slavery being the system that controlled most African Americans in the South, both extrajudicial mob violence and formal criminal justice were largely targeted at controlling this class of poor white Southerners.

Even today, in most Southern states the demographic distribution of poverty more closely tracks the overall demographic profile of the state than do poverty rates in the North.12 Of the states with the top ten highest white poverty rates all except for Idaho and New Mexico had been part of the Confederacy.

Making of the Yankee Ghetto

Concentrations of black poverty in the Northern states that once banned black settlement is the result of the racist articulation of deindustrialization and urban renewal. The Great Migration, that is the large-scale relocation of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West, began with the industrial boom of World War I. Pulled north by the lure of jobs, higher wages, and greater freedom, the migrants were also pushed north by the hard times brought on by the increasing mechanization of Southern agriculture, and by the despotism of Jim Crow segregation and lynch-law terror. Roughly six million black people moved north before the migration subsided around 1970.

The greatest part of this wave happened from World War II until 1970. But African Americans arrived in the land of industrial democracy and upward mobility just as that political economy began a process of radical restructuring driven by automation and then industrial relocation. Almost as soon as African Americans established themselves in Northern industrial occupations and cities, deindustrialization and racist slum clearance began.

As Thomas Sugrue shows in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, industrial employment in Motor City actually peaked in 1950, a full three decades before “deindustrialization” became a sociological watchword. As unionized industrial employment shrank, so too did the service sectors. According to Sugrue, black workers actually continued to move up the wage and skill ladder even as deindustrialization took hold. But this hardly made up for a shrinking regional economy and rising class inequality at a national scale.

Just as industrial employment was peaking, federally subsidized “slum clearance” and highway construction programs began reshaping Northern and Western cities. Coupled with suburbanization along racist lines, these developments increasingly forced black people into de facto segregated and underinvested communities. As businesses and middle-class whites left the urban core, municipal tax bases shrank, services and employment suffered, and concentrations of black poverty became defining features of the Northern-tier rustbelt.

The rustbelt geography became that of the doughnut city, with the African Americans’ deindustrialized core surrounded by autonomous, and for a long time de facto white, segregated suburbs.

The Modern Low-Wage South

Meanwhile, poverty in the U.S. South remained and remains widespread. This is revealed in the disproportionally high percentage of its population working for low wages. In 2016 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the “states with the highest percentages of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage” were: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and (one western outlier) Idaho.13

That year saw 2.2 million Americans working for wages at or below the federal minimum. Fully 49 percent of these workers worked in the South. These low-wage workers were predominately women. White women and people of color of all genders were (and still are) disproportionately represented in low-wage work. However, in absolute numbers, low-paid workers as a whole, were and are predominately white. The BLS reports that 74 percent of workers making wages “at or below the federal minimum” are white. (About 10 percent of that number are likely white Latinos but the BLS does not disaggregate in that fashion.) Thus white people work low-wage jobs in proportion to their share of the population. African Americans, at 18 percent of this workforce, are overrepresented. Latinos and Asians are each slightly underrepresented among low-wage workers. Thus for every African American working for the federal minimum wage or less there are four white workers in the same position, and, although the BLS does not offer numbers for race and region together, we can assume that most of both groups are in the South.14 In other words there are lots of poor white people in the South, and this probably helps explain why white people are killed at a higher rate in the south than in the north, and that, in turn, helps explain why black people so disproportionally show up in the northern police killing stats.

Conclusion

One clear takeaway from all these numbers is that Northern liberals—after all, they run most Northern city governments—should not feel too terribly smug when surveying the South, or applauding symbolic victories over racism, because very material forms of racism unfold up North on their watch and these are rooted not only in police prejudice but regional political economy and industrial policy. Transforming those “root causes” would be a massive though not impossible task. It would require challenging the prerogatives of capital; that is, confronting actual capitalists, i.e., campaign donors. That is a daunting prospect. And so, the liberal political class prefers progressive cultural change, renaming and redecorating, to the harder job of progressive economic change. Because, in the grand scheme of things, symbols are cheap.

Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions.

We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1 For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response to the deep sources of the phenomenon.

Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by police that is nearly double their share of the general American population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of the general population. That picture is a bit ambiguous because seven percent of those killed in 2015 and fourteen percent of those killed through June of 2016 were classified racially as either other or unknown. Nevertheless, the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear: among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding exercise2 called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright, prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the pursuit of public revenue.”3

This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.

But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%. However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29 people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of police killing.

What is clear in those states, however, is that the great disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days. What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism. There is no need here to go into the evolution of this dangerous regime of policing—from bogus “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power, to anti-terrorism hysteria and finally assertion of a common sense understanding that any cop has unassailable authority to override constitutional protections and to turn an expired inspection sticker or a refusal to respond to an arbitrary order or warrantless search into a capital offense. And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is—for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza, Tometi, Cullors et al.—in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments. It is also a demand that, in insisting that for all intents and purposes police violence must be seen as mainly, if not exclusively, a black thing, we cut ourselves off from the only basis for forging a political alliance that could effectively challenge it. All that could be possible as political intervention, therefore, is tinkering around with administration of neoliberal stress policing in the interest of pursuing racial parity in victimization and providing consultancies for experts in how much black lives matter.5

Another revealing datum regarding the imagery of an unbroken history of racist denigration of black “bodies” stretching back at least to 1619 as explanation of the current racial disparity in police killings is that, as Mike Males has shown, police killings of black men under 25 years of age declined 79% between 1968 and 2011, and 61% for men over 25 during that same period.6 Nor is that quite surprising. The victories won by the civil rights movement were real, as were the entailments of the Voting Rights Act. Things were generally worse with respect to everyday police terror in inner-city black neighborhoods than they are now. One of the few of the Black Panthers’ slogans that wasn’t simply empty hyperbole was their characterization of the role of police as an “occupying army” in black communities. (When I first saw The Battle of Algiers in the late 1960s, I felt an instant shock of recognition, a sense that I’d lived some of the film.) Racial transition in local government and deepening incorporation of minority political interests into local governing coalitions had a moderating effect on police brutality in black communities.7

My point is not in any way to make light of the gravity of the injustice or to diminish outrage about police violence. (I realize, however, that some will impute that intention to me; for them and all who would take the charge seriously, see note 1 below.) However, noting a decline—or substantial change in either direction for that matter—in the rate of police killings does underscore the inadequacy of reified, transhistorical abstractions like “racism” or “white supremacy” for making sense of the nature and sources of police abuse of black Americans. Racism and white supremacy don’t really explain how anything happens. They’re at best shorthand characterizations of more complex, or at least discrete, actions taken by people in social contexts; at worst, and, alas, more often in our political moment, they’re invoked as alternatives to explanation. In that sense they function, like the Nation of Islam’s Yacub story, as a devil theory: racism and white supremacy are represented as capable of making things happen in the world independently, i.e. magically. This is the fantasy expressed in formulations like racism is America’s “national disease” or “Original Sin”—which, incidentally, are elements of the liberal race relations ideology that took shape in postwar American political discourse precisely as articulations of a notion of racial equality that was separated from political economy and anchored in psychology and individualist notions of prejudice and intolerance.8

Nevertheless, putting to the side for a moment those ways in which causal invocations of racism and white supremacy are wrongheaded and inadequate and accepting for the sake of argument that the reified forces can do things in the world, if their manifest power can vary so significantly with social, political, and historical context, wouldn’t the objective of combating the injustice be better served by giving priority to examining the shifting and evolving contexts under which racism and white supremacy are more or less powerful or that condition the forms in which they appear rather than to demonstrating that those forces that purportedly cause inequality must be called racism or white supremacy in particular? One problem with the latter objective is that it is ultimately unrealizable. There is no definitive standard of what qualifies as racism; like terrorism or any other such abstraction, it is in the eye of the beholder. In fact, an illustration of the great cultural victory of the postwar civil rights struffle is that “racism” is negatively sanctioned in American society. No one with any hope of claim to political respectability—not even Maine governor Paul LePage, who leaves one struggling to imagine what he assumes would thus qualify as racist, (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/us/profane-phone-message-has-gov-paul-lepage-of-maine-in-hot-water-again.html?_r=0)—embraces it. In addition, advocates of antiracist politics argue that debate over the name that should be attached to the injustice is important because acknowledging the existence of racism/white supremacy as a causal agent is a necessary first step to overcoming its power. But that claim rests on shaky political ground. It is at bottom a call for expiation and moral rehabilitation as political action. In that sense Black Lives Matter is like its rhetorical grandparent, Black Power; it is a slogan that has condensed significant affective resonance but is without programmatic or strategic content. Also like Black Power, in response to criticisms of its lack of concrete content, BLM activists generated a 10 Point Plan—https://millermps.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/blacklivesmatter-10-point-program-called-campaign-zero/, in part clearly to address criticisms that they had no affirmative agenda beyond demands that the slogan be validated and the names of selected victims of police killing be invoked. This was followed more recently by an expanded document featuring roughly sixty items called “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice”—https://neweconomy.net/resources/vision-black-lives-policy-demands-black-power-freedom-and-justice.

Some, perhaps many, of the items propounded in the initial 10 Point Plan are fine as a statement of reforms that could make things better in the area of criminal justice policy and practice. Many, if not most, of those assembled under the rubric “Vision for Black Lives” are empty sloganeering and politically wrongheaded and/or unattainable and counterproductive. However, the problem is not a shortage of potentially effective reforms that could be implemented. The problem is much more a political and strategic one. And the focus on racial disparity both obscures the nature and extent of the political and strategic challenges we face and in two ways undercuts our ability to mount a potentially effective challenge: 1) As my colleague, Marie Gottschalk, has demonstrated in her most important book, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2016),9 the carceral apparatus in its many manifestations, including stress policing as well as the many discrete nodes that constitute the regime of mass incarceration, has emerged from and is reproduced by quite diverse, bipartisan, and evolving complexes of interests, some of which form only in response to the arrangements generated and institutionalized by other interests. Constituencies for different elements of the carceral state do not necessarily overlap, and their interests in maintaining it, or their favored components of it, can be material, ideological, political, or alternating or simultaneous combinations of the three. Challenging that immensely fortified and self-reproducing institutional and industrial structure will require a deep political strategy, one that must eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing. 2) It should be clear by now that the focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the animating principle of a left politics, it is a politics that lies entirely within neoliberalism’s logic.

In her prescriptions for resolving this taxonomic issue, however, Sharpe advances a short-sighted plan for reforming clinical research and relevant state classifications of race and ethnicity. The problem, as she identifies it, lies in classifying “Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native American and multi-racial women as a homogeneous group despite their distinct differences.” Doing so “erases identity and ignores a wealth of information about the unique experience of each group of women.” Only in “disaggregating data by race,” she claims, can we avoid the distortions that emerge from collapsing all non-white women into a singular category.   Subsequently, researchers can search for disparities between and among non-white groups as well as in relation to other race and gender-based ones. Sharpe also maintains the integrity of the biomedical and social category of “white women,” which, despite its own immense internal differentiations, remains an uninterrogated monolith. Lastly, Sharpe advocates for what she calls an intersectional approach to the U.S. Census, which would include population projections by race and ethnicity plus gender. The current design of census data collection, she argues, is poorly equipped to produce information on the trajectories of racial and ethnic demographics of women and, therefore, limits research and policy possibilities. For Sharpe, it appears that it is not the race-based aggregation of data in general with which she takes issue, but instead the particular aggregation at hand.

This perspective is in many ways representative of current modes of conceptualizing race and ethnicity in biomedical research, public policy, and the broader political culture. Even when older schemes of racial classification are seen as outdated and false, the proposed solutions wind up retaining the logic of racial aggregation, albeit at a level of abstraction slightly lower than the original. This process of disaggregation results in a sustained focus on a new set of aggregations, which bring with them all sorts of distorting effects for practice of biomedical research and patient care as well as interpretative and material obstacles for those attempting to combat our current condition of economic inequality.4

The resultant biomedical and political effect is a reinforced commitment to a certain form of racial thinking that imbues sets of human categories with a presumed social essence (i.e. an existence that is best explained with reference to racial categorizations). This impulse to aggregate too is intertwined with the study of racial health disparities and the creation of public policies targeted at their amelioration. This narrowed perspective tends to position measures of disparity as the indicator of inequality in public health despite (or as a proxy for) other circumstances of class, geography, or temporality. It is thus a tendency that both resorts to racial concepts to categorize social and political existence as well as conflates the foundations and conditions of inequality with those disparities that exist among constructed groups.

How could it be that such intentions to reckon with the troubles of sloppy racial reification will likely lead to the proliferation of even more research and policy based upon ill-defined categories? Moreover, what is it about the internal dynamics and politics surrounding biomedical research on racial health disparities that results in imbuing these categories with largely fictitious notions of biological heritage and ontology or, at the very least, some form of static and fixed socio-cultural essence?

One such snare can be found in the well-documented problems for research and patient care that attend the reliance on racial categories as proxy measures for numerous and complex patterns of social experience. Bioethics and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, for instance, has examined the use of what she terms the “crude and convenient” proxy of race in the study and care of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD).5 In making the (specious) observation that African Americans tend to have more muscle mass than those of other races, researchers purporting to promote “evidence-based” care have obscured other factors in research and treatment that can have negative effects for patient care. In assuming that all members of a demographic possess the same physiological quality, physicians testing for CKD may gather less accurate results than if they had not controlled for race in this fashion. In a related study of CKD from 2012, researchers explored the efficacy of race-based hypotheses in a multiethnic population in Brazil, which found no reason to adjust for race parameters in testing for the disease.6 In recognition of these findings and similar studies, organizations like the Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration now caution researchers that more generalizable testing measures might be preferable to race-based ones.7

This paradigm can even pit factors like race and socioeconomic condition against one another, despite evidence from epidemiological studies demonstrating that the studies that do so often wrongfully attribute racial differences to biological features.8 These purported disconnects between race and socioeconomic status have been shown to be due to residual confounding–in other words, the products of conceptual or methodological error. Similarly, the race-as-proxy model fails to recognize the instances in which public health data clearly demonstrate that variables like quality of education and other structural features of political economy can be teased out from foggier, less precise racial ones.9

Beyond the laboratory, some medical practitioners and scholars have begun to alert their communities to the deleterious effects that an emphasis on racial categories and disparity measures are imposing upon medical training and patient care. According to a 2017 article in the American Medical Association’s AMA Journal of Ethics, medical students now frequently encounter what the authors describe as a “preclinical curriculum that merely documents racial health disparities (without explanation), offers presumptive explanations that are disproportionately biological, and deploys race uncritically as a biological or epidemiological risk factor.”10 These scholars cautioned that the dominant perspective clouds over structural causes of health inequality by directing attention to much-needed, yet relatively surface-level conversations about the prevalence of racial biases in healthcare. The reigning race-conscious biomedical paradigm thus has the effect of downplaying and displacing attention to other important determinants of health and illness including class, geography, education, and other relevant indicators.11 While one might counter that race or ethnic categories may have some pragmatic utility for researchers or practitioners as proxies for specific patterns of social experience, this defense elides grappling with the flaws and the blind spots that they have been shown to produce.12

Proponents of a continued reliance on racial categories in these research and policy endeavors point to the U.S. Census as an important means of more accurately collecting demographic data. The logic here is that problems do not arise from the reification of historically-contingent racialized social categories into biomedical ones, but rather that they stem from inadequacies in data collection. Those familiar with its history, however, understand that the Census operates at as much as a prescriptive register as it does a descriptive one.13 The categories the state employs to collect data are reflections of dominant social and political imperatives and are informed by reigning ideological currents.

As one group biologists, anthropologists, and bioethics scholars have explained, Census racial category data and other “state-sanctioned but ill-defined categories of race” have been imported into biomedical research in ways that tend to reinforce the very arbitrarily-drawn boundaries around groups, which population genetics and similar research paradigms have worked to undermine.14 While this Census-based reform surely has offered the federal government a more accurate picture of the country’s racial composition (particularly how individuals personally identify themselves according to a racial schema), it has also enabled the production of new, more diverse data sets to be run through what can be the essentializing mill of biomedical research.15 In this light, a Census solution would likely do very little to guard against such reifying tendencies.

Accordingly, treating race and ethnicity as a collection of internally-coherent and homogenous social categories—in contrast to a simple racial dichotomy—stands also to translate into biomedical research and healthcare more generally in ways that may actually exacerbate the problem of biological reification rather than remedy it.16 This is in large part due to the bioessentialized character these categories can take on when introduced into the networks and institutions involved in the production of such research. Sociologist Steven Epstein’s work on “recruitmentology,” which he defines as “an empirical body of studies scientifically evaluating the efficacy of various social, cultural, psychological, technological, and economic means of convincing people (especially members of ‘hard-to-recruit populations’) that they want to become, and remain, human subjects [i.e. passive bits of data]”–is illuminating on this front.17

Since the 1980s, identity-based advocacy coalitions have effectively pressured federal legislators, bureaucratic agencies, and medical researchers to expand their studies to include diverse human populations. This has taken the form of new commissions, task forces, and guidelines such as those developed within the Department of Health and Human Services to expand biomedical and behavioral research to include racial and gender minority groups in federally-funded studies.18 The resultant paradigm has thus come to incentivize—and for those like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), mandate— the collection of specific demographic data and the participation of a diversity of clinical subjects.19

There have surely been benefits to pivoting away from an overreliance on white male participants as was a previous trend in the collection of biomedical data (though this is in part an ahistorical oversimplification).20 In his book on what he termed the “inclusion-and-difference paradigm,” Epstein details how gender-based research in particular has benefited patients undergoing treatments such as hormone replacement therapy.21 But the structural incentives created to achieve diverse research populations have led to a shallow attention to difference among relatively abstract racially-defined categories. Though the differences that are measured in these studies are often merely mean averages that overlap racial groups (i.e. not confined to one category), they are frequently conveyed as categorical ones between racial groups. Current biomedical and public health terrains consist of such extant bioessentialist thinking that these groups are frequently instilled with some form of fundamental biological content, despite the intentions of reformers who object to the biological reification of racial types.22 It is the grants, policies, and laws that propel an overextended and endless search for difference at this level of abstraction, which tend to reinscribe some bio-ontological character.

The latest iteration of bioessentialist thinking has already had a widespread effect on scientific research, the manufacture and distribution of pharmaceuticals, and the creation of a new line of genetic consumer products. Public health scholar Jonathan Kahn, for example, exposed how the pharmaceutical industry has been able to profit from medically baseless, race-targeted medications that have resulted from this kind of race conscious approach to biomedical research.23 Kahn traces how a drug prescribed to patients with heart failure called BiDil traveled through FDA and NIH channels and their institutional policies on race-based research in its evolution as a treatment targeted specifically to black patients.24 Most importantly, just as the original patent on the drug was about to expire, the owners of BiDil were able to re-patent it as a race-based treatment using anything-but-definitive results of its supposed efficacy as a racially-customized pharmaceutical.

As is the case with the home genomic ancestry testing kit industry exemplified by 23andMe, the political economy of biological race reductionism thrives on this expanded universe of racial categories.25 As sociologist Jenny Reardon notes, a misleading progressive sheen is often afforded to these genomic developments (Reardon even refers to these as the instantiation of a “genomic liberalism”).26 For an example of this exercise in liberal posturing, University of California, San Francisco Chancellor and former president of Genetech Susan Desmond-Hellman championed the idea of a “new social contract” between genomic companies and their customers.27 This new bio-infused approach to race and ethnicity comes with all the sorts of narrow and ahistorical thinking that is typical of a liberal pluralistic conception of political society. It is one which reinforces ontological presumptions of intra-group characteristics, inter-group dynamics, and those groups’ relationships with structures and influences outside of their stable, fixed essences and communities.

This myopic perspective on race-based biomedical research and the public policy reforms with which it is associated cannot reach the foundations of the racial and gendered inequalities that its proponents seek to redress. Nor does it escape the network of academic institutions, non-profits, policymakers, and private companies that incentivize such representations of the relationship between racialized identity categories and biology. Not only is this approach ineffectual, it inches dangerously close to the visions of geneticist David Reich and others like him who advance a nominally liberal perspective on the supposed biological “reality” of racial types.28 Like advocates of a disaggregation approach to existing racial classifications, Reich and his ilk distance themselves from discredited biological reifications of race, yet they wind up favoring others they deem to be more scientifically valid and less politically suspect. While there are surely vast differences between the two camps, an uncritical support for the expansion of existent disparity research features a disturbing possibility of leading us through the backdoor into a newly-biologically reified world of race into which Reich is seemingly prepared to welcome us through the front.

One such immediate problem that this racialist thinking among liberal progressive reformers is that it appears to play into logic of the revanchist right-wing more than it thwarts them. A recent study by sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan found that white nationalists whose genetic ancestry tests revealed a less-than-pure white European heritage were simply able to invoke alternative criteria and boundaries of what they considered to be an adequately white identity.29 As science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science,  Angela Saini, has noted, the logic behind such tests and the cultural and political conversations that we have about them play into the very reified notions of racial identities upon which reactionaries thrive.30

What then are the larger political consequences of these invigorated socio-cultural and biological variants of essentialism and the normative attachment to searching for disparities among them? Advocates of disparity research often warn that sloppily-collected clinical data translates into inadequate public health policies, and, as such, future studies and reforms should be oriented toward more robust collections of group-level data. Surely, it is important to more accurately amass health data and statistics that do not adhere to a vulgar racial dichotomy. However, pitfalls abound even the reforms pitched by the most genuine proponents that fail to consider the existing institutional context and political economy to which they are directed. As Adolph Reed Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun have shown, racial disparity research is not conducted in a political vacuum but rather it is produced by an array of public, non-profit, and entrepreneurial actors and organizations that together constitute a system that works to self-perpetuate the continued collection of disparity study upon disparity study, never getting too close to addressing the roots from which social inequalities sprout.31 These processes often reify disparities through simple racially-coded statistics at the expense of more holistic analyses of their embeddedness in a range of social relations.

