This introduction asks why the ways that we think through questions of race and class, particularly in academic settings, cannot be more like that back-and-forth on killer cops. It, and the book itself, urges less dismissiveness towards opposing positions. It refuses to imagine that we achieve open debate by embracing positions advocating for the sidelining of the consideration of race or, as in the case of liberal multiculturalism, by neglecting questions of class. However it does urge, in ways involving self-criticism of even some of the reprinted essays included in the volume, a respect for the ways in which those from whom we differ are working to address difficult problems in hard times.
A specific need for self-criticism deserves elaboration at this early point. Anchoring the collection is a 2006 provocation that I wrote for a special “Class” issue of the venerable US Marxist journal Monthly Review. Titled “The Retreat from Race and Class,” my essay scarcely avoids the problems of tone for which I skewer others both within it and below in this introduction. When I wrote it, the most polemically sharp of these collected essays, the critical things that I had to say about some people whom I like and admire gave me pause. In some cases they should have given me more pause. Such was especially the case with regard to Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres, whom I now see less perhaps as retreating from race and class analysis than as trying to move beyond Black and white in understanding those matters, and to Paul Gilroy. I was therefore pleased that as the article circulated Paul and I were able to communicate forthrightly about it. At one point in trying to contextualize our differences, and my respect for his position, I wrote to him that I thought much of the contention stemmed from those against whom we were trying to argue. In my case the quarrel has been with activists and labor history scholars whose “class first” claims reduce social divisions so profoundly as to miss both the gravity of race-based inequality and the reality that much social motion responds to that inequality not because of manipulation by “middle-class” activists, but because of a history of struggles and a present shaped by old and new incarnations of white supremacy. Views marginalizing race also too often embrace the wishful thinking that if the political field were cleared of all those arguing for organizing around opposition to white supremacy, all would be well.
In Gilroy’s case, the confrontation he enters has been with a narrow nationalism on both the fascist right in Europe and parts of the left that take the tactical utility of mobilizing on racial grounds as a fact of life. Such views, he warns, find their ways into the wider swaths of antiracist politics, which too easily suppose that constructions of race will endure and that it is wrong to question what it hides. So forcefully does Gilroy’s Against Race take this stance that it argues for the rejection, which he admits to be costly, of race-based mobilization not as an immediate cure-all enabling a return to class politics but as a necessary step to find new forms capable of addressing inequality with a goal of transcending race. One can—and I do—disagree with the prescription while acknowledging that the issues raised are profound. In that sense, while leaving my own essays intact as a part of a developing argument, it is necessary to acknowledge overstatements in characterizing, for example, my differences with Gilroy, Darder, and Torres.
Seeking, then, to raise questions of tone as well as substance, this introduction begins with a consideration of how a long period of defeats for both racial and class justice structures both our confusion and our bitter certainties. A second section considers, perhaps less graciously in terms of tone, how recent controversies over the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and its opposition to race-specific demands help to measure the difficulties of class-first positions. Such positions, I will argue, reach into the thinking even of some who succeed much of the time in keeping race and class simultaneously in view. A third part argues that, nevertheless, there are substantial grounds for hope in newer approaches to race and class, including in approaches criticized elsewhere in the introduction. Especially promising is work attempting to argue that the production of racial and other differences is itself part of the logic of capital. A concluding section takes readers through the contents and origins of the book’s six essays.
Our Period and Its Discontents
On the surface, it would seem easy to think about race and class together. Not too long ago, I would have regarded a challenging formulation in the 1963 edition of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins as giving an elegant, if a little vague, solution to the question of how we do so: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics,” James wrote, “and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous.” But, he immediately added, “to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”9 The quote still resonates powerfully, but I now think of it as being more a statement illustrating how deeply our problems run than as a solution to them. James sees the two categories as distinct, separable, and needing to be ranked, in ways I no longer do. Nevertheless his vantage, like Harvey’s, provides a good basis for mutuality and common work among those with differing inflections. Subtle balancing is required. The task is hard and not susceptible to being precise. As movements ebb and flow, existing struggles make one terrain, or perhaps inflection, seem more attractive at one moment, less at others. Pretense regarding a mastery of the calculus James calls for is regularly humbled. It ought, then, to be possible to differ about the specific emphases on race and class across time and place while not vilifying each other.
Just after a 1984 conference on the future of labor history had been held at Northern Illinois University, I ran into my informal mentor George Rawick in St. Louis. George, an important thinker on race and class who is the subject of one of the essays in this volume, took care of me around the fact that I had not been invited to the conference, despite being a graduate of Northern Illinois. He offered accounts of lots of the papers, but shook his head, often suggesting that they could only be so good and were fated to descend into acrimonious, petty disputations. The whole idea of the event was, he repeated several times, a mistake: “Can you imagine holding a conference on the future of labor history when there are no strong social movements to tell us where it should go?” We might hesitate, and at other moments George would have hesitated, to stake so much on the connection between upsurges in social motion and clear thinking by intellectuals. Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Stuart Hall, for example, thought through important ideas in periods of profound political defeat. But mostly, Rawick was right in terms of substance and he was distinctly on to something in terms of the difficulty of maintaining a comradely tone during periods of social quiescence.
Rawick’s comments speak to why it has not been easy to play nice and be clever when theorizing race and class during the long decline of the civil rights and labor movements. What used to be called the “nature of the period” has been favorable to posturing and unfavorable to both charity and clarity. The largest context structuring acrimony is that it has been for a very long time difficult to talk meaningfully about the ebb and flow of either struggles against class oppression or of those contesting racial injustice. For nearly half a century in the United States, we have overwhelmingly experienced ebbs and awaited flows. Nearly fifty years ago, when I first encountered the words quoted from James, US labor strikes of over 1,000 workers averaged 300 per year, sometimes reaching well over 400. In 2009, five such strikes occurred, in 2014 eleven, and in 2015 twelve. Today when the words “strike” and “US” are paired we think of drones. Union density, the traditional measure of labor’s decline, has hit unions only a little less hard, with a third of workers organized in the mid 1960s and a tenth—far less than that in the private sector—in 2015. I still wear a faded old T-shirt opposing a “generation of givebacks” in union contracts, but persisting unions are now in the third generation of defensive struggles.
That same period witnessed the end of great advances of the Black freedom movement and a turn to struggles to keep 1960s measures in force. Since the 1980s, the movement has played defense by attempting to slow the timetable of the