Where Work on Race and Class Is Going and Might Go
Admittedly, so far the introduction has not been a model of a positive, open-to-everything tone. Where attempts to sideline thinking about specificities of racial oppression are concerned, I suspect that letting “a thousand flowers bloom” cannot be the watchword, though willingness to work and debate together across difference can. I do stand by the idea that all of us should approach the difficulties for thinking about race and class generated by the difficult period in which we live with humility and frank admission that we cannot know where things will go. Happily, there is much in recent scholarly work and in recent struggles that offers glimmers of possibility. Indeed, some of the best insights in politically engaged recent work comes from some writers whom I have criticized above as too ready to suppose that class analysis best thrives when the field is cleared of over-emphasis on race.
In particular, three areas of promise deserve emphasis. The first involves how the critical study of whiteness might best respond to profound changes in the working class itself. The second measures the importance of anti-police, anti-racist movements and of recent work addressing inequality within the African-American population and to the increased visibility of what might be called “rulers of color.” The third brings us back to the introduction’s beginning, taking up the ways in which recent work challenges the view of David Harvey and so many others that race sits outside of the logic of capital.
With regard to the critical study of whiteness, the left scholarly project with which I have been most involved, the grounds for possibly productive auto-critique seem clear. I approach matters as someone who doubts that how we attach labels matters much against the weight of social relations. “Black or African American?” produced for a time interesting debates, for example, but in the longer run things shifted, and it became clear that academics and even activists do not get to determine popular usages, and social relations mattered more than names for them. Nevertheless, I think that we may be due for discussion on whether “white privilege” now serves us well in naming patterns of white advantage inside a system in which most people are miserable.
This question struck me forcefully during a 2015 visit to Rochester, New York. The historians Joel Helfrich and Jonathan Garlock had taken me on a wonderful tour of Rochester’s past struggles and present deindustrialized crises before I appeared on a Rochester Public Radio show. The host asked much about “white privilege.” It is not a phrasing I use often but neither has it ever been one I objected to. In this instance, I did note the extent of joblessness and foreclosure across the color line in Rochester and wonder aloud if “white advantage” might be a less loaded term.29 This reservation registers the fact that the Marxist coinage of “white privilege” (or “white-skin privilege”) by Theodore Allen with Noel Ignatin in the 1960s seems to have become less the popular meaning of the term today than non-Marxist variants. Allen theorized “white privilege” as the package of mostly petty preferences offered to all whites and especially to poor whites, in order to create a cross-class, elite-dominated political coalition policing (enslaved) Black labor and keeping propertyless whites out of mobilizations challenging the wealthy. Why “privilege” became Allen’s noun of choice remains a mystery. Whatever the derivation, as used in Allen’s writings “privilege” cannot be read as anything but ironic and bitter, with the benefits of the crumbs from masters’ tables being pitiable and fully worth rejecting.30
Today though discussions of the privileges attached to whiteness, whether in the useful writings of Peggy McIntosh and Stephanie Wildman or the less fresh formulations of Tim Wise, refer to what whites get away with interpersonally, especially within social movements and to what small affronts they do not have to worry about facing. In such writing white privilege is to be rejected in the name of racial justice but not necessarily also so that working class whites can fight for their own broadest interests.31 This usage will continue whether or not it is championed by historical materialists and I wonder if we on the left might be better off with a different terminology, perhaps focusing on white advantage, though with the same credit to Allen.
Critical studies of whiteness also have anchored—mea culpa—discussions in a framework that imagines race as overwhelmingly involving Black and white people as its subjects. This is true of both activist and academic writing on the subject. Rooted in an explanation of the origins of whiteness as bound up with racial slavery, it has been less than curious about settler colonialism’s role in shaping the creation of a white identity. The explosion of fine new work on settler colonialism and race, especially Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, challenges older studies of whiteness profoundly.32 The sociologist Moon-Kie Jung’s brilliant Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U. S. Racisms Past and Present specifies the task of retaining older emphases and taking on new ones in its closing words: “Once we realize that we are, or side with, Indians and Blacks, pledging allegiance to Old Glory is no longer an option. Instead it becomes incumbent on us to adhere to a variation on one of [James] Baldwin’s famous lines: As long as we think we’re Americans, there’s no hope for us.”33
With regard to race and nonwhite immigration the critical study of whiteness has certainly helped to inspire very important studies, including those of Neil Foley, Natalia Molina, Ian Haney-LÓpez, and Kornel Chang.34 However, the most-cited studies have not made non-white immigrant labor central to theorizing whiteness. We have in the United States nothing like Satnam Virdee’s methodologically pathbreaking study of the United Kingdom, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. On balance the study of whiteness has contributed, even among its critics, to keeping left attention focused on Black and white.35 Thus, when Taylor wishes to make the case that Black liberation requires alliances with the working-class movement, she decisively concludes in the familiar setting of a critique of “whiteness studies” rather than an engagement with the question of Black–immigrant solidarity. At a time when there are probably more—figures are necessarily unreliable—undocumented workers in the US labor force than private sector members of labor unions, we have been very slow to realize what working-class unity, and struggle, now means. In this area the critical study of whiteness has too often helped more to recapitulate dated discussions than to generate new ones.36
The second set of gathering trends in life and letters inspiring work on race and class concerns the challenges and possibilities raised in the recent past by militant African-American anti-police and campus protests, coinciding as they do with the most visible ever presence of “Black faces in high places.” The ways in which those protests focus on terror, take psychology seriously, and feature jobless, female, queer, and trans people ready to participate, lead, and bring their own demands encourages us to consider ways in which identities, including class identities, are multiply made. Frank Wilderson’s forceful 2003 critique of reductionism, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” could almost have been written for today’s movements against police violence. Wilderson insisted that any theorization in which “racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy … is not an adequate subalternity from which to think the elaboration of antagonistic identity.”37 Written much more squarely within the Marxist tradition, but taking account of the simultaneity and materiality of strands of identity, the Canadian sociologist David Camfield’s elaboration of an “anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism” deserves to change how we think about race, class, and more.38
In 2006, when I wrote