The effect of this orientation to inequality can be seen, for example, in political mobilizations of data on health disparities concerning gender and racial categories and the broader visions for political equality which they inform.32 There are indeed valid empirical distinctions to be made in assessing the impact of public health crises like private equity’s recent foray into hospital acquisitions (which is often paired with subsequent hospital closures and the sell-off of their real estate).33 Hospital closures like the recent one at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, for instance, stand to harm nearby residents who are disproportionately low income and racial minorities.34

Yet this closure and ones like it impact a range of would-be patients across the country who often do not fit the racialized pattern of inequality that characterizes crises that occur in a major urban majority black city like Philadelphia. A recent report by the National Nurses United (NNU) on the practices of the private healthcare hospital firm Community Health Systems Inc. (CHS) delineates a myriad of ways that companies like CHS buy up hospitals—oftentimes in rural, largely white areas—only to quickly close down expensive OB/GYN clinics, leaving residents without vital services.35 CHS even shuts down and sells off the component parts of entire facilities when they fail to generate profit. Thus, a situation that appears to be overdetermined by race in one context is actually the particular social manifestation of a broader series of political economic factors of which no parsing of disparity measurements could come close to comprehending.

The NNU campaign against predatory healthcare tycoons and related fights against private equity’s recent attempts to financialize the industry are emblematic of a strategy and action that a class-based political organization like a labor union takes to combatting conditions of inequality.36 Take for example how the NNU has folded an attention to a diverse array of racial disparities into its campaigns for Medicare for All and against the parasitic and exploitative natures of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.37 In a 2015 statement on Black Lives Matter, the NNU noted that the most effective way to address racial disparities is through fights for a “[g]enuine, universal guaranteed healthcare based on a single standard of quality care for everyone” and an “end to austerity economic policies that disproportionately affect minority populations [which] could be achieved by a tax on Wall Street speculation that could raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually for living-wage jobs; increased funding for healthcare, housing, and education; and robust action to combat climate change and environmental devastation that also hit low-income and minority communities in higher percentages.”38

As for an example from the nonprofit and entrepreneurial-based disparity industry, take founder and president Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe’s Women’s Institute for Science, Equity, and Race (WISER). WISER is a 501c3 with a stated focus on “expand[ing] women-focused policy research to include the social, economic, cultural and political well-being of Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native American and Multiracial women.”39 The accompanying WISER Public Policy mission statement is littered with buzzwords and catchphrases about producing research that will further “access” and “equity” along disparity lines as well as place more women and racial minorities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though these may be laudable goals depending on the circumstance (and in this caveat lies another issue with this disaggregation-reaggregation tendency, which keeps the targets of policy intervention incredibly vague), they reveal that WISER’s work, like that of many other non-profit disparity research outfits, is confined mainly to the edges of a deeply inegalitarian society.40

This is all perhaps unsurprising given that the racial disparities healthcare frame has been a staple of bipartisan neoliberal renderings of inequality for quite some time now. As far back as 2002, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson announced a goal “to eliminate disparities in health among all population groups by 2010.”41 The disparity orientation is also closely related to the one that leads liberals to split race and class into separate, distinct entities in ways that allow for the mobilization of rhetoric concerning racial inequalities to be used as a bludgeon against larger class-based programs.42 And even more broadly, this conception of inequality is especially impotent—even dangerous—in how it misrepresents the causes of the Trump phenomenon and the rise of a new right-wing politics in this country (and across the globe).43 The “white working class” myth and the vulgar binary that social scientists have come to construct between economic and status “anxieties” with hazy notions of prejudice wind up reducing social forces to a zero-sum game of racial antagonisms.44 It is difficult to see how the class character of contemporary racial health disparity politics could be made clearer.45

It is thus this persistent reliance on a logic of racial categorization (no matter how well-defined) and disparity that bears a sort of hegemonic influence over the ways in which we interpret and propose reforms to political society.46 One way to break free from this totalizing perspective is to champion public goods programs like single-payer healthcare reform and others like it as means of not only addressing disparities, but also of striking at the underlying material bases from which they emerge.47 The usual sort of disparity research is by contrast powerless when it comes to perceiving and resolving those structural conditions. In the U.S. in particular, a narrow focus on closing these gaps would not bring the general population up to many measures of equality in health that we see in countries with more robust social democratic programs.48 The road to equality points not so much in the direction of simply closing existing gaps among groups but rather in addressing the broader social inequalities created by capital’s predatory role in healthcare.

As for how to tackle these pathologies in biomedical practice and theorizing about race, future research would be better served by heeding the call of scholars of race and genetics to resist both new and old reifications of race and identity in our postgenomic era. It too would benefit from a return to the writings of an earlier generation of bioessentialism’s critics who promoted alternative theories that resisted the urge to taxonomize, identifying that latter propensity as owing its origins to the dynamics between a class society and the production of scientific knowledge.49 These geneticists, zoologists, evolutionary biologists, and neuropsychologists favored instead a dialectical view on the co-constitution of organism and environment, which has proven adept at breaking free from ossified, ahistorical models of human kinds.50 The pioneers of this mode of biological thinking include those like Richard Lewontin whose classic 1972 study “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” exposed the fallacy of racial reductionism by demonstrating that the genetic diversity within a particular racial aggregation was more significant than the genetic differences among reified socio-political racial types.51

More immediate reforms have been advanced by scholars of race and biology who have proposed a number of concrete reform measures. In a 2016 piece for Science, Michael Yudell, Dorothy Roberts, Rob DeSalle, Sarah Tishkoff lamented the tenacity that racial categorizations have had in the natural sciences, despite these longstanding calls against their use (or at least for a much more tempered use).52 One such prescription offered here was a requirement that journals justify the continued use of “classificatory terminology in studying human genetic diversity” as a means of forcing scientists themselves to clarify and rationalize their use of these categories. Though these types of proposals operate at a more procedural reformist level (rather than at that of the political economic and social influences which buttress racialist thought), they have an important role to play in curbing the use and expansion of this conceptual apparatus.

What we ultimately require is a kind of social constructionist approach to race that engages in a real reckoning with the processes of reification outlined here that simultaneously avoids being so glibly dismissive of scientific inquiry’s role in exploring features of human social life.53 Those self-styled radical, sometimes anarchistic, critiques of scientific logic that extend from the legacies, interpretations, and applications of works by Thomas Szasz, Paul Feyerabend, and Michel Foucault are no match for this formidable task.54 We would be better served by those like Kaushik Sunder Rajan who—similarly to Lewontin and his cohort—have combined critical perspectives on science with Marxist ones.55 Rajan’s work on biocapital, for instance, is notable for its integration of Foucauldian concepts like biopower with capital and commodity fetishism. Writing on what he has termed “genomic fetishism,” for example, Rajan elucidates that “the fetish…of the authority of scientific fact [is taken as] as something that is definitive and ultimate, and not the result of contingent, fragmentary, contested, and constantly revised processes of knowledge production; and of the authority of the gene as somehow standing in for, or representative of, entire organisms, populations, or species.”56

Rajan, Lewontin, Yudell, and their fellow travelers do not dismiss any and all biomedical research into social phenomena out of hand; instead, they caution against a hubristic attitude toward what it is that such projects could hope to reveal, especially when such studies begin from premises that reify categories that we know to be constructed and, thus, do not exist “in nature.”57 It follows then that a basic biological literacy is a necessary element of this corrective approach, if just to speak to and to convince the current universe of practitioners and researchers who have trained and matured in a context in which the notion that certain social categories have some biological essence comes as second nature. These and similarly-focused perspectives promise to more accurately attend to the intricacies of political and social life. They do so by encouraging the exploration of scientific truths while remaining vigilant about the distortions that underlie premises and conceptions about what may appear to be natural or commonsense on the surface, but which obfuscate complexities or rationalize historically-contingent phenomena lurking beneath.

While it is good practice to offer maps charting out the scholarly path forward, the more urgent immediate task is to expose these supposedly enlightened and egalitarian reforms to biomedical research and public policy for what they are: an internally-contradictory, politically-insufficient, scientifically-comprised, and ultimately reactionary58 set of discourses and policies that, in the process of displacing one reified worldview, replace it with another. The result is a schema that rationalizes a new arrangement of social relations, one that constitutes a fairly superficial degree of progress considering the expanding absolute (as well as intra-group) inequality with which its proponents often purport to be concerned. This latest iteration of racial aggregation and its associated disparitarian outlook are inadequately positioned to reckon with a regime in which the social determinants of health and life chances are conditioned by one’s position in a staggeringly unequal political economy of which highly-abstracted measures of racial disparity cannot begin to get us a full picture (and, again, are at times perversely weaponized to thwart broader, more substantive reforms). Those who seek both to comprehend and to eradicate existing social inequalities along with the material conditions that provide for their reproduction ought to pursue different routes to confronting inequality than those explicated here.59

This crux in American political history, the nexus of race and political realignment in the late 1960s and 1970s, has been fertile ground for historians. The “backlash” thesis was the most popular interpretation until the 1990s. In this formulation, white voters balked at liberalism’s ambitious domestic civil rights economic agenda, fraying the coalition that made the American welfare state possible and setting the path for Reagan. Judith Stein’s 1998 Running Steel, Running America was a stark counter to this narrative. Using the U.S. steel industry as a case study, Stein contends that 1960s liberal ideology failed voters and workers. Anti-discrimination policies lacked an economic blueprint to produce adequate jobs, sustain a cross-racial coalition of working class people, and improve the material lives  of African Americans. In the two decades since Running Steel, there has been no shortage of different takes on the subject, but none as innovative as the contribution of urban political historians. Drawing on the insights of urban and social history, geography, and urban sociology, the “spatial turn” in American political history situates the decline of New Deal liberalism and persistent racial inequality within the context of mass white suburbanization and regional migration to the Sunbelt. This literature compels scholars to consider the metropolitan nature of political realignment and racial inequality, particularly the relationship between suburbanization and the distribution of opportunity and wealth, along with the political constituencies this process birthed. But the “spatial turn” still rests on the key tenet of the “backlash” thesis: that political realignment hinged on white racial identity and whites’ political interests. It also elevates the divide between cities and suburbs as the primary reason for racial disparities and inequality. Despite its publication two decades ago, the insights of Judith Stein’s Running Steel remain relevant, not only for its challenge to the backlash thesis, but for its interpretation of politics and the economy which apply not only to the steel industry, but cities and suburbs too.

Post-World War II urban political history rests on the shoulders of two main threads in urban scholarship. Since Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto and Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier in the 1980s, urban historians have uncovered the contribution of federal housing policy, local land-use powers, and real estate practices to residential segregation and the twentieth century racial divide between cities and suburbs. These histories collectively identify the origins of what a vast social science literature, which dates back to the 1950s and achieved technical sophistication and wide praise in the 1990s, contend to be a primary source of the  Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass exemplifies this scholarship, with its nineteen distinct indices of neighborhood dissimilarity proving the significance of the urban/suburban divide and residential segregation to persistent racial inequality in the decades following civil rights victories. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro’s Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality likewise shaped an entire field of “disparities” research since the 1990s, illustrating with copious data how whites have accrued so much wealth compared to the meagerassets of black Americans, much of it accumulated through housing rooted in the city/suburb divide .1

Urban political historians use this interdisciplinary work to explain why the political battles around housing and metropolitan public resources in the postwar period led to such persistent inequalities despite civil rights achievements. To summarize, liberal middle-class housing entitlement programs, primarily the FHA and GI Bill, were racially exclusive elements of the New Deal social contract, enabling white Americans to move upward and outward to politically independent and racially exclusive suburbs. The social advantages embedded in suburbia, demarcated by school district boundaries, hidden in the tax code, and mediated by the real estate industry, forged a white racial identity tied to segregated housing and neighborhoods. White homeowners interpreted their real estate purchases as meritocratic choices in the free market, not as products of racial privilege, and understood themselves as moral, hard-working families, who earned entrance into communities with others like them.

When postwar liberals sought to end these structural privileges, white suburbanites’ market-oriented and localist outlook shaped their political response. Starting in the 1950s, but reaching its apex in the wake of urban rioting, civil rights groups and liberal policymakers fought to deconcentrate the poor, redistribute metropolitan tax dollars, and open suburban jobs and housing to black Americans. Suburban whites, intent on preserving their “right” to homeownership and couching their arguments in “color-blind” rhetoric, successfully thwarted federal, state, and local efforts to overcome structural barriers depriving African Americans of needed tax revenue, housing opportunities, and equal education. In the process, these homeowners formed a “suburban” political consensus, what became the largest bloc of voters in the country. They reinvigorated the Republican Party in the late 1960s and, over time, pulled the Democratic Party to the right, away from metropolitan social reforms and toward local environmental regulation and sprawl containment. Inner-city ghettoes, disproportionately black, poor, far from jobs, with little tax revenue to support basic infrastructure and education, was the consequence of this political shift.2

This urban and “spatial” interpretation gives the white “backlash” thesis needed heft, linking political realignment not to liberal overreach but to the contradictions of New Deal liberalism itself. Liberal policy was on one hand responsible for embedding inequality in the urban/suburban divide, and  was also at the forefront of rectifying spatial inequality. When the two strands came into direct confrontation, white middle-class political ideology, with its market-oriented defense of segregation, emerged victorious, pulling politics to the right and producing the “New American Dilemma” as Matthew Lassiter calls it, “the fusion of class segregation and racial discrimination embodied in the urban-suburban divide.”3 It’s a powerful argument, linking race and realignment in a way that still resonates in the current political climate and does not indict the civil rights movement or anti-poverty efforts for the rightward turn in politics. Despite its depth, the urban literature nonetheless takes the decline of New Deal liberalism to hinge on racism and white racial identity, particularly white opposition to rectifying racial inequality.

This is what makes Running Steel, Running America relevant. Though engaging the earlier debate about liberalism’s decline and the white “backlash,” Stein offers a significant counter to the urban or metropolitan political historiography. For Stein, growing liberal faith in the market as a solution to racial disparities, particularly black poverty and unemployment, divorced liberal policymaking in the 1960s from social-democratic impulses, aggravated racial divides among workers, and frayed the political coalitions that made liberal progress possible. The argument is laid out in chapters three, four, five, and seven, where Stein explains how there was a critical shift in the discourse of black economic problems, away from labor-market-oriented explanations and toward claims that disparities were rooted in prejudice, discrimination, and skill deficiencies. She first notes this change between 1963 and 1964, when Hubert Humphrey’s Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) bill was shelved in favor of Title VII, which addressed black unemployment as a problem of prejudice and discrimination, uncoupled from economic change. “Commercial Keynesian” influence was crucial, especially in the person of Walter Heller, Council of Economic Advisors Chair and the architect of the 1964 tax cut. Heller asserted that reducing taxes would have huge employment dividends, so questions of inclusion were about non-economic barriers.

This belief that the economy was sound, and that factors specific to African Americans were responsible for their destitution and joblessness, influenced legislation going forward. Johnson’s entire War on Poverty assumed that altering the poor’s skillsets and characteristics was the key to resolving these problems. Affirmative Action required equitable racial employment proportions without confronting layoffs or occupational shifts within industries. By 1967, as Stein argues, “the judgment that the United States was a racist society became widely accepted,” certified by the Kerner Commission the next year.4 This was reflected in the powers of the federal bureaucracies assigned to handle black economic problems, like the Justice Department, OFCC , the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the courts, which could only use the tool of discrimination, a solution that pitted white against black in the desperate competition for fewer jobs. These actions “socially constructed racism” in Stein’s words, as animosity grew over the policy focus on racial proportion over declining opportunities in the steel industry writ large. This was the critical element to liberalism’s decline: since the New Deal, liberals had linked social goals to an economic agenda, but “the weakness of the liberalism of the 1960s was not its ambitious social goals, as has so often been asserted. It was that liberalism lacked an economic blueprint to match its social agenda.”5

The shift in liberal ideology mattered across the city/suburb divide too. After all, suburbanites were workers, and while housing, schools, and related fiscal concerns shaped their political outlook, so did metropolitan labor markets. Take Long Island for example, the quintessential postwar suburb, home to the first and largest Levittown. Between the years 1935 and 1954, the rate of employment growth outpaced the population surge by a factor of ten, drawing people, particularly the working class, to the suburbs.6 Federal policy undergirded these jobs, just as mortgage programs lubricated the suburban housing boom. From World War II through the first decade of the Cold War, military spending had served as a violent extension of New Deal employment programs; defense outlays were the closest Washington came to full employment and industrial policy after the end of the WPA. Filtered through private contractors, defense procurement ate up between fourteen and twenty-three percent of the federal budget during the 1950s, and aerospace (a sector dependent on defense spending) was the second largest industrial employer after automobiles, and just as heavily unionized.7 Long Island was among the beneficiaries; as of 1963, aerospace manufacturing accounting for half of all industrial jobs, employing one in every six Long Island workers and supporting an estimated 600,000 of 1.3 million residents in Nassau, Long Island’s largest county. In addition, defense-related manufacturing laid the foundation for the infrastructure and construction capacity to attract other industries, while the population boom led to new jobs in finance, retail, and services. This was not unique to Long Island. Military Keynesianism stimulated suburbs across the “Gunbelt,” the industrial archipelago of suburban industrial communities stretching from Massachusetts down to Florida, across the Deep South and concentrating along the Pacific coast to the urban fringe of Seattle.8

These mostly unionized blue-collar jobs, and the broader suburban labor market, were critical to working-class suburbanization, giving workers the income threshold to qualify for FHA-insured home mortgages. It also shaped suburban politics around the local economy, including concerns over the national distribution of military spending, the kinds of defense contracts pouring into the region (research or production-oriented), and the relationship between state spending and the labor market “twist” reducing demand for low-skilled workers. Jobs and state policy were particularly important to Long Island’s 72,000 black residents in 1960, a small but growing proportion of the Island’s population (3.7%).  As of 1960, only an eighth of Long Island’s black workers held “white-collar” occupations, the remainder relying on metro-area factories, low-wage service-sector jobs, or laboring as domestic servants. Long Island’s aerospace manufacturers hired few black workers and promoted even fewer to skilled positions, and federal anti-discrimination agencies did nothing to improve non-white opportunity until the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, Long Island’s non-defense firms paid four dollars less a week on average than factories in the five boroughs.9 Overall, thirty-five percent of black families made less than half of Long Island’s median family income in 1960 (compared to ten percent of white families), a standard measure of poverty in high-cost areas.10 Low wages and unstable work added to the discriminatory obstacles of homeownership, relegating the black poor to Long Island’s scarce, expensive, and often illegal affordable housing.

This is what makes the 1960s shift toward commercial Keynesianism important. Though suburban politics included structural economic concerns, the market-oriented approach viewed the suburbs as the geographic manifestation of prosperity. Policies affecting suburbs like Long Island reflected this ideological turn in key ways. For example, just as the NAACP’s PCEEO complaint against Long Island’s second largest defense manufacturer, Republic Aviation, got underway in the early 1962, the Kennedy administration transformed the very nature of defense spending. JFK committed to closing the missile gap without raising taxes, and appointed Robert Strange McNamara to cut costs and improve military capability. McNamara chose to consolidate weapons purchases for the entire military, denying a contract to Republic Aviation in 1962, leaving 15,000 workers and an estimated 8,000 subcontract workers unemployed. The action weighed heavily on the NAACP’s suit, as saving jobs took precedence. Workers went on strike in April 1962, sent 50,000 letters to DC, and local pols publicly pleaded the government keep people working. Their outcry was not rooted in defense spending per se, but a general government responsibility to employ. Long Island’s daily Newsday argued “even before World War II, the government encouraged Republic and similar defense plants to expand to the point where all of them represent a crucially important source of employment… [The federal government] has a responsibility to these people.”11

The administration responded in a way that reflected the commercial Keynesian approach. McNamara was in charge of shuffling defense spending, while CEA chairman Walter Heller determined what to do with laid-off workers. Heller led the Committee on the Economic Impact of Defense and Disarmament (later an agency) in 1964, and published conclusions in line with the market-oriented view: defense cuts would have no major impacts on employment or growth, even complete disarmament. Workers would be easily absorbed into tax-fueled growth.12 When economic expansion occurred alongside reduced proportional defense spending in ‘63 and ‘64, the first time in postwar history that unemployment fell alongside defense reductions, Heller was vindicated. Aggregate demand measures replaced targeted industrial policy no longer justifiable for national security.

By the end of 1964, Republic slashed almost 14,000 employees from their payrolls, and this was aside from the thousands of subcontractor jobs lost. The White House only made two commitments to laid-off workers. Heller’s committee sponsored a report to prepare these workers for the private economy entitled the Transferability of Defense Job Skills to Non-Defense Occupations. And in October 1965, Robert McNamara toured Long Island’s plants. He basically came to scold Long Island’s government, business, industry, and education leaders for relying on defense spending because “the defense industry is a highly erratic industry and you should not try to build an economy on it.” Newsday best summarized the tour with the front-page title: “McNamara to LI: Diversify”, the suburban equivalent of “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”13 Essentially, McNamara was informing these workers that the government was no longer committed to employing them, and what happens to these plants, workers, and the region in general was not the state’s responsibility. The only solution offered, assisting defense workers’ transition into the private economy, was in line with the ideology that privileged the aggregate over the structural, and unemployment as the challenge for the worker to overcome, not of the state supplying the jobs.

Republic’s former white and black workers moved onto service or non-defense factory jobs, with wages that placed them below the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s “lower budget” threshold.14 But the defense shakeup did not hurt the entire Gunbelt. California benefitted, and even Long Island’s largest employer, Grumman, remained stable. Nonetheless, market discipline pushed manufacturers to favor skilled technicians and engineers over the mass of blue-collar production workers to win defense contracts. The anti-discrimination agencies responsible for enforcing fair hiring and promotion—from the PCEEO to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) in the late 1960s—implemented Affirmative Action, concerned with racial proportions within the existing distribution of work, not the number of jobs, particularly for the mass of non-white workers on Long Island and elsewhere.

Commercial Keynesian market ideology likewise informed the suburban War on Poverty. While Johnson’s own “Task Force on Suburban Problems” found that thirteen percent of suburban families lived at or near the federal poverty level, their plight was cast within the “poverty amidst plenty” framework of LBJ’s anti-poverty crusade.15 Long Island exemplified the “paradox,” where 33,000 poor families lived in the nation’s wealthiest large suburban region.16 Long Island’s county governments embraced the War on Poverty’s framing, hoping the region’s impressive median income, aggregate economic statistics, and relatively low poverty rates would make it a model for the nation. Federal anti-poverty agencies, county administrations, and even civil rights groups deployed the familiar labor-supply oriented programs: job training, bus routes, and comprehensive referral systems. These efforts revealed structural problems beneath the paradox: manufacturing losses, a polarized service sector, and a plethora of low-wage employment opportunities. By 1969, Nassau County’s executive Eugene Nickerson proposed (unsuccessfully) a county-wide job guarantee program, a public option for county residents which would create civil service jobs for those in need of work. Nickerson’s proposal illustrated the reality that suburbia’s private economy could not employ all; the state was necessary.

The mystification of suburbia’s economic structure came full circle in the widely circulated Kerner Report in 1968. The Report’s thesis about white society’s implication in the ghetto was spatial; America was moving toward “two societies, one black, and one white—separate and unequal…one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and in outlying areas.”17 And while the report addressed many aspects of racial inequality and urban problems, its condemnation of suburbia was direct: employment and the middle class were moving to the suburbs while restrictive land practices not only denied African Americans and the poor free housing choice, but restricted job opportunities, access to quality education, and equitable tax distribution. These conclusions were drawn from contemporary social science research from the likes of John F. Kain, author of the “spatial mismatch hypothesis,” and Anthony Downs, future author of Opening Up the Suburbs, and reflected decades of civil rights activism. The Report was not even the first federal commission to condemn the “white noose” for urban black problems, but it galvanized a wide range of federal agencies, state policymakers, civil rights groups, and local activists to interpret the wide range of racial inequalities, including black poverty and unemployment, along the urban/suburban divide. They were absolutely right that housing segregation, exclusive school districts, and the fragmentation of governance and taxing jurisdictions concentrated African Americans into urban neighborhoods with scarce resources relative to whites. But whether it was the source of black unemployment, lower incomes, or poverty rested on a formulation that the suburban economy worked well for all except those denied access.

This became problematic when the ideology met reality in suburbs like Long Island. In 1969, the NAACP sued the suburban town of Oyster Bay, Long Island, on the grounds that denying housing opportunity in effect nullified equal employment opportunity, and thereby the Fourteenth Amendment. The NAACP demanded the Town permit affordable housing for about 18,000 New York City residents, a population increase of five percent. But the NAACP had to prove housing segregation prohibited people from job opportunities, and while Oyster Bay experienced plant growth during the 1960s, defense cutbacks and a general industrial migration toward the South and West reduced manufacturing employment across the New York metropolitan area. The remaining entry-level jobs were no better than opportunities in the city. The Town’s defense attorneys stated as much when they contended the NAACP “merely state the conclusion that there are job opportunities in Oyster Bay.”18

On the brink of losing the case, the NAACP changed strategy in March 1973, demanding Affirmative Action based on the “fair share” concept, that the Town’s demographics should match that of New York City. This was a different rationale than the suburbs as a transformative space to end poverty and unemployment. Two years later, the NAACP withdrew the suit. The NAACP’s mid-suit shift in strategy reflected the broader direction of activism addressing the “urban crisis” as formulated by the Kerner Report. HUD’s Open Communities Program, New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, and county agencies all used their legal powers to disperse the poor so they could benefit from suburbia’s largesse. And on Long Island, as elsewhere, two basic issues emerged: whether moving the poor would have the purported benefits, and where to place the poor. The former was already answered and the debate framed in moral or legalistic terms. The latter question was the most explosive, particularly in places like Long Island, where fragmented taxing districts meant the costs of such housing would be borne by very local populations who were not always affluent. Affected residents, including white and black working-class suburbanites, vigorously fought such projects. Their opposition was framed in market-oriented meritocratic discourse, and some whites veered into racism. But this was in part a consequence of the way liberal elites socially constructed the problem – that the suburbs were an exclusive space where schools produced upward mobility and the labor market was full of work, but racial barriers limited access. The vision was at best relative, and for many working-class suburbanites, a skewed version of their reality by the 1970s. Both sides were speaking in terms of a market—one of a robust labor market exclusive to suburbs, the other of their own meritocratic status in a “free” market of housing that the state was trying to infringe upon. Here the thrust of the new political divide, fought along the urban/suburban divide, was born, a political outcome of suburbanization and the market-oriented approach that came to dominate liberal policymaking.

***

The Kerner Report is often the starting point among urban political historians, the “last gasp of the progressive imagination” of the 1960s.19 American politics moved right and came to center around suburban concerns as liberals failed to break down the structures that made America’s metropolises unequal. But the Kerner Report can also be read a first breath of a less social-democratic imagination, one where equality is found in the efficiency of the market, made inefficient by racially discriminatory barriers. This was first birthed in the racial democratic conception of Title VII, the War on Poverty, and Affirmative Action. The Kerner Report extended the approach to the “urban crisis.” The focus on suburban schools, including school desegregation, revenue-sharing to improve school quality, or forming regional districts, was and continues to be framed as means to improve the skillset of the labor supply, so that all can compete for work equally in the private market. Breaking open suburban zoning to permit affordable housing rested on the purported value of freeing the poor so they could be more mobile, to search farther and wider for work. And the fight for a more equitable distribution of housing wealth between races did not question whether asset building would reduce racialized class inequality.

This is not to say historians espouse these particular solutions to the exclusion of others, but the urban political interpretation of the period nonetheless contributes to the broader contention that segregation, and the whites who benefitted from it, is at the heart of the political failure to remedy systemic racial inequality, i.e. racism is responsible for the various still-present disparities. They locate the shift in suburban white identity politics and decry the “narrow social responsibility” among suburban voters, fomented by federal policy and abetted by politicians, who were concerned primarily with their own “spatially bounded communities” and failed to take “collective” responsibility for the nation’s urban problems.20 This limits the solution to metropolitan-level anti-discrimination or integration policies and generalized expiation; their identity, associated political movements, and embedded privileges were what needed to be altered. Overcoming racism entrenched in America’s metropolises would have surely produced a more humane nation and reduced educational, housing, and resource disparities, but it would not have grappled with the fundamental inequalities rooted in the structure of the postwar economy and the limits of anti-discrimination policy.

This is what makes Judith Stein’s Running Steel, Running America indispensable. While her work and that of urban political historians seemingly address two different aspects of inequality, one embedded in the labor market and the other in the urban/suburban divide, both are intimately tied together. Suburbanites had multiple identities, including that of a worker, and suburbs were places of work. On Long Island and across the Gunbelt, massive state spending buttressed suburbanization itself. Defense spending was not a social-democratic project, but a violent perversion of the full-employment ideals formulated in the 1934 Committee on Economic Security and WPA. It nonetheless employed millions, and discrimination excluded black workers from these jobs. Unfortunately, efforts to integrate and expand black job opportunities, in cities and suburbs, coincided with a new economic ideology that increasingly pushed Americans toward the private market for their livelihood. Emphasizing social, legal, and geographic barriers to participation in a labor market assumed to provide “full employment,” liberals offered little and framed battles as those between black versus white and city versus suburb, fomenting new political interests with consequences to this day. The responsibility then was not only one that rested with white middle class suburbanites, the beneficiaries of the course of events, but of the state, which shed its responsibility to employ people and produce adequate jobs that could make social policy meaningful.  Judith Stein’s Running Steel, Running America helps us understand that the emerging racial and spatial divisions of the 1960s were ideological constructions from liberal elites as much as grassroots metropolitan residents. And most importantly, Stein illustrates that broader political coalitions were and are possible, including ones across the city/suburb and racial divide. This is all the more important now, because today there is more poverty in suburbs than cities, low-wage jobs predominate across municipal borders, and the challenges once considered “urban” or “black” can no longer be justified as such.21 History proves they never should have been considered distinct in the first place.

Creditors, residents and city and state officials quickly mobilized at the prospects of bankruptcy. Ultimately, every effort made by citizens to declare bankruptcy or to prevent the privatization of public assets under a state-appointed Receiver was blocked by a bipartisan commitment in the state legislature to protecting the interests of the financial sector.

That experience made me acutely aware of how little I understood the dynamic forces that comprise contemporary politics and the anemia of popular explanations for the social conditions of the urban areas in which I had lived and worked. I wanted to better understand the forces behind the hollowing out of America’s cities, and why the usual activist and civic groups had continually failed to mount an effective opposition. I returned to graduate school in Philadelphia to study religion and political culture in the United States since the postwar era. I also hoped that engaging in graduate research would shed light on what kinds of political solutions were more promising than running political Hail Mary plays or cheerleading the latest palliative—usually bike lanes, food trucks and tax abatements—prescribed by real estate developers. No scholarship has proven to be more insightful, instructive and compelling to me in the course of my studies than that of Judith Stein, especially in her work on racial politics, political economy and social class.

Making sense of postwar American politics requires grappling seriously with the political significance and development of racial ideas and politics in relation to political economy and social class. The period witnessed the continued mass migration of rural southern blacks to northern cities, the civil rights movement and defeat of Jim Crow, a realignment of Democrats and Republicans, the formation of black radical groups and the emergence of a black political class in American cities. And yet, despite the complexity of these developments, many academic histories of postwar cities bear resemblance to the popular stories neighbors tell about their cities insofar as they turn to race and racism as explanations for how and why American cities changed so dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century.

Untangling and understanding the political significance of racial discourse in American history up to the present day is what makes Judith Stein’s critical approach to writing about race and politics an invaluable and generative model for would-be American political historians. In contrast to so many historians and social scientists writing about postwar history, Stein was not satisfied with constructions of shared racial interest as explanations for American political development. Whether analyzing Clinton-era racial politics in the pages of the Nation or reconstructing the social and political world of Marcus Garvey on the basis of extensive archival research, Stein consistently challenged her readers to historicize the social, material and political significance of racialized political discourse, and demonstrated that political appeals to racial interest can be illuminated by the light of changes, conflicts and tensions that existed within and between social classes.1

This is especially helpful in the context of current trends in the field of postwar urban political history and social science research. According to their overview of what they view as the most influential literature in the field over the last few decades, Thomas J. Sugrue and Robert O. Self, note the predominant focus on race, racial inequality, racial identity, and racial politics by scholars, despite significant methodological differences.2 They point first to the proliferation of scholars following Arnold J. Hirsch in “examining postwar cities as products of racial conservatism.”3 Like Hirsch’s history of post war Chicago, (and the contributions of Sugrue and Self to the genre), these histories are based on syntheses of social science urban case studies and often level criticism toward liberal elites for pursuing public policies that failed to address and often worsened racial inequalities in housing, employment and education.4

A second dominant trend they point to in the field reflects the influence of cultural historians and sociologists such as Robin D.G. Kelley, Michael Omi and Howard Winant.5 In their focus on racial formation, whiteness, and black culture, postwar civic institutions, political parties, municipal and federal government policies and mass popular political movements are either peripheral to everyday cultural struggles to define racial identity, or they are subsumed beneath a long and global narrative of white oppression and black struggle.6

Even though both of these distinct historiographical types foreground racial attitudes, racial ideologies and racial identity, it is surprising how often they fail to address basic, critical and compelling questions about race and politics. How, why, and for whom did conservative racial ideologies gain or lose support? What made the racial politics of a given historical moment appealing, feasible or pragmatic? What did developments in racial politics have to do with developments in political economy and class structure? At best, histories of postwar political culture that pass over these important questions convey that the historical and political significance of conservative racial ideologies and racial disparities is self-evident. At worst they perpetuate the myth that racial beliefs and attitudes are primordial historical forces that cause racial disparities.

Stein’s contention that treating racial identities and language as trans-historic leads contemporary intellectuals “into the realm of metaphysics” was well founded.7 Howard Winant for instance, adopts a decidedly apophatic theological rhetoric to discuss the political and historical significance of race and racism. In a representative passage from his history of race since World War II, The World is a Ghetto, he stops just short of defining race as the ground of all being:

Race has been fundamental in global politics and culture for half a millennium. It continues to signify and structure human life not only experientially, and locally but nationally and globally. Race is present everywhere: it is evident in the distribution of resources and power, and in the desires and fears of individuals from Alberta to Zimbabwe. Race has shaped the modern economy and nation-state. It has permeated all available social identities, cultural forms, and systems of signification. Infinitely incarnated in institution and personality, etched on the human body, racial phenomena affect the thought, experience, and accomplishments of human individuals and collectivities in many familiar ways, and in a host of unconscious patterns as well.8

Continuing in this vein, Winant states that “the race-concept” unleashed a process of global racialization that was, and continues to be, both “the cause and consequence of modernity” and “a fundamental condition of individual and collective identity.”9 Tellingly, Winant’s political telos is not a post-racial society. Race, according to Winant, is not “a social problem” that can be solved, but, “a fundamental social fact.” As such it is not merely the cause of exploitation but also for future political liberation.10

Like Winant, Kelley’s project requires engaging in a form of racial history that, despite careful and often interesting research into the culture of black Americans, is confounded by his insistence that black culture reveals a consistent subversive politics of resistance. In his history of black working-class resistance, Race Rebels, he discerns evidence for a distinctly black and radical politics in the culture of working-class black Americans regardless of era, region, ideology, social status, political affiliation, or movement participation. Just as Winant sees “the race-concept” as the central ideological force in modern history, Kelley stakes his project on an assertion of the, “centrality of race in the minds and experiences of African Americans.”11 “Race,” states Kelley, “particularly a sense of ‘blackness,’… figures prominently in the collective identities of black working people.”12

Kelley must also, in his words, “substantially redefine politics” in order to maintain that black workers, by virtue of a shared experience of racial oppression, participate in an essentially black political struggle even when their political activity conflicts with that of other black workers or when they have forged alliances with white workers. According to Kelley, it is a mistake for political historians to associate politics with social and civic institutions, public policies, partisan political contests, class struggle and mass movements. This untethering of race and politics from these narrow confines allows him to point to stereotypical features of black culture in a given period such as music, hairstyle, cursing, and graffiti, as evidence of black political solidarity:

If we are to make meaning of these kinds of actions rather than dismiss them as manifestations of immaturity, false consciousness, or primitive rebellion, we must begin to dig beneath the surface of trade union pronouncements, political institutions, and organized social movements, deep into the daily lives, cultures, and communities which make the working classes so much more than people who work. We have to step into the complicated maze of experience that renders “ordinary” folks so extraordinarily multifaceted, diverse, and complicated. Most importantly, we need to break away from traditional notions of politics.13

Within this theoretical move it is possible for Kelley to view the adaptation by southern black Communist Party members of black spiritual music and religious customs, or the presence of racial themes in their poetry and songs as signals of a sublimated subversive black nationalism held by black Party members in defiance of the Party’s “proletarian realism,” i.e. a commitment to working-class based internationalism.14 Given the range of internal strategic and ideological debates that define political party participation (to say nothing of black political thought in the US), and the subtlety of his evidence, even if Kelley has discovered a form of embryonic racial nationalism in black Communists, attributing it to the black experience of racialization reflects his own intellectual and political commitments more than providing grounds for them.

Kelley’s argument is only possible because he deliberately liquidates black politics of any particular material stakes, and by extension, of the pressing interests of black people. Only a metaphysical racial identity can supply what Kelley finds everywhere across time and space, namely, the participation of black domestic workers, sharecroppers, Communists, hep cats, preachers and rappers in single political struggle for a self-determined racial identity.15 Kelley’s narrow vision of black politics does more than a flatten out history. It erases stark class contradictions. While participation in a political tradition of resistance mediated by black culture may represent a pressing political objective for Kelley, it is a projection of his imagination that this represents the primary concern of black workers. As Stein observed in a reflection on contemporary efforts to define black politics solely in racial terms, “most people, including African-Americans, engage in politics to improve their lives, not to select their associates or affirm their identity. The desire for change in the social condition of African-Americans—not in their relationship with whites—has been the driving force of black politics.”16

If Kelley redefines politics and Winant waxes theological on race, urban historians in the mold of Hirsch attempt to avoid such pitfalls by historicizing the political dimensions of racial identity in a particular period and location. Even the best examples of this type, however, often fail to subject the historical terms of racial discourse (conservative or otherwise) to critical political, historical and material analysis. For these scholars, demonstrable racial discrimination and disparities in housing, transportation, education and employment functions as prima facia evidence that whites held racial ideological views and that these views, if not explain, the production of public policies that favored the material interests of one racial group over another.

Thomas Sugrue, in his justly lauded study of postwar Detroit, goes to even greater lengths than many of his peers to question this simplification.17 According to Sugrue, it was primarily political economy and federal government policy that shaped the material connotations of racial identity in the postwar era. Race became more associated with property tax policy than with beliefs in a natural biological hierarchy for an increasing number of Americans.

But despite this openness to economic and political influence on racial identity from above, Sugrue struggles to untangle further the relationship of local racial politics and racial inequality to broader social and political conditions. In order to avoid what he criticizes as the “ahistorical,” “reductionist” and “monocausal explanations of racial discrimination” found in an older generation of economists and sociologists, he attempts to “start with the important questions asked by whiteness scholars, but to provide a more rigorous account of the mechanisms that perpetuated racial difference in ideology and in experience.”18

In order to “bridge the cultural and the structural” Sugrue makes use of ambiguous and indeterminate theoretical language. That American capitalism generates economic inequality and that African Americans have historically borne a greater share of this burden represents “two of the most important, interrelated, and unresolved problems in American history.”19 Similarly, the production of racial inequalities in Detroit is ascribed to “mutually reinforcing processes of ideology and political economy, of identity and self-interest.”20 However helpful these constructions might be for thinking about the historical ways racial inequality and inequality became inter-related and mutually reinforced one another, they are not always reflected in Sugrue’s historical narrative. Instead of a dynamic account of ideology, self-interest, public policy, and the forces of political economy as integrally related features of postwar American society, more often than not, Sugrue presents white racism, public policy and the movement of capital as a tragic combination of “forces that occurred simultaneously.”21

The relationship of racial discrimination in Detroit to the postwar American economy is arguably more than chronological and also more interesting. Even though Sugrue takes the changing shape of racial identity seriously, he, like others in this camp, presents racial discrimination in housing and labor as explanations for that without reference to the fact that in the US these are commodities bought and sold in a market that requires disparity to function, regardless of how those disparities are distributed or justified. Sugrue is correct to argue that the postwar transformation of Detroit was caused by a complex combination of deindustrialization, workplace segregation and housing discrimination. However, in attributing this discriminatory complex to “policymakers, large corporations, small businesses (particularly realtors) and ordinary citizens that created and reinforced racial and class inequalities and perpetuated the political marginalization of African Americans” we are left with the question, why did these people do what they did?22 Leaving that question unanswered implies that the tragedy of Detroit’s crisis might be a tale of personal ignorance or immorality.

These critical lacunae are why Judith Stein’s work is so helpful for understanding racial discourse and the political culture of American cities in the postwar era. She put two of the most common principles taught in historical and social science theory courses to work: that the meaning or significance of words is context dependent and that identities are socially constructed.

Despite frequent lip service paid to the claim that race and racialization are not naturally occurring phenomena, the implications that claim has for interpreting racial discourse are not taken seriously enough. For Stein, however, affirming that racial identities are constructed socially was not merely an obligatory genuflection to assure her readers that she, also, rejected a biologically determined racial hierarchy.

Popular identities, whether racial or nonracial, are constructed as people define their social and political objectives….The ways people define themselves are determined by their history, politics and class. They change. The same words have conveyed vastly different meanings and encouraged diverse actions. They mean less and more than they seem. People employ strategic fictions that can be understood only in context. They always must be understood as one element with other ideological beliefs that have nothing to do with race. And they interact with definitions made by other people, especially those who exercise power.23

What racial terms mean in a given context is no more fixed than the political projects and class interests with which those terms can be (and have been) associated throughout history. Stein recognized a tendency in both scholarship and popular racial discourse to overstate the influence of racial consciousness, identity and experience on the development of politics. But if racial identities are not transcendental or uniform, that scholarship has the relationship backwards, and the compelling question can be asked, to what social or political end or ends does a particular appeal to racial identity address?

If Stein’s approach to understanding the political and social utility of racial discourse is helpful for making sense of the racial politics of a figure like Marcus Garvey, it is also the case that it can help to make sense of the racial politics of twenty-first century historians and social scientists like Sugrue, Winant and Kelley. It is striking that neither popular nor academic accounts of postwar urban history offer much by way of a justification for making race and racism the central political concern in accounts of the decline of urban social conditions. True to form, Stein wasn’t afraid to attribute that tendency to the scholars’ own politics. In a short piece on what she saw as a misplaced and fanciful admiration for the Communist Party’s anti-racism campaign of the 1940s among historians, she speculated that the reason was “because many historians view antiracism as their first political principle.”24 To the extent that multi-cultural liberalism, anti-racism, and personal norms of empathy have displaced postwar racial conservatism as the dominant political ideology, it would be comforting if the sensitivity trainings and moral revival that have accompanied the ascendance of antiracist politics represented a serious effort to address the dire conditions of life in American cities or the kinds urgent problems that keep ordinary Americans awake at night.25 But I am suspicious that meeting such needs may fall much lower on the list of urgent demands for some social classes than others.

The economic appeal of the Trump campaign, and his success in parts of the Midwestern industrial heartland has provoked a rash of explanations and invective centered on the “white working class.” But the “angry white worker” line misses too much. Trump did not grow the GOP base substantially, though he outperformed McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 by over 2 million votes. More importantly, Trump did not secure a larger share of the white vote than Romney did. Trump performed well among blue collar voters, former Obama voters, wealthy whites, non-unionized workers in coal country, the steel-producing belt and Right to Work states, building trades and contractors, proto-entrepreneurs, and minorities. One-third of Latino voters supported Trump, as did 13% of African American men.

The answer to why Trump was elected lies in the ideological crisis of the Democratic party, and more specifically in the implosion of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, both problems having their root in the New Democrats’ neoliberal political agenda and pro-corporate strategic and governing priorities. To the extent that party insider Donna Brazile’s new memoir corroborates other accounts, the New Democratic leadership of the party worked to sabotage the challenge mounted by democratic socialist candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, especially after his New Hampshire primary victory.1 The antipathy towards white workers found its most forceful expressions early in the 2016 election, most often in the statements of party operatives and the liberal commentariat, who attempted to derail Sanders’ bid for the Democratic presidential nomination by portraying him as the candidate of white working-class men, and a relic of the old-style New Deal liberalism. Even after Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing defeat, many clung to this logic that rustbelt voters didn’t matter, the working class was dead, and the future of the party lay with African Americans, Latinos and women, as if those groups do not comprise the working class. MSNBC personality Joy Reid summed up the New Democrat’s anti-worker electoral calculus, “Because Democrats, although they understand, I think, deep down that they are the party of black and brown people, of gay people, of marginalized people…they still long to be the party of the…Pabst Blue Ribbon voter…the Coors Lite-drinking voter.”2 Reid doubled-down on the New Democratic shtick that first gestated in the wake of the unsuccessful presidential challenges of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, when the Democratic Leadership Council was formed and committed to an electoral strategy predicated on making symbolic overtures to the constituencies that once made up the New Deal coalition, while adopting a neoliberal agenda. That agenda, despite the pretense and optics of social liberalism, has been ongoing throughout the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the campaign platforms of numerous candidates before and after them, typically hostile towards working-class interests in practice. “The problem with this line is not just that it’s gross and elitist—it’s that it’s not even true,” as Connor Kilpatrick noted in the throes of the 2016 primary season, “The working class is bigger than ever, is still really white, and is broadly supportive of a progressive populist agenda.”3 The “white working class” is a powerful political myth, one that services the corporate-centered agenda of Democratic elites, but its origins lie in academic left attempts to make sense of the historical difficulty of achieving socialism on U.S. soil. Born out of noble intentions, it is a dangerous myth nonetheless, one that distorts our sense of history and politics and how we might build social forces capable of contesting the power and interests of capital in our times.

Given the timing of its publication, David Roediger’s latest book, Class, Race and Marxism (Verso, 2017) is addressed to this new terrain of Trumplandia, and the book’s introduction takes up the debates within the American Left that reached fever pitch during the 2016 election cycle. The book, however, is not a collection of new essays, but rather a compendium of Roediger’s writings over the last ten years. As such, it is an attempt to reassert his position on how we should think about questions of race and class in American life and history, and what role Marxism might play in that process. This essay examines Roediger’s latest book, but also takes stock of the interpretative assumptions of some three decades of whiteness studies in academe, and its consequences for left thought and action. Throughout what follows, I offer alternative historical analysis and case-study illustrations to demonstrate the limits of whiteness discourse, and how we might approach questions of class power and interests instead.

Whiteness studies as an academic field of inquiry was born in the waning years of the Reagan-Bush era, and its creators’ motives were earnest and well intentioned. They were preoccupied with how to reverse the trend of neoconservativism and revitalize the American Left. The New Right was built in American suburbia, the southern states, and the shuttered manufacturing towns stretching from the eastern seaboard across the Midwest, and at the heart of the New Right’s campaign playbook and governing agenda was the assault on the egalitarian reforms of the civil rights and second wave feminism, such as affirmative action and reproductive rights, as well as those targeted programs of the welfare state, e.g. AFDC, public housing, which were portrayed as giveaways to the undeserving black and brown poor. The problem, many would argue, lay in whiteness, as a category of material advantage and political affinity, or put another way, the New Right had emerged through conspicuous appeals to whites as a group and against urban blacks and Latinos, who were portrayed through underclass narratives as an inferior caste, lacking a work ethic and delayed gratification, immoral, prone to criminality and self-sabotage, and in the most racist articulations, biologically inferior, lacking the intellectual and social capacity that might enable assimilation as citizens.4

Whiteness studies had important precursors. In 1987 black political scientist Ronald W. Walters published a pamphlet titled, “White Racial Nationalism in the United States” as part of the Without Prejudice series of the United Nations’ International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.5 Seeing a clear connection between Reagan’s conservative policies and the rising violence perpetrated by white supremacist organizations and vigilantes, Walters concluded that “the current wave of American nationalism is chauvinistic not only because it is American, but also because it is white.” In 1989 feminist educator Peggy McIntosh’s published “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” an abridged version of an article she penned a year prior. But it was Roediger’s 1991 book, The Wages of Whiteness, that quickly gained influence within academia and beyond, establishing the new beachhead of anti-racist thinking and activism. More than any other single figure, Roediger has helped to advance the study of whiteness as a central problem in American history and politics, having published and edited numerous books on the subject, including his Toward the Abolition of Whiteness (1994), Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005) and How Race Survived U.S. History (2010).6

In the three decades since Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, dozens of books have explored the historical process of white identity formation, such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995), Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1996), George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998), Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (1998), Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness (1998), dozens of scholarly and popular articles, as well as the independent left journal Race Traitor.7 A one-man brand, Tim Wise has become a routine fixture on the college lecture circuit, national news and radio programs, and authored numerous best-selling books including, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (2008) and Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority (2012). McIntosh and Wise represent a more therapeutic, consciousness-raising approach to whiteness that has spawned a cottage industry of professional trainings, national conferences, study guides, manuals, and curricula targeting white audiences and intended to spark dialogue, personal reevaluation and behavioral modification, all in the hopes of reducing racism in its various manifestations, i.e. micro-aggressions, institutional racism, and white privilege. Such projects include the United Church of Christ’s White Privilege: Let’s Talk—A Resource for Transformational Dialogue, the film, Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible, produced by World Trust Educational Services, and the Whiteness Project, an on-line interactive platform built around interviews, among scores of similar initiatives.

As historian Eric Arnesen pointed out in a critical overview of the whiteness studies literature, “Whiteness is, variously, a metaphor for power, a proxy for racially distributed material benefits, a synonym for ‘white supremacy,’ an epistemological stance defined by power, a position of invisibility or ignorance, and a set of beliefs about racial ‘others’ and one-self that can be rejected through ’treason’ to a racial category.”8 The promiscuity of the concept of whiteness, and related notions of white privilege and white supremacy make it a difficult concept to criticize, as Arnesen adds, “it is nothing less than a moving target.”

Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness was unique in its focus on the complicity of white workers, and its rejection in part of earlier Marxist arguments that pinned the creation and circulation of racist ideology on ruling elites. Published a decade into Reagan-Bush’s neoconservative reign, Roediger’s opening salvo posed the question that many still asks about white workers’ commitments to the GOP— “why do white workers vote against their interests?”—with the speaker almost always assuming that working-class interests are already self-evident, unified and simply waiting to be advanced. “White labor does not just receive and resist racist ideas but embraces, adopts and, at times, murderously acts upon those ideas,” Roediger argues in that now classic book, “The problem is not just that the white working class is at critical junctures manipulated by racism, but that it comes to think of itself and its interests as white.”9

This essay takes aim at this central premise regarding “white interests” running through Roediger’s oeuvre, from The Wages of Whiteness to his most recent book, and widely adopted by other academics, professional trainers, activists and citizens. The academic and popular discourse of whiteness is concerned with the “souls of white folks” if you will, their predilections, behaviors and reactionary tendencies, often relying on retrospective psychoanalysis to discern the interior lives and private motives of the antebellum crowd, the minstrel show audience, southern lynch mobs and middle class suburban strivers alike, even when evidence of those motives and interests is scant.

The historian Barbara Fields once remarked that “Whiteness is the shotgun marriage of two incoherent but well-loved concepts: identity and agency.”10 That said, this essay seeks to begin divorce proceedings because a keen sense of historical interests, the shifting, territorial demands and worlds people fight to realize in their times, is lost in the common inferences made through psychohistory and the false equation of identity and political interests, analytical moves which are central to whiteness studies, and for that matter, much contemporary thinking on blackness and race in the US. As Fields reminds us, whiteness acts as a thimblerig that “performs a series of deft displacements, first substituting race for racism, then postulating identity as the social substance of race, and finally attributing racial identity to persons of European descent.”11 And I would add, the same thimblerig enables attributing political interests to whites (and blacks) without the critical analysis and investigatory rigor that might sharpen our understanding of class and power in American history.

Marxism is a diverse, contradictory and evolving body of thought and practice, but its impetus in the historical writings of Marx and Engels, lies in the critique of capitalism, and the political project of abolishing the capitalist class relation, the production of surplus value. Analysis of historically contingent interests should lie at the heart of the project of historical-geographical materialism—to borrow David Harvey’s more precise phrasing. I do not question Roediger’s political commitments here, only that his arguments regarding whiteness, and approach to thinking about how class interests are actually formed, articulated and advanced, particularly among white and black workers, do not help us to advance the intellectual and political project of anti-capitalism. Whiteness has come to function not so much as an analysis of interests in historical motion, but rather, it functions as catechism—America’s original sin is racism and redemption in the post-political hereafter lies in white atonement. With respect to class struggle and the maintenance of consent and order by dominant classes, the devil is in the details of history, details that fall out of focus when we evoke “white interests” as a metanarrative of what is wrong with American politics. Roediger’s work has advanced an approach to thinking about history and contemporary politics that reifies whiteness, even as it explores its social construction, presupposes that racial identity is the foremost shaper of working-class thought and action, and silences interracial solidarity.

Losing DuBois, or Thinking Historically about Class Interests

In Chapter 2, “Accounting for the Wages of Whiteness,” Roediger returns to the debates surrounding his most influential book, taking time to respond to some of his critics and defend the merits of his thesis. He summarizes the thrust of whiteness studies as “the argument that an embrace of white identity has led to absences of humanity and of the effective pursuit of class interest among whites.”12 I taught The Wages of Whiteness throughout the aughts, and for the same reasons that many others assigned the book in class. By the time George W. Bush took the oath of office, Wages was a widely-cherished classic in the realm of left historical writing, and the return of Republican control of the White House raised the same anxieties and frustrations about why certain segments of the population were so easily seduced by cultural conservatism and GOP tax-cuts than the New Democrats’ multicultural version of neoliberalism.

The book had a certain pedagogical value on college campuses, which are spaces of middle-class assimilation, and especially the kind of small, monastic liberal arts college where I began my career. In those contexts, which are often classed along racial lines because of admissions and financing processes, with white students often hailing from middle and upper-middle class suburban backgrounds and boarding schools, and black and brown students more likely to be drawn from inner-city high schools and working-class environments, the clash of urban and suburban cultures, privileged and disadvantaged class positions take on a sharp racial character. In that context where middle class was synonymous with white, discussion of the white working class was both novel and innocuous. Over the course of my time there, I discovered that there were many white students who hailed from the old industrial towns of the Hudson valley and western New York’s southern tier, but they had little means of expressing their difficulties in an environment where “white” and “working class” simply did not seem to go together. Roediger’s first book then provided a way to think about American history and contemporary political conflicts in a manner that many students could identify with, but that was part of the problem.

Roediger’s extrapolation of George Rawick’s comment that enterprising, colonial whites encountered slaves in a manner akin to a reformed sinner confronting a comrade of his previous debaucheries, as “pornographies of their former selves,” was powerful as a speculative claim, one which allowed students to think through the process of industrialization as a social and cultural experience, and not merely a technical and economic one. “As proletarianization brought new losses of access to the commons and new forms of time discipline and social regimentation to far greater numbers of people,” Roediger writes, “workers processed loss by projecting onto Black workers what they still desired in terms of imagined absence of alienation, even as they bridled at being treated as slaves, or as ‘white niggers.’” In his discussions of the evolution of racial language and racist ideas, Roediger may be at his best, detailing the subtle and not so subtle, regional and incremental changes in language, tracing the etymology and evolution of racial categories and slurs as well as shifting nomenclature of the industrial order, the meanings of “master,” “boss,” “factories,” and so forth. As someone who came of age in French-speaking Southwest Louisiana during a period when the phrase “coon ass” still prevailed as a term of endearment among Cajun whites and an insult against them, I appreciated his discussion of the circuitous route this phrase took historically from the antebellum uses of the word “barracoon” to the anti-black epithet of Jim Crow discourse.

Roediger’s analysis of the evolution of whiteness, and in particular how this historical development was related to the interconnected processes and social dislocations of immigration, urbanization, industrial discipline and urban political incorporation was highly generative and made for great classroom discussions. Teaching Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness helped to underscore the ways that race is socially-constructed, an invention of historical processes, but also to examine how notions of social consciousness and historical interests are contingent, never given or static. It is on this very subject of historical interests, however, that discourse analysis and retrospective psychoanalysis lose their power and fail to capture how particular class interests are congealed, articulated and advanced.

The wide-interpretative license Roediger takes, moving from the consumer habits of antebellum white workers, e.g. their presence in the crowd at Jonkonnu celebrations or as patrons of the black-faced stage show, towards making firm conclusions about the choices made in their political lives, is not particularly helpful as historical analysis. This problem derives in part from his use of W.E.B. DuBois as inspiration, and in particular, DuBois at a moment in his long career that was marked by transition and a rather uneasy commitment to both bourgeois liberal politics and a nascent interest in socialism—not quite the “great African American thinker and militant” Roediger praises. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction was powerful as an antidote to those who lampooned black citizenship, but it also reflected his standing skepticism of interracial working-class solidarity as a path to socialism during the Great Depression.

In a sub-section of the introduction to The Wages of Whiteness, titled “The Essential DuBois,” Roediger attributes the book’s title and thesis to DuBois’s Black Reconstruction. That 1935 book was a revisionist history that challenged the prevalent, racist Dunning School interpretation, which held that Federal Reconstruction was a failure simply because freed slaves were not prepared socially or intellectually to assume the role of self-governing citizens. DuBois not only sought to highlight the role that blacks played in their own emancipation before and during the Civil War, but to illustrate the reactionary tide that would undermine the extension of republican manhood suffrage across the color line. In the waning pages of that book, he takes up the plight of the white worker noting that “while they received a low wage,” they were “compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.” “They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white,” DuBois adds, “They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.”13 DuBois’s accounting of why the white worker, though sharing similar material conditions with newly freed slaves, would gather under the political banner of white supremacy and against Reconstruction is rather alluring. At the time of his writing, the vast majority of southern blacks were still without basic citizenship rights, and while the frequency of lynchings had begun to decline, the threat of anti-black violence was still pervasive and all too real. Following DuBois, Roediger claims “whiteness was a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of capitalist work discipline.”14 Although Roediger sees DuBois’s work as essential for understanding these matters of race and class, there are many reasons why we should not.

DuBois’s comments reflect as much about his views on working-class organization and interracial solidarity at the time of his writing, as they do about the tragedy of Reconstruction. DuBois was skeptical of interracial unionism, and that attitude is clearly reflected in the “wages” passages that many contemporary historians have embraced.15 Instead of advocating black participation in trade unionism, he was at that moment more committed to the pursuit of black entrepreneurship and cooperatives as a means of addressing economic inequality. While some latter-day historians have found value in DuBois’s depictions of white workers, adopting his historical summation as a metanarrative of America’s reactionary tendencies, some of his black intellectual contemporaries were less enthusiastic about his perspective. DuBois’s critics viewed his advocacy of separatist economics as a losing strategy, one that would not benefit the vast majority of black laborers, and they openly criticized his conservatism on matters of working-class unity and anti-capitalism.

Foremost among DuBois’s critics was the economist and Howard University professor Abram Harris, who published a scathing 1935 review of Black Reconstruction for New Republic magazine. “DuBois cannot believe that a movement founded upon working-class solidarity and cutting across racial lines can afford any immediate relief to the Negro’s economic plight or have any practical realization in the near future,” Harris wrote, “He is a racialist whose discovery of Marxism as a critical instrument has been too recent for it to discipline his mental processes or basically to change his social philosophy.”16 Harris also rejected DuBois’s characterization of the mass exodus of blacks from plantations to the Union army camps as a “general strike,” seeing that use of the term as a corruption of its discrete political meaning—“the general strike has come to mean the organized stoppage of work by labor on a national scale either to force immediate economic or political concessions from employers or the government, or to capture the state itself and socialize industry.” “Whether used in a conservative or revolutionary manner, the general strike implies a real consciousness not only of the class issues that make its use necessary but also of the ends deliberately sought by those who use it,” Harris added, “The Negro slaves’ so-called general strike grew out of no such consciousness of the issues or of the significance that their ‘escape to freedom’ would have upon the ends of the war.” Harris may diminish the decisive role that so-called “contraband” would play in winning the war, bearing in mind that the influx of black enlisted men replenished many battle-worn and depleted Union regiments, but his critical point about DuBois’s interpretative license are well-taken, especially since this problem persists in whiteness studies.

Historian Jonathan Scott Holloway argues that the bitter tone of Harris’s review derived from his own professional struggles and ambivalence about his role as a black intellectual, as well as his deep ideological aversion to the racial chauvinism that DuBois still abided. I would add as well, that Harris probably harbored some resentment regarding DuBois’s new found appreciation of class analysis, especially since four years prior, Harris and political scientist Sterling Spero had published a book titled, The Black Worker, which actually used Marx’s industrial reserve army as a way to frame northern manufacturers’ mobilization of black southern migrant labor during the opening decades of the twentieth century.17 This may explain his motivations for publishing such a sharp review of Black Reconstruction, but his criticisms of DuBois’s politics at the time, which were leftist in aspiration while remaining rather conservative in substance, were shared by others who either held the old man in too high esteem to cross him, or simply did not feel well-positioned enough to voice their misgivings publically. One such person was George W. Streator, a devotee of DuBois who grew increasingly frustrated by his mentor’s views on working-class solidarity.

Unlike Harris, Streator took up his disagreement with DuBois in private, in a series of letters where he challenged DuBois’s skepticism of interracial working-class solidarity, and the contradictions between his newfound commitment to socialism and advocacy of Negro business development as a practical solution. Streator led a 1925 student strike at Fisk University and later worked under DuBois at the Crisis magazine, before diving into union work. In July 1935, while working for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in Virginia, Streator wrote to DuBois to express his disappointment with the anti-unionism he witnessed among elements of the black professional-managerial class in Norfolk, where the Amalgamated was engaging in a “strenuous effort to organize colored workers along with the white”.18 According to Streator’s report, the local black leadership element responded to the unionization drive with lip service, ”a dozen evidences of sabotage,” and “the usual drivel about ‘being careful about the AFofL’ even though a genuine effort to organize is being made.” “[W]here are your racial loyalties?” Streator wrote, goading DuBois, “I want to know how you arrive at your conclusions that the lower middle class Negro who has absorbed the capitalist ideology will somehow be enlisted for socialism without disturbing his class allegiances?”19 Streator’s impatience with DuBois rivals Harris’s and he closes out the letter with this barb: “You didn’t see fit to answer my last letter to you, and I’m sure it’s too hot to answer this one. But for me, I am through with any doctrine of ‘racial solidarity’ as a way out.”20

My point here in introducing Harris and Streator as critics of DuBois is not to encourage the construction of another, better canon, but to reject this process of canonization altogether, because it urges the valorization of individual black thinkers, and in a manner that loses sight of the rich internal debates that have always defined black political life. Instead of enlisting black luminaries to authorize contemporary intellectual positions, we would be better served by studying them in their historical context and trying to understand their particular motives and preoccupations. In other words, we should do the tedious work needed to understand their times and our own.

DuBois’s account of white workers is poetic and tragic, but inaccurate. He presents white workers as widely enjoying civic and economic benefits that many never possessed. There is ample evidence that the defeat of Reconstruction actually hurt white workers, and that many were aware enough of this fact to find common cause with blacks despite the rising reactionary tide. “It is difficult to see where the great gains for lower-class whites are to be found in this situation,” sociologist Jack Bloom wrote of the fall of Reconstruction, “Many of them lost the right to vote. They were subject to the harsh terms of their employers, and they remained without labor unions, to counter the power the wealthy retained. When they did try to form unions, they found the region’s tradition of violence turned against them.”21 Working-class whites fared better relative to blacks, in many cases, but the greatest gains of the Jim Crow system were reserved for the merchant-landlord class and New South industrialists. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the percentage of farmers who were tenants grew from 59.9 percent to 65.4 percent. In the year that DuBois’s Black Reconstruction was published, 3 million blacks and 5.5 million whites, one-quarter of all Southerners, were tenant farmers.22

DuBois’s words about black workers, which appear further down the page of the often-cited white “wages” section, are just as disparaging. Commenting on the racist southern press and their effects on the Negro, DuBois writes, “He was a caged human being, driven into a curious mental provincialism. An inferiority complex dominated him. He did not believe himself a man like other men. He could not teach his children self-respect. The Negro as a group gradually lost his manners, his courtesy, his light-hearted kindliness. Large numbers sank into apathy and fatalism.”23 “The effect of caste on the moral integrity of the Negro race in America” he continues, “has been widely disastrous; servility and fawning, gross flattery of white folk and lying to appease and cajole them . . . inordinate admiration for the stigmata of success among white folk: wealth and arrogance, cunning dishonesty and assumptions of superiority; the exaltation of laziness and indifference as just as successful as the industry and striving which invites taxation and oppression . . .” These passages reflected DuBois’s own bourgeois sensibility, and his third-person narration of the incapacitation of the black masses is a central justification for race leadership, the guiding role of representative men. If the same sentiments were voiced today, some anti-racist intellectuals might reject his characterizations as dangerous underclass myth making, why then should we think DuBois’s accounting of white workers is any more reliable?

What The Wages of Whiteness offers is not so much historicity—that is, a clarifying sense of historical context, expressed motives, preoccupations and strategic choices that defined the lives and political actions of capital and workers— but ventriloquism. Felt needs and articulated interests that have been documented by a mountain of historical research are bypassed for a method of imparting meaning through retrospective psychoanalysis, attribution and vivid metaphor.

It would seem that the more fruitful question for a Marxist intellectual and political project is not merely, what passions or foibles drew mechanics, farmhands and stevedores to the antebellum black-faced minstrel stage, but what conclusions, if any, we can or should make about their political choices and lives based on that particular act of mass consumption. This is not merely a problem in Roediger’s work, the tendency to use consumer activity as a proxy for political interests, but it is one that pervades contemporary left academe and broader liberal American culture. This is a dangerous shortcut to generalization that does not require taking the time to examine the actual political commitments people make in their own contexts and limited choices while positing cultural consumption and verbal uncouthness as somehow directly akin to physical violence and the enactment of racist policy. Racism, we should note, is not even skin deep, its thin veneer of myth is routinely punctured by the daily interactions between black and white, its absurdity revealed by every walking and breathing example of black intellect, ability, insubordination, and humanity. Moreover, the fact of racist attitudes and distrust have never fully precluded the possibility of interracial communion and solidarity, a reality that seems lost in the reams of paper dedicated to the history of whiteness and white privilege.

In the closing pages of The Wages of Whiteness, Roediger turns to post-emancipation racial politics. “Black emancipation, battlefield heroism and citizenship” Roediger writes, “thus ensured that white workers could never again see African-Americans or themselves in just the same way.” He then cautions, however, that “more than enough of the habit of whiteness and of the conditions producing it survived to ensure that white workers would be at best uncertain allies of Black freedom and would stop short of developing full new concepts of liberation for themselves as well.”24 If whites always and everywhere understand their interests in racially provincial terms, how then do we explain recurrent, pervasive moments of interracial collusion, solidarity and rebellion that define every decade of this country’s existence?

The 1892 New Orleans General Strike is one such case that whiteness studies cannot account for, where black and white dockworkers achieved solidarity despite animosity, distrust and prevailing beliefs in black inferiority.25 The 1892 strike was not exceptional, but was part of a decade-long cycle of national labor militancy from the Haymarket bombing to the 1894 Pullman strike. Likewise, the first half of the twentieth century was defined by intense periods of working-class insurgency, such as the Appalachian Mine Wars, the Depression-era American Communist Party, as well as the CIO organizing campaigns of the late thirties and forties and the wartime March on Washington movement to desegregate the defense industries, episodes when racial cooperation and solidarity were forged and substantive gains won despite prejudice, animosity and suspicion. Whiteness studies is part of this longer lineage of left struggles, but its central motives and interpretative preoccupations took shape during the Cold War, an era of resurgent capitalist class power and popular retreat from working-class left politics.

The Affluent Society, Taproot of Whiteness Discourse

In Chapter 2, “Accounting for the Wages of Whiteness,” and Chapter 3, “The White Intellectual Among Thinking Black Intellectuals” Roediger gives a deeper sense of the roots of whiteness discourse, and returns to the earliest explorations of “white skin privilege” offered by activists like Alexander Saxton, Noel Ignatiev (formerly Ignatin), Theodore Allen and George Rawick.26 Taken together these chapters make clear that while whiteness studies as an academic sub-field was born in the late eighties, it was conceived in the sixties New Left, and the efforts of white activists, often veterans of union struggles and left sectarian tendencies, to remain relevant within the context of suburban middle-class conservatism and insurgent black struggles against Jim Crow. Central to their process of self-awakening was the problematic role ascribed to black intellectuals as authentic translators of the “black experience” and conduits of black political struggles.

Roediger profiles Alexander Saxton, a novelist and later the author of the 1990 book, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America. Educated at Harvard and the University of Chicago, Saxton had been a union organizer in the railroad and construction industries, before serving as a publicist for the Committee on Maritime Unity, which was dedicated to increasing interracial solidarity in unions. “Saxton’s labor activism” Roediger writes “frequently centered on race even in the uncommonly tough Jim Crow atmospheres of the railway brotherhoods and building trades.”27 Saxton subsequently explored the problem of interracial unionism in his 1971 book, The Indispensible Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Roediger offers a brief intellectual biography of Theodore Allen as well, the author of the two-volume study, The Invention of the White Race, published in 1994 and 1997. Although he was born into a middle class family and raised in Indianapolis and West Virginia, Allen was “proletarianized by the Great Depression.” Allen joined the American Federation of Musicians as a teen and made his way into the Communist Party. He entered the Congress of Industrial Organizations through the United Mine Workers, which was, as Roediger notes, “a racially diverse organization and where the extent of interracial unity very much shaped the prospects of unionism.”28 In the sixties, Allen argued that workers’ identification with the white race was the “Achilles heel” of the American Left. He advanced that position in a series of articles and pamphlets including “Can White Radicals Be Radicalized?” (1967), Understanding and Fighting White Supremacy (1967) and Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (1975).

Readers will be rewarded by Roediger’s close, tender portrait of Rawick, his beloved friend and mentor. Roediger describes him as “arguably the most influential student of the US working class, although he is almost never counted among the founders of the ‘new labor history’ that emerged in that period.”29 Roediger credits Rawick’s 1969 Radical America article, “Working Class Self-Activity” with popularizing that concept in the US labor studies, a position that he traces back through Rawick’s left activism. Roediger unearths the political and intellectual development of Rawick from his upbringing in an observant Jewish household in Brooklyn to his adventures in the Communist Party and the Shachtmanite Independent Socialist League, and eventually his experience of the civil rights movement. Through his participation in black political struggles in Detroit, Rawick’s ideas about race and class were greatly influenced by the Trinidadian Marxist and Pan-Africanist, C.L.R. James and his experiences in the Facing Reality collective alongside Martin Glaberman.

Although these two chapters are helpful for understanding how whiteness studies originated, there are moments when Roediger may overreach in discussing the impact of James and Facing Reality. At one point, he claims that James was “the senior Black radical intellectual most admired by young Black Power advocates,” and later he concludes “Facing Reality influenced far more young Black activists than it managed to recruit.”30 The former claim is simply not true, and the latter is certainly not proven by Roediger in this chapter.31 In his recollections of the period, Dan Georgakas says that the “person who made the strongest immediate impression on us, particularly among the Blacks who would become the nucleus of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, was James Boggs,” who “had been through numerous rank-and-file movements and racial initiatives within our unions, and he spoke eloquently about his experiences.”32 On the other hand, Georgakas says the “influence of [C.L.R.] James was indirect. Some of his books were thrust at us and had quite an impact but there was little attempt to present his ideas in a systematic manner.” In addition to James’s actual distance in Britain at the time, Georgakas adds, a “complicating factor was that James seemed distant in style from the kind of informal give-and-take Detroiters preferred.” James was surely respected by many black activists and students during the sixties as a Pan-Africanist forbearer, and for his history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, but few would claim that his writing was so decisive in shaping black power thinking to the extent that Roediger claims.

Rather than seeing James as an important interpreter and shaper of domestic U.S. black politics, it is safer to say that James’s appreciation of black self-activity and the role that slavery played in the making of world history and the evolution of capitalism— consonant intellectual sensibilities that defined the work of other Caribbean left intellectuals in his orbit, such as Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, and later, Robert Hill and Stuart Hall—made a strong impression on Rawick and shaped his pursuit of a bottom-up accounting of slavery. James’s intellectual influence on Rawick found full articulation in From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, his classic exploration of slave culture. Like James, however, the account of black culture offered by Rawick and Roediger, which celebrates black agency and resistance, falls short of providing the kind of Marxist analysis of black political life that might be helpful, one that actually lays bare the internal class interests and ideological positions that shape black politics in real time and space. Instead, Roediger writes about the “uncommon ability of Black communities to incorporate difference,” and of the “openness of Black communities, movements and intellectuals,” statements which seem overly romantic and rather superficial.

In reconstructing these deeper intellectual lineages and the social milieu that gave shape to the earliest intellectual focus on white skin privilege, Roediger wishes to remind us of the role of worker struggles and socialist politics in the conception of whiteness studies, and to reiterate that it is an historical materialist project, rather than one deriving from academic postmodernism. His discussion is helpful in this regard, but perhaps inadvertently, it also reveals how a preoccupation with whiteness derived from the relative alienation of white leftists who stood between two colliding worlds during the sixties and seventies, the conformist white suburban middle class and the surging political militancy of the black movements that evolved within and against the affluent consumer society. In a 1974 Radical America article titled, “Black Workers, White Workers,” Noel Ignatin wrote, “the key problem is not the racism of the employing class, but the racism of the white worker (after all, the boss’s racism is natural to him because it serves his class interests).”33 Across these two chapters, we can see the immediate political preoccupations that drove the turn to whiteness, as activists tried to make sense of the Cold War conservatism and anti-civil rights fervor that increasingly defined some white communities and political tendencies in the Deep South and beyond. Saxton, Allen, Ignatin and other activists working in formations like Facing Reality, Students for a Democratic Society and later the Sojourner Truth Organization scrambled against the tide to build progressive political consciousness in a world of movement demobilization, middle-class contentment, mass cultural distraction and Meany-era union conservatism. Was a focus on whiteness, however, the way forward— then or now?

Whiteness discourse misdiagnoses the Cold War disintegration of the Left, treating the symptoms as the disease itself. It is worth noting here that the focus on white skin privilege did not emerge within the context of the shop-floor insurgencies of the interwar period where workers out of necessity struggled through their distrust, ethnic rivalries, prejudices and internecine conflicts within the practical strategic context of the card check campaigns and strike actions, but rather the analytical turn to whiteness took place within the context of class decomposition, the Cold War taming of working-class militancy via Taft-Hartley, the rise of McCarthyite anti-communism, and the spatial transformation of American cities through suburbanization and urban renewal projects that produced rising living standards for many whites while further segregating the black urban poor. The pioneers of whiteness discourse were well aware of the victories that interracial working-class organizations and mass movements had achieved in the Depression years because some had come of age amid those struggles. The source of their trouble, however, was the middle-class culture of conformity they endured in the post-war period. They developed arguments that saw white skin privilege as not only the cause of political conservatism in their times, but as the main barrier to developing a working-class consciousness and institutions that might advance socialism. As an amalgam of underlying, disparate class positions and interests, however, whiteness does not help us to understand the root causes of the growing conservatism during the years after World War II. What was needed then and now, is a Marxist class analysis that does not begin from the old Werner Sombart question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” which sets up not so much useful historical comparisons but ahistorical benchmarks of what class society and class struggle should look like.34 Instead, we need a historical-materialist analysis that begins with the careful examination of society as it exists, and that does not reduce complex motives and material interests to markers of identity.

The problem that Allen, Rawick and others faced— i.e., most whites were committed to country and capitalism on one hand, while many blacks were driven to militancy so that they might share in the most basic access to citizenship and opportunity on the other— was rooted in the victories and defeats of an earlier episode of class conflict spanning the Depression and World War II, where popular struggles and mass action were able to impose limits on the power of capital and achieve important victories for workers generally with the establishment of the Wagner Act and spread of unionization, but also to momentarily alter racial and gender exclusions through federally-managed public works projects and desegregation of the defense industries.35 The conservative political terrain that many still discuss in terms of whiteness and white privilege was a product of the post-war era turn to commercial Keynesianism and real-estate driven growth as a national urban development policy, attempts to weaken and criminalize radical trade unionism, and the New Deal coalition’s retreat from social democracy.

Post-war economic development improved the living conditions of millions of Americans and elevated a new middle-class consumer identity as a dominant social and cultural aspiration. As early as the Woodrow Wilson administration’s “Own Your Own Home” campaign, American politicians, commercial and real estate interests promoted homeownership as an antidote to left labor militancy.36 The turn to housing and real estate development as an economic growth model and political maneuver against labor insurgency would gain ground amid the Depression. Beginning with the New Deal establishment of the Federal Housing Administration and expansion after World War II under the leadership of Harry Truman, the US embarked on a housing revolution, a process of mortgage lending, massive highway and infrastructure development, and new home construction that transformed millions into nominal property-holders and members of the new middle class. Suburban development and all manner of consumer activity propagated a new consumer-class identity, sweeping away old urban ethnic and proletarian affinities, and cementing the loyalty of more secure workers to the Cold War growth trajectory of defense spending, urban renewal and suburbanization. Woven into this same process of suburbanization were policies that resegregated the black urban poor through tower block public housing, freeway construction and practices like redlining, which combined to devalue and deter investment in central city neighborhoods.

Out of this post-World War II urban-spatial transformation, race emerged as the dominant symbolic language for understanding American inequality. The combination of home ownership, access to suburban school districts, police protection, tax-relief, and relative economic advantage formed the material basis for the conservative positions of many whites who came to support the New Right, but we know that not all whites embraced such conservatism. Relative urbanity, union-membership, civic organizations, religion, familial and community traditions of activism, and other idiosyncratic factors continued to matter in shaping political ideology and policy commitments even in suburbia. “White” became a synonym for middle class, suburban, law-abiding, virtuous, property-owning, hardworking, and self-governing, and “black” came to function as a euphemism for poor, urban, criminal, dysfunctional, dispossessed, lazy, and dependent. Whiteness discourse accepts and legitimizes these symbolic markers of post-war class structure, without undertaking a more nuanced examination of actual material and political interests, how they are formed, articulated and contested within specific historical-local contexts.

In retrospect, whiteness studies emerged from the peculiar conjuncture of black political movement and white middle-class conservatism, and it inherits the same problematic assumptions of black surrogacy and the primacy of race politics that defined sixties left radicalism. Roediger scoffs at a criticism offered by the historian Sean Wilentz, who characterized whiteness studies as “black nationalism by other means.”37 In response, Roediger writes “in a broad sense the impact of African-American struggles and thought especially in the moment of Black Power shaped the critical study of whiteness decisively . . . there was a ‘white left’ named as such and even developing self awareness and self critique.”38 Wilentz’s criticism, however, touches on a problem that merits attention, one that Roediger’s defense does not adequately address, namely the way that black nationalists’ essentialist thinking about race, often dressed up in the language of culture, becomes central to the discourse of whiteness from its origins in the New Left to its institutionalization as an academic sub-field.

Despite their deep personal roots in interracial unionism of the middle-twentieth century, by the sixties, the forbearers of whiteness studies, like so many others at the time, embraced the basic assumptions of black power militancy, that race was paramount and that blacks constituted an organic political constituency. This position certainly made sense at the time, especially when televisions broadcast images showing virulent white mobs heckling and assaulting neatly dressed black children who could only enter “whites-only” schools under heavily armed guard. By embracing black civil rights and the desire for black autonomy, intellectuals like Rawick, Ignatin and others were expressing their solidarity with black struggles and black humanity in the strongest possible register. The problem, however, is that this ethical position, which spoke to a unique historical conjuncture, takes on another life when it is offered as a way of approaching historiography and politics. Moreover, that position of white deference—rather than white opposition—freeze-frames black political life in a manner that loses sight of its dialectical, contradictory nature. When we review sepia images of civil rights protests, they are evocative and command reverence from many on the Left today who appreciate the sacrifices made, but as the material of historical memory, those images do not capture the complex social relations, disagreements, exclusions, heterogeneity and contending interests that framed the Baton Rouge bus boycott, the Wichita Sit-ins, the Selma to Montgomery march, and scores of lesser-known campaigns.  Whiteness studies is shaped by a particular manifestation of black politics, a moment when black nationalist thinking became dominant.

In the late fifties, the strongest criticisms against the civil rights movement offered by African Americans came from what many called the New Afro-American nationalism, or simply the new nationalism, a mostly northern and urban political tendency that was represented in the rhetoric of Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam, organizations like the Group of Advanced Leadership in Detroit, the Afro-American Association in the Bay Area, the Organization of Young Men in New York, and the Freedom Now Party, as well as magazines like Liberator and Soulbook. Expressions of the new nationalist militancy defined the work of artists like the poet LeRoi Jones, saxophonist Archie Shepp, singer Abbey Lincoln and the drummer Max Roach, and the writings of the former communist and essayist Harold Cruse, among many others. Though their political and aesthetic choices were diverse, the new nationalists cohered around their skepticism of liberal integration as an historical possibility and effective solution to the problem of black inequality. They identified with the struggles for national liberation and socialism unfolding across the Third World, and were enamored by the aesthetics of armed struggle. Their demands for black autonomy and genuine revolution presaged the birth of the black power movement.39

Whiteness studies was conceived in the context of Black Power, at a moment when increasing numbers of black political activists and ordinary citizens had grown disillusioned with many openly questioning the utility of non-violent civil disobedience as a strategy, and when white suburbanization and post-war black urban migration had created the conditions for black political empowerment. Popular black publics embraced the criticisms and ideals of the new nationalists, and demanded black power and autonomy. Underneath the rhetoric of indigenous control and the black colony, however, black power in operational terms came to mean the pursuit of the established model of ethnic political incorporation. Flowing from that logic, whites needed to get out of the way as blacks closed ranks and asserted themselves as a collective. Organizations like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) proceeded to expel whites from their ranks—even if they would maintain relations with whites as financial benefactors and legal defense teams.40

Roediger discusses Rawick’s expulsion from the Detroit chapter of CORE, “as the organization moved from being a mostly white group to advocating Black Power, [Rawick recalled] that he was most pleased with the transformation, right down to his own removal.” Obviously Rawick, like many other leftists at the time, respected the desire for autonomy that many black activists asserted and was willing to step aside. That political moment, however, obscured the fundamental basis of political life, which is not shared complexion or ethnic affinity, but shared political interests, and instead legitimated identitarian leadership claims and specious notions of organic racial constituency. It should be noted as well, that the interracial purges marked the end of those organizations as effectual social forces, and in the case of CORE, the expulsions marked its turn towards the Right under the leadership of Roy Innis, who endorsed Richard Nixon for president. Roediger recalls that there were other incidents that caused Rawick considerable hurt, and that his relationship with the black historian Sterling Stuckey ran “afoul not only of past political differences but also of the US color line, which at times left [Rawick] hesitant to approach Black scholars.”41 Whiteness studies, then, inherits some of the core ideological flaws of black power thinking, namely the falsehood that racial affinity is synonymous with political constituency. These are not synonyms, and any close examination of black political life tells a much more complex story, one where class power and interests are always present and consequential.

When the Investor Class Goes Marching In: Multiracial Revanchist New Orleans

Roediger’s effort to provide some useful historical materialist approach runs aground when he turns to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. In Chapter 1, “The Retreat from Race and Class,” he criticizes two 2005 articles penned by Adolph Reed, Jr., “Class-ifying the Hurricane,” which appeared in the Nation, and “The Real Divide,” which was published in the Progressive. Writing in the months after the disaster, Roediger claimed that these articles were “the signature pieces so far of the retreat from race.” In a fashion repeated elsewhere, his discussion relies on cherry-picked quotes of Reed’s arguments and passing dismissals—e.g., “In one of the few bits of the article offering ostensible, if misguided, class analysis, exposing racism is said to serve ‘the material interests of those who would be race relations technicians.’”42 Rather than engaging in a serious, informed way, Roediger disregards Reed’s argument. And judging from the lack of any mea culpa in the introduction, he does not seem to realize that Reed’s formative assessment of the fundamental political forces at play in New Orleans has proven durable and prescient in the city’s decade-plus rebirth, which has been characterized by renascent ruling class power, massive dispossession and rent-intensifying development. Roediger’s insistence on a “race and class” framework largely misses the way that class was the most decisive force shaping the experience of the disaster, and how the city’s multiracial governing elite mobilized anti-racism to advance a property owner-centered reconstruction process, which has produced new dislocations and hardships for the city’s multiracial servant class.

Many academics and commentators framed the Katrina crisis in terms of racial injustice, a sensibility perhaps best summarized in Kanye West’s “Bush doesn’t care about black people” quip during a telethon for Katrina victims.43 The optics of the disaster certainly supported the view that racism was the culprit, as people around the world saw images of desperate black residents stranded on rooftops, wading through flood waters, and in the worst case scenario, dying due to lack of emergency services. The week after Katrina made landfall was also marred by horrific instances of police and vigilante violence against black New Orleanians, with some incidents not coming to public light until weeks and months later. When it comes to the racial frame, seeing is believing and experiential knowledge is irreproachable, but what we saw in televised newscasts only revealed part of the more intricate story on the ground. As Reed noted at the time, the contra-flow evacuation plan, where all lanes of the Interstate-10 highway are directed away from the city center, worked well for middle-class and working-class blacks with access to automobiles, as it had for similarly situated whites, Hondurans, Vietnamese and Isleños among others. The city’s disaster preparation was predicated on the assumption of personal responsibility and possession of adequate means to support individual or family evacuation. Those without automobiles, kinship or social networks beyond the city, credit card or savings account were unable, however, to make use of the evacuation process and seek refuge in a hotel or public shelter miles away from the city. Moreover, Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s administration offered the Superdome as a hastily and ill-prepared “shelter of last resort” for the tens of thousands of residents who remained in the city. So yes, those who suffered most were black, but they were the most vulnerable black New Orleanians. Blackness and institutional racism were convenient, pedestrian explanations of what happened, but these frames are too imprecise to capture the grounded-dynamics shaping the scale and substantive toll of the disaster. Relative class position was the primary determinant of who lived and died during the disaster, and it would be, as Reed anticipated, the primary force shaping the character of the recovery and reconstruction.44

Roediger favors Mike Davis’s interpretation of the Katrina disaster, but the usually adroit Davis was less apt in anticipating the ways that black political and civic leadership would help to authorize and advance mass layoffs of public workers, the shuttering of the city’s Charity Hospital, which had provided health care to generations of New Orleans’ poorest residents, the transformation of the city’s school system into an all-charter school district, a process that entailed the mass firings of the city’s public school teachers, the majority of whom were African American women, and the demolition of the last remaining public housing complexes.45 The charge of “ethnic cleansing” made by Davis, Roediger and many others in the aftermath of the disaster had a certain virtue as protest rhetoric, but as an analytical frame it is simply not helpful. It is mystification that does not capture the central dynamics of who lived and who died, and who was empowered through state relief programs, non-profit and foundation-funded projects, which not only favored homeowners and large real estate holders to varying degrees, but were openly antagonistic towards public housing tenants, renters, itinerant and often undocumented construction laborers, unionized public workers and teachers, activists and for that matter, anyone who might stand in the way of the neoliberal reconstruction agenda orchestrated by the city’s multiracial ruling elites.46

Black public figures like Nagin, former city council members Oliver Thomas and Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, jazz trumpeters Wynton Marsalis, Irvin Mayfield and Kermit Ruffins, the late restaurateur Leah Chase, bureaucrats like former HANO board chair Donald Babers, HUD secretary Alphonse Jackson, and one-time recovery czar Edward J. Blakely, mercenary education reformers like former local Teach for America director, Kira Orange Jones, as well as many black homeowners, landlords, private contractors and community activists have been crucial in projecting the image of a multiracial, inclusive recovery. Their motivations and views on recovery were not monolithic, but in most cases their approaches to reconstruction combined genuine sincerity for the welfare and future of the city, perspectives shaped by their specialized technical training and professional experiences, and specific career and material interests connected to the revitalization of the local tourist-entertainment-real estate complex. Most of these figures publically demanded a racially-inclusive recovery, asserted the centrality of the black presence to the city’s unique culinary and musical traditions and defended the right of the return for all residents in the abstract, adding a sense of internal dynamism and a veneer of racial democratic inclusion to the neoliberal project. Many were also, however, silent in the fight to save public housing, while others were openly hostile towards public housing tenants and vocally supportive of demolition. Recall then councilman Thomas’s underclass myth-making regarding public housing tenants when he proclaimed “We don’t need soap opera watchers now. We’re going to target people who are going to work. It’s not that I’m fed up, but that at some point there has to be a whole new motivation, and people have got to stop blaming the government for something they ought to do.”47 In a few words, Thomas gave credence to prevailing notions of the urban black poor as underserving moochers, and in so doing, authorized an ideological position on who should be included in the next New Orleans, a position that had already been condemned as racist and as “ethnic cleansing” when it was offered by whites who cheered the mass exodus of the poor after the levee failures. This combination of racial justice overtures and neoliberal political commitments has been missed in many analyses of the post-Katrina milieu that do not appreciate the historical origins and power of black political leadership, and the role they have played in legitimating a pro-growth development trajectory in the Crescent City since the end of Jim Crow. On this last note, Roediger’s “race and class” framework comes up short in providing any useful analysis of black politics in New Orleans and beyond. He admits as much in his introduction to Class, Race and Marxism.

Roediger claims that when he wrote his 2005 “Retreat from Race and Class” essay “few would have predicted that an African American liberal would hold the most powerful political position in the world two years later.”48 He then goes on to say that along with “the growth of significant wealth at the top of the African-American community, this trend has given rise to exciting new scholarship on intra-racial class politics and on intra-racial economic inequality in the last five years.”49 Here Roediger repeats a number of canards that hobble any useful left analysis of black life, and by extension American society. His use of the phrase, “African American community” repeats the fiction that the black population, now numbering nearly 46 million and greater than the population of Canada, constitutes some organic, intimate political community, with widely-shared experiences and interests—even as African Americans are divided by region, class, familial and kinship networks, religion, political ideology and personal tastes, immigrant status, interests and strivings. Amazingly, he contends that class differentiation among blacks and analysis thereof are late-breaking phenomena, in the “last five years” no less, rather than a reality that black activists and intellectuals have contemplated since the nineteenth century, and that scholars like Stein, Fields, Reed and Arnesen— who have all been critical of Roediger— have illustrated through exhaustive studies since at least the early seventies.

Roediger’s passing acknowledgement of an internal black class politics is too little and too late, and perhaps like the rest of his opening plea regarding tone, constitutes only a light revision of the same race-centric arguments. Even after acknowledging his own blind spots on the subject matter, Roediger writes “perhaps my 2006 critique was too harsh in examining the work that already was attempting to account for inequality in the Black community and the inadequacies of African-American liberal leadership, though in ways that I still think ended up being insufficiently attentive to either race or class.” Inequality within the black population is not new, nor is the problem simply one of inadequate black liberal leadership as he claims. In the decades after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black liberal politicians and civil rights leaders continued to fight for the expansion of social democracy despite the internal turmoil, political retreat and weakening electoral and legislative power of the New Deal coalition. This same post-segregation black liberal leadership worked to protect voting rights and anti-discrimination laws, and with the dawn of the crack cocaine epidemic, many were instrumental in waging groundbreaking campaigns against racial profiling and the carceral build-up in the 1990s. A more daunting problem is that black liberalism, meaning those who favor the activist use of state power to address social inequality, has faded as neoliberalization has come to dominate the Democratic party and become the normative urban economic-development orientation across the country. Contrary to Roediger’s surface reading, the problem besetting black political life is not black liberal politicians, but the hegemony of neoliberal politics. This is the central point of Lester Spence’s book, Knocking the Hustle, a point that Roediger somehow misses even as he enlists that work to support his claims.50

At one point in his discussion of New Orleans, Roediger turns to an old stand-by, the nomadic interpretation of signs and symbols, in this case, a protest placard that pointed out the hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s War on Terror and its lousy response to the misery and death experienced by residents in Louisiana’s largest city. Recalling the black anti-Vietnam War quip, “No Vietcong Ever Called Me Nigger,” the sign declared that “No Iraqi Has Ever Left Me to Die on a Roof,” once again capturing the prioritization of American imperial interests abroad over reckoning with domestic injustices. Roediger concedes that “Poor whites, and indeed the large numbers of Vietnamese resettled in the Gulf region and abandoned in Katrina’s considerable wake, could conceivably march under the ‘NO IRAQI’ sign.” Again, Roediger moves from analysis of cherry-picked symbols towards speculation and voice throwing, rather than examining the actual positions white workers, different unions, Vietnamese organizations, politicians and homeowners took in relation to the recovery regime. Such a task that would have required more investigation into the actual balance of class forces on the ground in New Orleans, the complexities of racial, ethnic and other native-local affinities in the city and its hard hit surrounding parishes, and the political alliances that prefigured the Katrina disaster and shaped the process of its recovery. Roediger rejected Reed’s formative assessment, but Reed offered the kind of informed, grounded-historical account that not only gets New Orleans right, but is the only worthwhile interpretative approach for those of us who want to create a more just and egalitarian city, one the places the needs of working people over those of capital.

Looking for Solidarity in All the Wrong Places

In the concluding essay, Chapter 6 “Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past,” Roediger begins by revisiting political struggles and debates that emerged in the wake of the 2012 vigilante killing of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and the 2014 police killing of unarmed, black 17-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. He criticizes the philosopher Steven D’Arcy who questions the utility of some of the emerging slogans of the “movement for black lives” and the ways that whites are cast as junior partners and “allies” in black-led protests against police violence. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” captured the commonsense view that police and vigilante killings are meted out against blacks more frequently than other groups, a view that was legitimated with every viral video of unarmed black citizens being shot, choked or bludgeoned by police—again, in the age of social media, seeing is believing. From that perspective of who bears the burden of police violence, whites are ordered to take a backseat, “check their privilege” and play a supportive role.

D’Arcy takes issue with an internet video titled “I Am Not Trayvon Martin,” created by University of Kansas undergraduate Emma Halling in response to the “I Am Trayvon Martin” t-shirts worn by blacks in protest. In the video, Halling discusses her sense of white privilege, but D’Arcy contends that such identity-focused moves and apologetics undermine solidarity and mark a clear retreat from older and more useful political discourses of sixties social movements. He argues that in our times, the older sixties language of oppression has been replaced by talk of privilege, analysis of working-class exploitation has given way to “classism,” and building alliances and solidarity through political action has dissolved into hierarchies of participation, where the terms of one’s involvement in political work is conditioned by “positionality” and relative privilege.51

I agree with his criticisms of contemporary activist frames and their limitations, but I am not persuaded by D’Arcy’s contention that these are a wholesale departure from New Left vocabulary. If anything, we can find the roots of contemporary identitarian sensibilities in the sixties. Contemporary white self-flagellation over being a “good ally” is clearly descendant from the expulsion of whites from civil rights organizations discussed previously, and it inherits all of that moment’s problems as political practice, imposing a social hierarchy on political life based on identity claims rather than demonstrated commitment, political acumen, organizing skills and capacity or other criteria that should matter. In both cases, the public performance of democracy takes precedence over the kind of deliberation and strategic thinking that is needed to build an organization or wage a successful activist campaign. I agree, however, with his overall criticism of contemporary thinking, where epistemic standpoint is the basis of political affinity and action, rather than shared interests and those political objectives individuals and groups are willing to fight together to achieve.

This problem of conflating identity and interests is especially acute in popular framing of the policing crisis, where many view prisons and criminal justice as problems that primarily, if not exclusively, affect blacks—a position that Roediger abides in his introduction. Closer analysis of arrest-related deaths, as well as who is arrested and convicted, however, reveals a class character to contemporary policing.52 Ironically, although Roediger criticizes David Harvey who said he did not see “very much anti-capitalism” in the Ferguson protests, Roediger does not do much either to subject policing and mass incarceration to a useful Marxist class analysis, or to connect those discrete problems to an anti-capitalist politics. He seems content to merely express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter crowd, assert the righteousness of their cause and, as he does with the writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, defend them against any criticism from the Left that might reveal their limitations.

There is a truth to D’Arcy’s criticism that Roediger misses, and had he taken the time to examine the actual demography of policing, which communities and populations are targeted, rather than deferring to hashtag sloganeering, he might have been able to offer an analysis of the contemporary carceral state, which functions as a means of managing surplus population during an age of technological unemployment and rollback of the social wage.53 Black and brown populations are overrepresented among those who are incarcerated and under court supervision, and black men are much more likely to be killed in arrest-related incidents. The common denominators among America’s incarcerated at the time of their arrest and after their release, however, are poverty, underemployment and unemployment. Frames like “Black Lives Matter” and the “New Jim Crow” do not capture that reality and, as others have noted, such language actually circumscribes the potential for generating broad popular support for dismantling the carceral state and creating more just alternatives for securing public safety. Roediger owes us more than platitudes on this subject matter. He should do the work of offering class analysis of the actual historical dynamics at play, especially since whites continue to make up 58.4% of federal inmates, and 39% of all inmates in jails and prisons nationally. If the problems of policing and incarceration are widely felt across race and ethnicity, urban-rural geography and sectional divides, it would seem that there is potential to build a broader and deeper base of opposition to the carceral state, one that is capable of winning the legislative and congressional majorities needed for any meaningful reforms.

In response to critics like D’Arcy who call for broad solidarity, Roediger writes, “[I]t remains critical to make a case for embracing solidarity while simultaneously being uneasy about the assumptions it sometimes evokes.” “The unease ought to make us wonder if solidarity is always a good thing, “ Roediger continues “to recall what and whom solidarity leaves out, and how it is premised on those leavings out, to consider how solidarity works across differences in kind and degrees of oppressions, and to ask if the presence of solidarity is the logic of things or if for long periods it may be a treasured exception.”54 Roediger wants to trouble the view that solidarity springs forth from shared material conditions, but aside from a rather unfair evocation of the historical Marx’s writings, we do not really get a clear sense of who actually abides by this notion nowadays. Also, are we to assume that within racially homogenous or women-only political formations, achieving political unity is somehow easier? No one who has spent any amount of time in black activist meetings or black church congregations would give quarter to such a notion. Roediger sees difference as a formidable challenge to the concept of solidarity, but his chosen method of taking up the subject, which focuses more on the aesthetics of solidarity, e.g. T-shirt slogans, the origins of the song “John Brown’s body,” the limitations of hymns like “Solidarity Forever,” and the “Black solidarity of the ring shout,” rather than the historical conditions, social relations, organizational sub-cultures and practices, and leadership that give rise to solidarity in actual struggles.

I was disappointed reading a discussion of solidarity that fixated on Pepsy Kettavong’s “Let’s Have Tea” sculpture located near the Susan B. Anthony house in Rochester, New York. As much as I adore the Laotian-born Kettavong’s depiction of the friendship between two of Rochester’s most famous left progressives, Anthony and Frederick Douglass, that bronze representation has precious little to do with how solidarity is forged in real time and space, either in the 1850s or in this moment of Trumpism. Again, Roediger’s focus on decontextualized art, as opposed to the character of unfolding social struggles simply leads to more wrong-headed conclusions, rather than thinking through the ways that people build social bonds, discover common interests, and make mutual sacrifices— in other words, the actual work of political practice. Kettavong’s sculpture and Roediger’s analysis tell us very little about the making of solidarity in contemporary Rochester—certainly not the city I experienced as a resident during the decade after the 2001 September 11 terrorist attacks.

During the aughts, in a time of pervasive anxiety and jingoism, it was not difficult to find racism and xenophobia in Rochester. Despite those conditions, activists there mounted a successful interracial effort to address the problem of lead poisoning. In 2006, nearly four percent of the 14,500 children under the age of 6 who were tested in Monroe county had elevated blood lead levels, meeting the Center for Disease Control’s “level of concern.”55 Many of those children lived in the so-called “Fatal Crescent,” a majority black, Latino and poor area stretching across the northeast, northwest and southwest quadrants of the city, named so because of the frequency and concentration of homicides and other violent crimes. The Rochester Lead Free Coalition (now referred to as the Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning) waged a successful fight to pass a lead-paint abatement ordinance, one of the most stringent in the nation at the time, which would apply to all housing stock built before 1978. Under the 2006 law, property owners would be subjected to lead inspections, and when elevated levels were detected, compelled under penalty of law to make repairs and bring their property up to code. Since that time, there have been documented reductions in the rate of lead poisoning in the city.

I bring up the fight against lead-paint poisoning in Rochester, not because it is some unique development, but precisely because it is so mundane. It represents the place where solidarity is forged most often, through struggles that bring people together not because of corporeal identity, but because of their shared sense of what problems deserve their attention and how they might work together to create solutions. The Rochester Lead Free Coalition united public school teachers and administrators, many of whom witnessed the cognitive effects of lead poisoning on a day-to-day basis, the parents of children who had been affected, and community activists in neighborhoods with older and deteriorating housing stock. The coalition was also comprised of activists from left organizations like Metro Justice and the Green Party, congregations and clergy, perhaps foremost among them being Reverend Marlowe Washington of Baber African Methodist Episcopal Church, professors, students, social workers, and health care professionals. For every person who attended a rally, planning meeting or city council session, there were probably as many different motivations for their getting involved. Some may have had personal reasons, a loved one or acquaintance who was lead-exposed, but for others, their motivation may have been more overtly political, seeing this issue as an expression of class power and how landlords place profits over the welfare and safety of their tenants. It should be noted too, that those who opposed the lead paint abatement ordinance were also diverse, a mix of landlords who lived in the suburbs and the city, and who were black, brown and white. And even among the majority-minority city council, some politicians were concerned about the welfare of young children, but were also wary of imposing a “tax on doing business” and the potential negative effects new regulations and strict enforcement might have on future investments. They came around to supporting the measure through the concerted and sustained pressure of activists. With blacks, whites and Latinos on both sides, where are the “white interests” in this particular political fight? Neither whiteness nor white privilege would have been a helpful way of framing this problem, or a means of winning reform. The same is true for the battle to save public housing after Katrina, or the struggle for better wages and hours during the 1892 New Orleans General Strike.

Whiteness studies has produced a form of anti-racist politics focused on public therapy rather than public policy, a politics that actually detracts from building social bonds and solidarity in the context of actual organizing campaigns, everyday life, and purposive political action. This political problem is not strictly Roediger’s, but is one that besets the contemporary left more generally and is derived from the cultural turn within Western academe and the U.S. Left since the sixties, the rejection of modernist political projects as irredeemably tarnished by histories of racism and imperialism, and a resulting deep, pervasive suspicion of constituted power. Whiteness studies, as Roediger illustrates, had its origins in the distinctive needs, challenges and aspirations of white New Leftists, who sought to bridge their own alienation within the affluent society and their social justice commitments with the shifting black nationalist sensibilities that transformed black political life from a focus on defeating Jim Crow and securing full citizenship towards demands for self-determination from the middle-sixties onwards. The problems of white middle-class conservatism and quiescence that New Leftists ran up against during the Cold War were conjunctural. The petit-bourgeois politics analogized as “whiteness” were the result of the institutionalization of trade union victories and defeats during the middle decades of the twentieth century and concomitant transformations in state-market relations, urban space and residential settlement that accompanied the postwar housing revolution. These historical processes had the combined effect of reorienting popular sentiment towards an acceptance of capitalist class interests as those of Americans writ large.

The interpretive problems and faulty political assumptions of whiteness studies have become entrenched through the emergence of a therapeutic industry dedicated to rehabilitating interpersonal racism and addressing white privilege through acts of contrition, and have grown more dangerous as they have been amplified and degraded via social media. There is not much evidence that the expansion of this mode of anti-racist trainings over the last few decades has produced a different politics, a willingness to take risk, to sacrifice one’s privileged position to make substantive changes in society, or even altered day-to-day behavior. In 2017, after a suburban Chicago teen posted a Snapchat photo of himself in blackface, causing a furor at his high school, his mother defended the integrity and tolerance of their household saying she had just read Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, and that Coates’s Between the World and Me had been on her son’s “reading shelf forever.”56 If anything, whiteness deprogramming provides a ready means of egress, a way to demonstrate sympathy without making more difficult, sustained political commitments that might entail contesting institutionalized power. Neither does it require shedding or sharing the actual trappings of middle class privilege, i.e. better salaries, savings and assets, high performing schools, the capacity to travel, social networks, etc., which are codified in popular speech as white privilege, even though these same goods may be shared by other middle class and wealthy ethnics. Whiteness training encourages sharing one’s origin story, failings and sense of torment, but beyond charitable giving, it does not necessitate sharing resources at the level of redistributive public policy, i.e. through expansion of the universal social wage, commuter taxes, consolidation of urban-suburban school districts, revenue sharing across metropolitan divides, federally-managed public works projects etc. There is also a millenarian and liberal individualist dimension to the kind of anti-racist politics embodied in whiteness studies, notions of white privilege and the like. We are told individuals must correct their flaws before they can participate with others, a view that runs counter to what should be conventional wisdom about human behavior and social movement dynamics. The assumption that the therapeutic work needs to happen first is simply wrong, and there are plenty of examples throughout history and in our own times where we can find imperfect people working to realize and advance their common concerns.

The work of building solidarity lies elsewhere, not in therapy aimed at self-actualization, but in lived social relations and sustained political work that transforms participants’ social consciousness and collective sense of historical possibility. Those everyday social relations and the context of political work are always defined by the presence of differences, whether those are differences of background, perspective, maturity, knowledge, insight, power, capacity, and passions, and none of these are calibrated strictly in concert with racial, ethnic, gender or other corporeal identities. Although Roediger and others condemn “class reductionism,” their work too often succumbs to a reductionist view of black political life that does not comprehend different material interests and ideological positions among African Americans. What is lost in the din of whiteness discourse, and certainly in the reparations hustle that Roediger defends, are the strategic choices made by black people who have sought working-class solidarity and action, despite the fact of political disenfranchisement, segregation, and repression. It would seem that latter-day historians, activists and bloggers are more preoccupied with difference than those black teamsters who joined the 1892 general strike in New Orleans, or those African American and Puerto Rican parents who fought alongside white teachers, social workers and community organizers to end lead poisoning in Rochester. We should be able to talk about situated-class experiences, i.e., ascriptive gender and racial hierarchies, sectoral and regional variations in working lives, unique occupational subcultures, idiosyncratic worker concerns and daily issues, without losing sight of the fundamental capitalist class relation of exploitation, and the dependency on wage labor endured by the vast majority of the U.S. population. Moreover, when we discuss what are often treated as discrete identity-based issues, i.e. matters of hyperpolicing, health disparities, urban unemployment, environmental racism, the gender gap in wages, affordable housing crises and gentrification, we should be clear that those problems originate from the tremendous power capital wields over all of our lives, and contesting that power is essential to addressing those specific concerns and creating a more just state of affairs.

As it took formal shape during the Reagan-Bush years, whiteness studies set out to counter the myth that working-class solidarity springs organically from shared oppression, and to show that such solidarity is always contingent. In the process, however, whiteness studies has painted working-class solidarity into a corner analytically, treating solidarity as always and everywhere hemmed in by racial difference. From the most cynical view, the pursuit of a working-class, anti-capitalist politics is always elusive and impotent. Working-class solidarity, however, like all other forms of alliance and common cause, is forged through politics, an imperfect and unwieldy process of discovering and advancing common interests through debate, conflict, bonding, experimentation, sustained work, failures and victories. Such solidarity is not given, nor permanent. Its value is not intrinsic, but rather its worth should be measured by the degree to which anti-capitalist solidarity alters the balance of class forces in a progressive way, and imposes more just, non-alienated, non-exploitative modes of working and living. Differences of opinion and passion are preconditions of political life. We should not be uneasy about these social realities, or unnerved by the difficult work of building counterpower. The only ones who should be uneasy about solidarity are the bosses.

It is important to acknowledge that there were different material outcomes for different black strata under contemporary redevelopment. At the same time, better material outcomes for black property owners and real estate professionals did not come from a change in how they defined their interests in the recent period from one that prioritizes the racial group over their specific class. In this article, I argue that the benefits that black professionals received from their investments and participation in redevelopment was less a change in how they define their interests than a change in opportunities to pursue those interests.7 In other words, there has been an underappreciation for the role of class interests in driving black housing professionals and property owners’ politics during the postwar urban renewal period. Middle-class blacks’ interests may be harder to detect in the earlier period, but just because black professionals were not largely able to realize their interests does not mean they did not aspire to achieve them in the postwar period. Many of their earlier aspirations are being fulfilled in the recent flurry of urban redevelopment some fifty years later. That lack of recognition has caused some scholars like Derek Hyra to exaggerate the differences between the two urban renewal regimes and their impact on African Americans. Hyra does this by counterpoising middle-class blacks engaging in racial uplift which purports to advance the racial group versus this class pursuing the narrow interest of enhancing their property values through reinvestment even though it will displace their lower-income neighbors in the process.8 I argue that a closer examination of the earlier period would have given us clues about the political behavior of black professional-managerial stratum in the more recent period of urban redevelopment. In this instance I will draw upon examples from Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, and Oakland in the early 1960s to show the continuity between the two periods by first highlighting black property owners and real estate professionals pursuing their class interests in the postwar period, and second, underline the class content of racial uplift ideology particularly evident in the more recent instances of black gentrification in Chicago. I will examine both postwar and contemporary redevelopment to illustrate the continuity of black professional-managerial class interests between the two periods and the consequences for the study of black politics.

Comparing Old and New Urban Renewal

There are many factors that are similar and different between the postwar and contemporary periods of urban redevelopment. The main similarity between the two periods is the facilitative role that the federal government plays in authorizing and subsidizing the revitalization of neighborhoods that border the central business district.9 The redevelopment of downtowns and surrounding neighborhoods was initiated by public-private partnerships in both periods. Both the interests of public officials and private businesses benefited from these arrangements. Whether the municipal government played an entrepreneurial or simply a supportive role, private developers still set the priorities, the timetables, and the likely outcomes of the redevelopment activity. Municipal government gained in property tax revenue, and in commercial and residential upgrades in and around its downtown, which led to mayors gaining prestige and enhancing their electoral opportunities. Private developers, real estate brokers, and mortgage lenders gained in profits from sales and rentals, and the fees that come from increased real estate transactions. These public-private partners often constituted the governing coalitions in cities in the post-World War II era and today. These local public-private partnerships were instrumental in jump-starting and then managing revitalization in both periods. Moreover, the benefits that accrued from this redevelopment activity was key to the partners’ willingness to continue to participate in the city’s governing coalition.

A key difference between the two periods was the source and amount of capital available to private developers to redevelop properties after federal dollars were used to clear away public housing in neighborhoods bordering downtowns in the recent period. The deregulation of the financial industry, which featured financial product innovations, created surplus capital looking for new investment outlets. For instance, the development of mortgage-backed securities traded globally created a huge influx of capital in the redevelopment of inner cities.10 Also, the role of public housing changed between the two periods. In the first period, public housing was approved and built to house those income-eligible residents who had been displaced by the demolition of old slums. In the second period, public housing, after decades of real estate industry opposition and governmental neglect, was considered the new slums to be cleared for mixed-income and upscale housing developments in targeted neighborhoods. There is broad agreement about these differences in the two periods.

In contrast, both the role of black professionals in the process of urban revitalization and the impact on black residents are controversial among scholars. What underlies both the role and outcomes is the charge that broad racial group interests dictated politics in the first period while narrow class interests motivated and guided the political behavior of black professionals in the second period.11 Hyra argues that most blacks suffered from postwar urban renewal.12 It is true that mostly blacks, regardless of class or housing tenure, were displaced by postwar slum clearance. Not only were their homes displaced, but businesses and social institutions were also displaced. Furthermore, many commercial strips of establishments that were either owned by and/or served black people were devastated and never recovered.13 However, black property owners did not suffer to the same degree as black tenants. While they were often displaced along with black tenants, they were compensated, although often unfairly, for their property.14 Although constrained by lingering restrictive covenants and other segregative practices, due to their income they were able to buy or rent in more select neighborhoods.15 When black tenants were displaced their only option was to find available housing in nearby segregated and declining neighborhoods.16 How much individual blacks were harmed and what limited opportunities were available to them was based on their class and housing tenure. In some respects, these differences were overshadowed by the common experience of being displaced by white politicians and real estate developers for the expected benefit of middle-class whites who worked and shopped downtown. Few blacks benefitted from, or were in the public-private partnerships that underwrote postwar urban renewal.17 The lack of black participation in public-private partnerships with some notable exceptions also contributed to the narrative that the loss was largely a racial one.18

During the more recent urban renewal period, the neighborhoods that have been targeted by HOPE VI and other redevelopment programs were segregated by race and class, therefore those displaced were poor, working class and mostly tenants. Since the point of government intervention was to use public funds to leverage more private investment in low-income neighborhoods, after public housing residents were displaced private housing tenants followed as more buildings were either converted to condos or demolished to accommodate an upscale clientele. As a result middle-class blacks benefitted from the urban redevelopment in 1990s and 2000s in two ways. First, unlike the earlier period where they were largely displaced, the focus of current inner-city redevelopment is to attract and retain middle-class homeowners. Second, due to holding onto re-valued property, making strategic investments, and participating in new public-private redevelopment partnerships, middle class blacks benefited from contemporary urban renewal. Whether they were black homeowners who never left, the children of previous residents who took up a family property, or black professionals looking for a good investment all have cashed in the escalating property values, at least until the Great Recession.19 Black property owners, realtors, developers and insurance brokers benefited by rising property values in inner-city neighborhoods subject to HOPE VI-spurred revitalization. Black professionals in the real estate industry nonetheless are active in enhancing land values that garner fees, commissions and profits. Hyra commented that middle-income blacks followed their class interests by choosing to participate in redevelopment partnerships instead of practicing the collective politics of racial uplift.20 He considers black professionals following their class interest as a novel development in urban redevelopment politics in contrast to the earlier period. It will be clear from what follows that black property owners’ interests have not changed from one generation to the next, but urban revitalization in the 1990s afforded this stratum unprecedented opportunities to realize those interests.

Black Elites and Postwar Urban Renewal

In Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, I show that black policy elites in Chicago in the postwar era were engaged in debates over urban renewal, public housing, and housing discrimination that reflected a racial democratic ideology which promoted racial group interests that hid, but largely privileged the class interests of black elites.21 For instance, at least as early as 1942 there was widespread “fear of Negro clearance” on the South Side when the Chicago Plan Commission declared a twenty-three square mile area was blighted or near-blighted and would need to be cleared and rebuilt. Despite the fact that five years later the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council talked about redeveloping the area for both black and white “Loop workers,” black Chicagoans assumed they would be displaced by white professionals and clerical workers who were employed downtown.22 This fear was palpable given the fact that at the time few blacks worked downtown who weren’t passing, and people understood the locational value of their neighborhood’s close proximity to both the Loop and Lake Michigan. Nevertheless, Lake Meadows, the first urban renewal project, was slated for interracial occupancy, which should have called into the question the rhetoric that urban renewal created an injury to the whole racial group.23

Despite the widespread fear of Negro Clearance not all blacks opposed the Lake Meadows project. The debate among blacks over slum clearance in Chicago did not break down along class lines as much as residential and sectoral lines. Factions of black property owners and institutional leaders opposed urban renewal whereas regional black federal housing policymakers supported it. The opposition was led by The Champions, a neighborhood homeowner organization led by Alice Browning and other black middle-class women.24 Aligned with this group was an assortment of black property owners, politicians, ministers, and business owners who stood either to lose property, votes, congregants, or customers if the “captive” black ghetto was broken up by urban renewal.25 The support for urban renewal was led by George Nesbitt, a black regional federal housing official based in Chicago, who argued that if blacks wanted residential integration on the periphery of the ghetto they needed to be willing to allow integration via urban renewal on the mid-South Side.26 There were also black notables like Irene McCoy Gaines and Truman Gibson, Jr. who were members of the South Side Partnership which supported the Lake Meadows project.27

Although there wasn’t a vote taken on the Lake Meadows project by black residents directly affected by it, it appears, unsurprisingly, a majority of them opposed the redevelopment project. While poor working class black tenants stood to lose a great deal, they were not active participants in the intraracial debate, but were nominally represented by progressive middle-class property owners.28 The result of slum clearance was a little more mixed for black property and business owners. They did lose property and businesses, but were compensated in ways that non-property owners were not.29 Furthermore, some blacks living in the neighborhood could afford to rent an upscale apartment in Lake Meadows.30 I point to these differential costs and benefits in the postwar period because they would be missed in an evaluation that simply tried to determine whether urban renewal was good or bad for the race as a whole. It is also further evidence that black property owners had options, however limited, that were not available to poorer tenants in postwar urban renewal.31

It was clear that the opposition to urban renewal represented the “majority opinion” when Supreme Liberty Life and other black-owned insurance companies pulled out of a plan to build single family homes as part of the city’s first urban renewal project. Insurance company executives like Earl Dickerson of Supreme Liberty Life cited two related reasons for their withdrawal. First, they were concerned that they would not be able to sell their exclusive single family homes in a timely enough fashion to recoup their investment. They were not sufficiently capitalized to not realize a return in a relatively short time frame. Second, it was also clear from their comments that their participation in the plan was considered racial disloyalty, which of course jeopardized their ability to attract the small number of affluent blacks as potential home buyers who either agreed with this sentiment, or at least did not want to experience  racial shaming by their peers. Because many middle-class blacks as property owners and organizational elites opposed the city’s redevelopment plan, they were in position to shape that majority opinion and discipline members of their class that did not follow the race line they established. They determined who was loyal to the race and who was considered a sell-out.32

Some of the same people who were initially opposed to Lake Meadows were involved in trying to redevelop the mid-South Side in ways that did not further displace black Chicagoans, at least the property owners, from prime real estate. They viewed slum clearance as not just an attack by city hall and downtown on the black community, but more specifically, an assault on the prerogative of their class to determine the land uses in segregated black neighborhoods. Through hard work, ambition, and exploitation they had carved out nice, middle-class blocks in neighborhoods that overall suffered from both private and public disinvestment. There is a long history of black place entrepreneurs including such notables as Oscar DePriest, Jesse Binga, and Carl Hansberry accruing large holdings, subdividing apartments, and charging blacks the same exorbitant rents charged by white landlords in the process of building “the Black Metropolis.”33 Black publisher Claude Barnett responded to the city’s first urban renewal project by utilizing his position as a board member of Supreme Liberty Life to advocate raising enough capital to redevelop their adjoining affluent enclave.34 Barnett instructed the Supreme Liberty insurance company agents, “Let’s build a pool of money here so big that this desperate housing condition which exists here and in other cities where we operate can have big dents made in it because [of] the fund of money which Supreme Liberty has.”35 After 1953, he and others attempted to take advantage of the changes in state and federal laws that emphasized conservation over slum clearance.36 There was a consensus among black property owners in neighborhoods surrounding the Loop that they would rather have the city rehabilitate select homes than indiscriminately clear the whole neighborhood. In other words, black property owners wanted to see their houses spared while the city’s bulldozer knocked down decrepit tenement buildings, especially those owned by white absentee landlords.37 While the historical record on this score is limited, from at least 1944 to 1955, Barnett along with his fellow homeowners initiated various attempts to control redevelopment of their neighborhood which bordered the Lake Meadows project area. Apparently, none of Barnett’s schemes were successful due to the lack of capital.38 In one instance, the city backed one of the schemes though they expressed concern about the lack of capital coming from the black-led neighborhood development corporation initiating the plan.39 So while there was opposition to the city’s first urban renewal project that produced Lake Meadows, black property owners, business owners, and politicians were not opposed to redevelopment which entailed some clearance as long as it was under their control and spared what they considered “the highest and best use” of the land, single-family homes and upscale apartment buildings.

Beyond the interest of black property owners to conserve their middle-class blocks in the institutional ghetto, there was consistent interest on the part of black real estate brokers and lenders in joining the public-private partnerships cobbled together to redevelop the mid-South Side. Black insurance companies, along with Illinois Federal Savings and Loans, underwrote many mortgages for black property owners on the city’s South Side.40 Supreme Liberty-Life Insurance Company, which was the largest black business in northern United States, had expressed their interest in joining the first urban renewal project only to withdraw after strident opposition to their participation emerged from those in their professional and social circles. There were other attempts by ambitious black real estate brokers such as Bolin V. Bland who sought national and local black capital to start a mortgage company to underwrite mortgages in the black community.41 In fact, one black director of a savings and loans in Ohio went as far as to appeal to white capital to jumpstart a black-led “self-help” scheme to fund a black-owned mortgage company.42 It was clear that national and local schemes for controlling mortgage capital never got off the ground due to insufficient capital. In the context of red-lining and land contracts, issuing mortgages to black homeowners, even at high interest rates due to perceive risk and limited capital, was considered progressive given the structure of urban land markets.43 The point here is not to praise or condemn, but only to reveal what black real estate professionals sought to accomplish with the limited opportunity they had during the postwar urban renewal period.

The Case of Oakland  

Unlike Chicago where black elites only aspired to participate and benefit from redevelopment partnerships, black property owners and black real estate professionals were able to realize this goal in Oakland, California. In the early 1960s, the city’s first two urban renewal projects was the Acorn project and Oak Center located in West Oakland. The plan for the Acorn site, one of the poorest parts of the city, was to have mixed residential and industrial land use.44 The population of the site was 78 percent black, and nearly half of the households were dependent on some form of public assistance. It was estimated that at least 500 low-income families would be displaced from land clearance.45 Much of the opposition to the plan was not against land clearance or revitalization, but whether to house those displaced in public housing.46 Sociologist Chris Rhomberg sees Acorn as noteworthy because the city’s black middle-class leadership in confronting the city on the behalf of black residents “gained a foothold in the urban renewal process” even though they were not successful in preventing displacement.47 Rhomberg points out that this leadership did not live in the Acorn neighborhood, and this fact seemed to make a significant difference with the fate of the next urban renewal project.48

The second project targeted the Oak Center neighborhood, a fifty block area north of Acorn. The differences in the predominant class and organization of the residents between the two redevelopment areas determined different outcomes for each neighborhood. Black homeowners led by Lillian Love, whose family unsuccessfully fought an earlier displacement due to public housing construction in the 1930s, created the Oak Center Neighborhood Association (OCNA) to fight the city’s plans.49 The black homeowner association sought rehabilitation over total clearance, which was the plan for the Acorn neighborhood. In 1964, during the negotiations over the plan for Oak Center the executive director of the Oakland Redevelopment Agency resigned and was replaced by John R. Williams, a black former redevelopment official from Cleveland. Under Williams’ leadership the redevelopment agency worked with an advisory committee of OCNA to come up with a plan to preserve many of the homes of middle-class black neighborhood residents. Rhomberg argued that these middle-class black homeowners had earlier distinguished their interests from the low-income tenants in the neighborhood. He concludes, “through their organization and sophisticated use of strategic allies in the federal government, they compelled the regime to incorporate their interests as middle-class property owners in a majority black neighborhood.”50 In future redevelopment projects, both in the downtown and nearby neighborhoods, Williams established affirmative action programs which ensured that minority construction workers, minority building firms, black developers and community institutions got their fair share of employment and building contracts under the urban renewal regime in Oakland.51

It is clear from the historical evidence in Chicago and Oakland that black property owners, investors and developers sought to maximize their property values in the segregated ghetto during the old urban renewal regime. They resented their exclusion from white real estate associations and partnerships with downtown capital and city government, especially in redeveloping black neighborhoods. In Chicago, they attempted to counter their exclusion by drawing up self-help schemes that never got off the ground due to limited capital. Black business owners needed black people to “buy black” by funneling their wages and income into purchasing the goods and services of black owned companies when available in order for those companies to accumulate capital to compete with white businesses. Black insurance companies regularly complained about black policy-holders purchasing insurance from white companies. The implication was if they had all the “black dollars” they could compete with larger white companies.52 Black elites reasoned that if they weren’t allowed or were unable to compete with white companies in larger markets at least they should dominate the housing and commercial markets within the ghetto. They felt they should have had proprietary control of the segregated black community. This was where the battle with white capital was most fierce. Due to the growth of the black middle class after 1970, gains made through the civil rights movement and Great Society programs, and a prosperous economy for black baby boomers, the aspirations of a prewar generation of black property owners, investors, brokers and lenders came to fruition in the 1990s.

Black Middle Class and HOPE VI Redevelopment

Derek Hyra, Mary Pattillo and Michelle Boyd have all produced useful studies of black participation in urban redevelopment that commenced in the early 1990s. All of the studies are set in former poor black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago – Bronzeville and North Kenwood-Oakland – that are in the process of gentrification. The novel development compared to other studies of gentrification is the fact that both the longtime residents and the newcomers are black. Each of the scholars used ethnographic methods to collect data on the political behavior of black property owners, business owners, community planners, and real estate developers.53 Each study is focused on the following questions: what motivated the black newcomers to invest in poor black neighborhoods; what do these newcomers think about and how do they relate to poorer longtime residents; in what ways have they contributed to the displacement of these residents; and what is their relationship to the growth regimes that dominated politics in Chicago during the 1990s and 2000s?

Their studies focus on members of the black professional-managerial class who chose to invest, revitalize and/or reside in poor black neighborhoods. Sociologist Mary Pattillo’s study mostly focuses on the attitudes and practices of affluent black homeowners who chose to reside in North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood.54 Political Scientist Michelle Boyd’s study analyzes long-time black residents, business owners and community planners’ nostalgia for an elite-ruled segregated Black Metropolis. These long time black homeowners were active in community planning organizations that reviewed developers and developments who wanted to build in the Douglas-Grand Boulevard neighborhoods in Chicago. Her study concentrates on the role of black heritage tourism as a vehicle of black-led economic development.55 Sociologist Derek Hyra’s comparative study of Chicago and New York focuses on the way black property owners, politicians and developers all contributed to enhancing property values.56 All of the studies illustrate the new opportunities that black property owners, developers and investors have gained to produce exchange values in gentrifying black neighborhoods. Where they disagree is whether racial uplift distracted their black subjects from pursuing their class interests, or in fact, provided a racially acceptable rationale for those same interests. Hyra sees how racial uplift diverted  black property owners from following a strict adherence to the logic and structure of property markets. Pattillo and Boyd show how the ideology of racial uplift which purports racial group solidarity behind black elite-led redevelopment of black neighborhoods represents a way for black subjects to pursue their class interests while professing their linked fate with poorer blacks. These disagreements are often posed as black elites either engaging in racial uplift or pursuing their class interests.57

In his conceptualization of the “new urban renewal,” Hyra emphasizes the benefits that middle-class blacks gain from gentrification and the harm that lower income blacks experience. He is to be commended for bringing a class lens to the issue of neighborhood change, but he is not alone in featuring this lens in his analytical framework.58 In particular, his study explains “how more contemporary class distinctions translate into specific political actions influencing property values in revitalizing black neighborhoods.”59 He felt the need to point out the role differential class interests played in neighborhood revitalization given the fact that earlier studies of black gentrification by John Jackson and Monique Taylor deemphasize class differences in the interests between black middle-class newcomers and poorer longtime residents in Harlem.60 Hyra also correctly takes aim at political scientist Michael Dawson’s idea of linked fate. Hyra points out that Dawson’s argument that middle-class blacks identify with the racial group is based on “perceptions of racial solidarity rather than actual behaviors grounded in black communities.”61 In his critiques, Hyra aligns himself, correctly, with Mary Pattillo, since both seek to introduce the idea of class interests in tension with racial solidarity in black professionals’ decisions about what was necessary to revitalize formerly poor urban neighborhoods.

As a way to dramatize the choices confronting middle-class blacks Hyra counterpoised racial group uplift with the interests of enhancing property values. He draws on St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s definition of racial uplift as elevating the profile of blacks through individual achievement as well as engaging in practices that help the group as a whole. Hyra argues that black gentrification raises the race’s profile while failing to achieve group advancement.62 He also attacks the implication made by William Julius Wilson’s critique of black middle class flight that they would strengthen economic and social institutions if they had remained residing in, or returned to inner-city neighborhoods. Middle-class blacks’ positive influence would come from their superior resources and their ability to model behavior conducive to personal success in the marketplace.63 For Hyra, the choices that middle-class black-led block clubs, community development corporations, and planning boards made every day, which aim to change the class demography of inner city neighborhoods, necessarily entail displacement of lower-income blacks. In other words, the practices those entities adopt to elevate property values will be the same actions that end up displacing poor longtime residents regardless of middle-class blacks’ motivation or intention. He argues that middle-class blacks have chosen to align themselves with the urban growth machine rather than with their low-income neighbors.64

Hyra attempts to build on the insights of Michelle Boyd and Mary Pattillo when it comes to understanding the complexity of racial uplift. He follows Boyd when he criticizes the “contradictions” of racial uplift espoused by black gentrifiers.65 Both Pattillo and Boyd show how black property owners’ and community planners’ belief in racial uplift allows them to pursue their interests while thinking in doing so they are helping to elevate less fortunate members of the racial group.66 Both scholars argue what makes middle-class blacks different as gentrifiers is that they don’t want to displace lower-income black residents.67 It appears that they reject white gentry’s “revanchism” wanting instead to reconstruct their idealized vision of a harmonious class-integrated black community.68 However, according to this vision, and the practices that it informs, poor black residents cannot outnumber or “overshadow” their middle-class counterparts and they must consent to having their behavior modified by their middle-class peers.69

Hyra found in his research that despite the fact that middle-class blacks might have felt sympathy toward their poor neighbors, mentoring and assisting them was not a “major priority” for these homeowners.70 Pattillo counters that some of the black middle-class homeowners she interviewed and observed felt public housing residents who had been “left behind” represented the “incomplete project of black advancement.”71 She thinks black newcomers interpret “linked fate” as a personal obligation to help needy blacks.72 Following this logic middle-class blacks tended to use “environmental” rather than “structural” explanations for the poverty of their black neighbors.73 Pattillo explains that the preference for environmental explanations stemmed from middle-class blacks’ feeling they can only be effective when they intervene through role-modeling and mentoring in the neighborhood or community environment. Furthermore, she chides, “It takes concerted and collective action to redirect the economy or politics at the local or national level, whereas it only takes parking your BMW in front of your house to be an example of financial success for your less well-off neighbors.”74 She finds tellingly, but not surprisingly that her middle-class subjects reject economic redistribution as a remedy for black poverty.75 Hence, they express their linked fate with their lower-income neighbors by providing personal assistance and advice, something that requires them to volunteer their time, but not pay more taxes.

Michelle Boyd goes one step further in her critique of racial uplift. She saw the updated ideology of racial uplift live and well among her middle-class black informants who were longtime residents. These informants believed that since poor black neighborhoods had been disinvested by white political and business elites, it was up to them to reinvest in inner-city neighborhoods. This means, as Boyd points out, black gentrification became a strategy for racial uplift.76 She observes that her middle-class black informants were not against gentrification as much as their own displacement by wealthier whites.77 Their redevelopment strategy now, which was rehabilitation rather than demolition, was the same stance taken by an earlier generation of black property owners in the Douglas-Grand Boulevard neighborhoods.78 In this modern version of racial uplift it was imperative for affluent blacks to purchase expensive homes, and create and attract new businesses, in order to establish a tax base that would purportedly benefit all neighborhood residents. Accordingly, black property owners were essential to “stabilize” the community. They were being counted on to take on more responsibility than just provide for their personal financial well-being. Their investments were meant to benefit the group as a whole.79 A key assumption of this strategy is that individual investment is considered to double as a communal investment since “all blacks share a common set of racial interests” in black neighborhood improvement.80 As Boyd points out, racial uplift ideology does recognize class differences, but these differences are not considered “meaningful divisions” because they were overshadowed by the similarity of racial identity.81 However, this ideology tries to paper over the fact that affluent and poor blacks have not only different, but conflicting interests in urban revitalization. Boyd writes that this ideology is particularly pernicious because while it does acknowledge inequality among black strata at the same time it minimizes the political implications.82 The major implication is that following their interests in rent intensification will threaten the interests of lower income residents.83 Boyd concludes, “in their attempt to be attentive to the needs of poor blacks, Mid-South members become limited by an ideology that obscures the conflicts of interest implicit in gentrification.”84

Conclusion

While Hyra agrees with the contradictions of racial uplift outlined by Boyd and Pattillo, he does not get the extent to which it represents an updated version of a durable class politics. To be fair, Hyra says his wide-ranging work is not an examination of black politics.85 However, this admission also reveals an insufficient appreciation for how the theoretical lens of class has been applied to the study of black politics.86 According to Pattillo, the study of black politics has been far more critical of middle-class blacks than the field of urban policy, which she thinks privileges middle class actors as crucial for community cohesion and neighborhood revitalization.87 She argues that in the field of black politics there is a critique of the black middle class for contributing to the “marginalization, if not subjugation, of poor blacks.”88 By counterpoising racial uplift with class interests, Hyra does not convey the extent that the politics of racial uplift in its many iterations was and is a class politics.89 It is not accidental that racial uplift reappears when middle-class blacks reoccupy inner-city neighborhoods.90 As I have outlined above, racial uplift is a politics that helps to rationalize middle-class leadership in an intraracial, mix class setting. Pattillo talks about the fact that middle-class blacks can only recognize their class status in contradistinction to “unadjusted” poor blacks. She writes, “(t)he virtuous behavior of the black middle-class required the depravity of the black poor as its counterpoint.”91

Hyra’s work does not convey the continuity of black property owners’ and professionals’ class interests in different periods of urban redevelopment activity. A broader examination of earlier middle-class blacks’ interest would have indicated the continuity of those interests in a political setting which now provides far more opportunities to realize those interests in the recent bout of urban revitalization. Moreover, a recognition of continuity may have allowed Hyra to better convey the class content of racial uplift politics which never deviates from the bourgeois interest in rent intensification. It is refreshing that Hyra finds among his subjects a more naked expression of class interests without the varnish of racial uplift. It may be significant that such a stark expression indicates a new willingness among black real estate professionals to openly and unapologetically align themselves with urban growth interests. If racial uplift is now interpreted as black gentrification, then there is no contradiction with the real estate capital standard of “highest, and best use” of land as long as it is black-owned. However, given the prolonged shelf life of the obfuscating concept of “linked fate,” it is imperative to still show the often hidden class content under the announced racial group interests. The continuity between a sometimes hidden and sometimes more open expression of class interests by black property owners, investors, developers and politicians calls into question how new is new urban renewal supposed to be. The durability of class interests among all the members of the growth coalition, including its newer black members, speaks to unprecedented opportunities to build the kind of biracial public-private partnerships that were only imagined in the postwar period.

Like most other black leaders of the Depression decade, Granger was clear that the chief challenges confronting African Americans in the 1930s were poverty and unemployment. Granger, therefore, contended that blacks must mobilize around economic concerns. Fortunately, New Deal era black youth had learned, what Granger called, the principal lessons of the “new common wealth.” First, they must fight for “the man at the bottom” because anyone could find him/herself there in modern times, Granger asserted. Second, blacks must forge appropriate (economic) alliances with whites. Granger went on to say:

Slowly and painfully young people are learning the Negro’s fight for freedom is not a fight of the Negro for Negro freedom, but that the Negro’s fight is only a small part of a nation-wide struggle—not of ten or twelve million Negroes, but of fifty-five millions of Negroes and whites, the majority of the population of this country.2

Granger’s speech to the NAACP’s Youth Council was partly autobiographical.  Born in Newport News, Virginia in 1896, Granger was a member of the black elite. His father, William Granger, was a Medical Doctor. While Granger’s five brothers followed in their father’s footsteps, he pursued a professional path of his own making. After earning a BA from Dartmouth College in 1918, Granger served as a lieutenant in an artillery unit attached to the, all black, 92^nd Division during World War I. After his honorable discharge, Granger embarked on a career in social work, securing positions as executive officer in a number of black uplift organizations—most notably the National Urban League. His early work in organizations such as the Negro Welfare League (NWL) of Newark and the Manual Training and Industrial School (MTIS) in Bordentown (1922-1933) reflected Granger’s embrace of individual solutions to societal problems such as racial prejudice and economic inequality. Indeed, these groups attempted to combat racial inequality by providing blacks vocational training and cultural tutelage.3 Granger’s departure from the MTIS for the National Urban League was, thus, a logical career move, as the NUL was the most prestigious and influential black uplift organization of the era.

Still, Granger’s career with the NUL would mark a shift in his approach to the problems confronting black Americans that would be reflected in the evolution of the National Urban League’s uplift project. Granger’s speech to the NAACP Youth Council was, thus, not simply autobiographical, but it offered a window onto the impact of New Deal industrial democracy on the uplift politics of the National Urban League—and, of course, black politics generally during the 1930s and 1940s.  The New Deal’s efforts to redress the problem of under-consumption, at least in part, through unionization—best exemplified by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Wagner Act—transformed not just the workplace, but American democracy. Aware of the contradictions between the Jeffersonian democratic ideal still celebrated by most Americans in the 1930s and the realities of industrial society, New Dealers sought to use government, as President Roosevelt stated, to “assist in the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order.”4 The right to unionize was at the center of this agenda. New Dealers ultimately understood collective agitation in the workplace as a public good. Unionization enhanced workers’ purchasing power and, along with entitlements, afforded dignity and security to the nation’s producer classes. This social democratic turn in American political culture tilted the focus of African American civil rights away from narrow calls for racial equality, that basically accepted economic inequality as a given, towards broader demands for economic justice. New Deal industrial democracy would also encourage political militancy among black activists, who came to identify mass protest as a responsibility of citizenship.

In the case of the Urban League, the Workers Councils—which were led by Lester Granger from 1934 to 1938—were the clearest expression of the impact of industrial democracy on civil rights and black uplift. Founded in 1910 by black sociologist George Edmund Haynes, the NUL was established, partly, to facilitate rural black migrants’ transition to industrial cities by addressing the material and cultural barriers to black integration. In contrast to the NAACP, the Urban League eschewed direct challenges to racist policies and practices. Proceeding from the view that blacks would only overcome whites’ visceral prejudices through proper conduct, the League developed programs intended to acculturate migrants and impoverished blacks. The NUL and its locals likewise encouraged employers and landlords to provide deserving blacks access to decent jobs and housing. The group’s emphasis on self-help, has led some scholars to cast the League’s philosophy in the conservative light of Booker T. Washington. Though the Urban League was firmly imbedded in the conservative wing of the Civil Rights Movement, the group’s approach owed more to the bourgeois liberalism of the famed Chicago school of sociology than the Wizard of Tuskegee. Still, even as Chicago sociology equipped Urban Leaguers with powerful intellectual tools with which to counter the thrust of eugenics, i.e. scientific racism, Chicago school race-relations models such as social disorganization/ reorganization and ethnic cycle ultimately led Leaguers to emphasize the needs of middle-class blacks, as these individuals already possessed the cultural and intellectual attributes necessary to demonstrate the race’s capacity for assimilation. The Urban League’s identification of respectable behavior as essential to black integration, likewise led it to occasionally assist employers and landlords in weeding out undesirable workers and tenants.5

While the Urban League’s work during the 1930s continued to reflect a preoccupation with the interests of middle-class African Americans, New Deal industrial democracy would inspire the social work organization to take an activist turn.  The League first began to mobilize black workers in 1933 through its Emergency Advisory Councils (EAC). The EACs set out to combat discrimination in recovery programs by both lobbying officials in the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and other New Deal agencies and by encouraging black workers to demand their fair share of relief. Blending petition and interest group politics, local EACs achieved some success in breaking down barriers to relief programs in Chicago and other cities.6

In 1934, the NUL’s efforts to mobilize black workers took a more militant direction—as alluded to in Granger’s 1938 “Challenge to the Youth” speech— with the creation of the Workers Councils (WC). The brainchild of T. Arnold Hill, longtime director of the Urban League’s Department of Industrial Relations, the Workers Councils identified collective agitation, rather than personal responsibility, as the surest route to black economic equality. Workers Councils thus educated blacks about the implications of federal recovery efforts and labor law. WCs likewise mobilized grassroots protest campaigns, such as the Councils’ 1936 campaign demanding an antidiscrimination amendment to the Wagner Act. Finally, the Workers Councils encouraged African Americans to join in common cause with white workers in labor unions. After centralizing operations in the Workers’ Bureau, headed by Lester Granger, the WC spread like wild fire.  At the conclusion of four years of operation, the Workers Bureau established more than 70 Workers Councils in 21 states representing tens of thousands of black workers.7

The Workers Bureau’s calls for increased black participation in the union movement required the group to work directly with organized labor. The WB continued the NUL’s longstanding efforts to encourage the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to open its ranks to African Americans.8 Though the AFL ignored the WB’s calls for racial fair play, the Urban League would find an important ally in the fledgling Congress of Industrial Organizations. Founded in 1935 by United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis, the CIO focused principally on unskilled and semi-skilled laborers who comprised the core of the nation’s industrial workforce. Since most African American workers were unskilled, the democratic potential of the CIO’s industrial focus was clear to the WB’s Lester Granger from the outset.  The comparative racial liberalism that characterized the CIO’s organizing drives in the steel industry, between 1936 and 1943, would affirm the Urban League’s commitment to the industrial union. The NUL’s Workers Bureau, thus, not only encouraged African Americans to affiliate with CIO locals, but in 1938 the Urban League would dissolve the Workers Councils, turning over their work in support of black unionization to the CIO.9

The Workers Councils’ official calls for black political mobilization and interracial working-class solidarity were indicative of the League’s newfound militancy. Some prominent Leaguers had expressed an interest in interracial unionism dating back to the 1920s; however, the League’s partnerships with employers and its reliance on wealthy philanthropists ensured that little would come of these calls prior to the WC. The Workers Councils’ workers’ education programs are therefore best understood as a product of the New Deal and the related leftward drift of American politics. Still, as I have argued elsewhere, “the Urban League’s identification of interracial unionism as an instrument of uplift was neither altogether novel nor indicative of a commitment to left-wing politics. Indeed, the Councils’ calls for interracial unionism were shaped by the social work group’s longstanding embrace of sociological race-relations theory.”10

Since the 1920s, League officials had reflected on interracial unionism’s potential for promoting goodwill between blacks and whites.  Leaguers such as CUL/NUL Director of Research Charles S. Johnson alluded to this issue in the famed Chicago Commission on Race Relations Report. According to the CCRR, labor market segmentation and union discrimination were among a number of issues contributing to the 1919 Chicago race riot. In its efforts to stave off similar conflagrations in the future, the CCRR suggested that greater equality in the workplace might, in time, reduce racial animosity. “Through contact and association with Negroes during working hours” the Commission argued, “white workers may come to look upon Negroes, not as members of a strange group with colored skin, but as individuals with the same feelings, hopes, and disappointments as other people.”11 The Chicago Commission on Race Relations Report “only implied that interracial unionism might counter ethnic prejudice;” however, in 1925 the T. Arnold Hill and the NUL would sponsor a worker education program whose overarching aim was to elevate “the relationships between the races in the ranks of organized labor.”12

The League hoped that fostering a sense of camaraderie between black and white workers might defuse racial tensions. Rather than reflecting radical sensibilities of Marx or Lenin, Johnson and the NUL’s interest in interracial solidarity was rooted in Chicago School of Sociology race relations models such as ethnic-cycle theory. Ethnic-cycle presumed that ethnic/racial group assimilation conformed to a five-stage process consisting of: contact, competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Even before the New Deal, then, some Leaguers identified unions as a vehicle through which to facilitate blacks’ assimilation into the American mainstream, socially and economically.  As New Deal era labor legislation legitimated the union movement by establishing collective bargaining as a public-good, the League expanded on its efforts to enhance blacks’ economic, political, and social standing via unionization.13

Even during the New Deal, assimilation theory continued to influence Leaguers’ perspectives on unionization. Indeed, T. Arnold Hill believed that interracial working-class solidarity had the potential to foster mutual empathy between blacks and whites. In a 1937 publication, Hill identified unions as a potent means of combating apathy among blacks while simultaneously defusing racial tensions. Echoing a central claim made by W.E.B. DuBois in Black Reconstruction, Hill argued that the ruling class had used race as a wedge to stave off interracial class coalitions since slavery.  Hill asserted that the union movements of the New Deal era— particularly the CIO, with its comparatively liberal racial policies— showed the promise of interracial class alliances. Hill believed that interracial trade unionism was indispensable to improving black workers’ wages and working conditions. He was equally clear, however, that such efforts promised racial amity. Specifically, Hill argued that organized youth groups had already shown their capacity to neutralize racial animosity. Bringing black and white youth together for a common aim, he argued, such groups “have not only inoculated others with the germ of good-will toward their fellow men but have marshalled a new force of militant opinion for economic reform and cooperative efforts in social welfare and social reorganization.”14

The Leagues assessment of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee’s (SWOC) 1937 southern union drives harmonized with Hill’s perspective. Specifically, the Workers Bureau argued that black unionization might create “a new type of interracial relationship….” Since the union movement fought for the protection of labor’s rights, the League argued that CIO affiliates would “find themselves… defending the civil liberties of Negro workers even at the risk of supporting ‘social equality.’” Though the Workers Council Bulletin did not provide a detailed discussion of specific policies, it did contend that black CIO affiliation held the potential to engender the kind of interracial solidarity necessary to transform both the workplace and the broader society. If SWOC were to organize blacks “on a basis of democratic equality,” the WB argued, African Americans would necessarily have real influence in the workplace. Keenly aware of organized labor’s growing political power in the late 1930s, the Bureau likewise argued that unionization promised African Americans influence over American politics. “For the first time since Reconstruction,” the Bureau asserted, “Negro citizens of the south will have a chance to join in large numbers with white citizens in democratic efforts for civic improvement.”15

Two years later, the National Urban League’s organ, Opportunity, revisited the democratic potential of SWOC’s southern organizing drives in an article by Alfred B. Lewis entitled “The Negro Worker and His Union.” Echoing the Workers’ Bureau’s assessment, Lewis argued that the CIO’s campaign in Birmingham, Alabama augured a major shift in the region’s racial politics. Like the Bureau, Lewis believed that SWOC’s commitment to interracial trade unionism would play a decisive role in African Americans’ quest for racial equality by equipping blacks with a tool that was capable of both improving their employment prospects and chipping away at Jim Crow.  Arguing that black civil rights required interracial solidarity rooted in mutual interest, Lewis asserted “it would seem clear that, in the long run, the most effective attack on segregation,” would have to come from organizations “including both whites and Negroes,” in quest of “economic advantage for the group as a whole.” According to Lewis, “unions [were] a perfect example of such groups.”16

As I stated previously, Granger’s speech to the NAACP Youth Council was not simply a reflection on his idiosyncratic sensibilities, but it was also a window onto the philosophy shaping the work he directed via the National Urban League’s Workers Councils. Indeed, the labor orientation of the League’s uplift philosophy during the New Deal was illustrative of a general leftward drift in American and African American politics during the 1930s and 1940s.  As scholars such as Eric Gellman, Risa Goluboff, and Jonathan Holloway have noted, black activists during the New Deal and World War II came to perceive racism as an outgrowth of class exploitation. The NUL, the NAACP, and the Communist influenced National Negro Congress (NNC)—three of the most influential civil rights organizations during the New Deal and World War II—would all identify unionization as a crucial component of black equality.17

With the creation of the Workers Councils, however, the Urban League would institutionalize a labor-oriented civil rights agenda before the more militant NAACP and even prior to the creation of left-wing National Negro Congress (NNC). To be sure, the NAACP’s Second Amenia Conference had recommended adding worker education to the group’s program as early as 1933. Nevertheless, institutional constraints prevented the NAACP from embracing black trade unionism as a civil rights strategy until the end of the decade. Ironically, the very philosophy that led the NUL to adopt a comparatively conservative approach to African American racial progress in the decades preceding the New Deal—its emphasis not just on employment, but the group’s interest in adjusting the attitudes of workers, black and white—likely influenced the Urban League’s decision to adopt a more militant approach to civil rights just a year into President Roosevelt’s first term.

Granger and the League’s promotion of trade unionism as a vehicle for civil rights highlights the problem with the commonplace disposition to view the NUL and NAACP through dichotomous lenses like Bookerite or Du Boisian. Such frameworks not only look past institutional politics’ sway over the scope of these civic groups’ agendas, but they may also obscure the influence of changes in the broader political landscape over the parameters of African American civil rights. In “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” Judith Stein traced the tendency of American historians to reduce black political movements to potted frameworks such as “accommodation and militance, self-help and protest” to a reflexive reification of race. As Stein put it, students of African American politics too often treat black led movements “as mechanical successions of protests against racism and withdrawal into self-help,” which functions to mystify race—divorcing racism “from the concrete and complex experiences of social groups in particular circumstances.”18

Stein explored the explanatory deficiencies of off-the-shelf dichotomies such as accommodationism and integrationism by examining Booker T. Washington’s rise to prominence within the context of the Populist insurgency. As Stein argued, northern philanthropists and southern elites heralded Washington’s accommodationism not as an alternative to DuBois’s militant integrationism, but rather Washington’s vision for a politically inert black laboring class, promised to quash the comparatively egalitarian, interracial Populist movement.

In the 1890s, the Populist insurgency reflected the common material interests of African American and white agricultural workers who had been squeezed by crop-lien and marginalized by Republican and Democratic parties that had identified a ready supply of cheap, tractable labor as essential to the New South’s commercial and industrial development.19 To be sure, the Colored Farmers Alliance—which attracted about 1.25million members at its peak—was committed to issues such as voting rights and personal safety. According to Stein, however, Populists did not see these as simply black issues. Democrats, not whites, sought to suppress blacks and other constituencies antagonistic to their legislative agenda. For Populists, then, ousting Democrats equated protecting the franchise for black men. More to the point, African American and white Populists alike embraced economic programs—such as cooperative exchanges and subtreasuries—and legislation intended to loosen the grip of planters and the south’s nascent industrial class over the working man. Stein is clear that many white Populists, like most other whites, harbored racial prejudice. She contends, however, that African American and white agrarians’ shared material interest fostered a sense of solidarity that would break under the weight of election fraud, violence, and intimidation, rather than ingrained attitudes.20 According to Stein, this is the context that gave rise to Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist philosophy—a political project that, in contrast to the CFA’s grassroots, egalitarian political movement, was imposed on most blacks by the northern philanthropists, and southern planters and industrialists who financed Washington’s career.21

According to Stein, historians had generally failed to situate Washington’s rise within the context of Populism—despite the CFA’s large membership—because the tendency to view black politics through a narrow lens of “racial struggles” excluded political movements, like the CFA’s, “that encompassed but transcended racial goals.”22 Though many scholars have noted the labor turn in black civil rights during the New Deal and World War II, the long Civil Rights Movement framework—which proceeds from the view that African Americans have been united in a fight against a trans-historical racial oppression— has led even many of the historians who acknowledge the labor orientation of New Deal era civil rights politics to look past the proximate influences informing both the break from the clientage model of politics that was dominant before the Depression decade and the Civil Rights Movement’s turn toward attitudinal—rather than political-economic— conceptions of racism during the Cold War.  According to Stein, Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty—a sweeping history of civil rights activism in the north—suffered from this very problem. “Because his purpose is to record the long history of black activism… Sugrue,” Stein asserted, “slights assessments, non-racial sources of change, and the structure of power that activists faced. He rarely evaluates strategies that transformed institutions and social relations and those that did not.”  Stein went on to say that since Sugrue not only eschewed both exploration of “the activists’ ideas” and the efficacy of their political platforms, he constructed a narrative that ensured that readers would “never meet an activist who had bad politics.”23

For Stein, “bad politics” would be defined as a program that not only failed to address capitalism’s role in generating poverty and inequality but “bad” political frameworks were also incapable of mobilizing a large enough base of support to catalyze political change.  Stein’s The World of Marcus Garvey made clear that Garveyism—with its reification of race and its identification of entrepreneurialism as an engine of racial uplift—was “bad politics.” According to Stein, Garveyism’s reliance on a language of racial solidarity was intended both to shore up a loyal base of consumers for black entrepreneurs who were incapable of competing with large, white-owned businesses for market share and to obscure the fact that entrepreneurial uplift could, as is its nature, only benefit a small stratum of elites—the burgeoning class of black businessmen whose economic fortunes and aspirations hinged on the uncomfortable marriage between the economic gains African Americans had made during the Great Migration and residential segregation in the urban North.24

Unlike Stein, Lester Granger was not a Marxist. Nevertheless, Granger’s “Challenge to the Youth” presumed—much like Stein— that a “good politics” for African Americans centered on efforts to create a more equitable distribution of wealth for all Americans, which might only be achieved via interracial coalitions built on common material interest. In the era of anti-racism and reparations, Granger’s calls for interracial working-class solidarity might seem naïve. But this is so only if one reifies race or forgets, or just does not know, the lessons of the past.  In 1938, Granger would not have had the benefit of the kind of hindsight that informed Stein’s assessment of black politics. Nevertheless, his instincts about the promise of the “new commonwealth” for African Americans were basically correct.  Though some are quick to dismiss the necessity of interracial political alliances by pointing to their short shelf-lives, such individuals should take a page from the book of Judith Stein and compare the track records of the disparate interracial political coalitions— spanning the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations— that were indispensable to the victories of the modern Civil Rights Movement, whatever the movement’s shortcomings, with that of the racial “self-help” projects advanced by the likes of Booker T. Washington or Marcus Garvey.  Because blacks remain overrepresented among the unemployed, the poor, and the working class today, any serious effort to redress racial inequality necessitates—just as it did in Granger’s day— that tens of millions of blacks forge political alliances with similarly situated whites as well as Latinos, Asians, and others.