The final article in the book’s first half, “The White Intellectual among Thinking Black Intellectuals: George Rawick and the Settings of Genius,” first appeared in a special “Thinking Black Intellectuals” issue of South Atlantic Quarterly in 2010. It portrays an unlikely figure who fashioned a heterodox, supple, and psychoanalytically informed Marxist approach to race and class after long apprenticeship in Trotskyist groups not always nurturing in any of those regards. Rawick, a mentor of mine, had the good fortune to encounter the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, the militant Black workers of Detroit in the 1960s, and the voices of ex-slaves whose stories had been collected in a Great Depression project funded by the federal government in making his escape from rigidities.48
The book’s second half, also gathering three essays, speaks to matters of tone and to questions now being debated under the rubric of race and the “logic of capital.” The first of the pieces in Part Two, published in a small book of essays in honor of the sociologist Wulf Hund, is “Removing Indians, Managing Slaves, and Justifying Slavery: The Case for Intersectionality.” It briefly attempts to think about how critical both settler colonialism and the gendered social reproduction of the enslaved labor force were to producing a slaveholder-led cross-class alliance that undergirded the expansionist capitalist state in the United States before 1848. The second, originally appearing in the Marxist journal Historical Materialism in 2009, reflects the breadth and confidence born of my collaborating in writing it with the historian of transnational Fordism Elizabeth Esch. Titled “ ‘One Symptom of Originality’: Race and the Management of Labor in US History,” it argues that US capitalist management both exploited and reproduced racial division as part of processes of expansion, production, and accumulation.
The final selection, “Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past,” comes back to questions of tone. It emphasizes how precious, but also how understandably fragile, broad solidarities are among groups who are oppressed but oppressed in very different and divisive ways. Originating as my 2015 presidential address to the American Studies Association and first published in American Quarterly the following year, it reconstructs the checkered history of the origins and uses of the word solidarity. It also analyzes the urgencies and silences surrounding how we memorialize, remember, and experience instances of solidarity, which we urgently need to desire and to question.
The Retreat from Race and Class
As the twentieth century started, indeed at almost exactly the same moment that W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that the “color line” would be its great divide, Eugene Victor Debs announced that the socialist movement that he led in the United States could and should offer “nothing special” to African Americans. “The class struggle,” Debs added, “is colorless.” As the century unfolded, the Marxist left, schooled by struggles for colonial freedom and by people of color in the centers of empire, increasingly saw the wisdom of Du Bois’s insight and tried hard to consider how knowledge of the color line could illuminate, energize, and express class struggles. We would find in Debs the striking historical insight, “That the white heel is still on the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized. The history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.”1 But we would also find him too often unable to act on that insight.
As the twenty-first century starts, the idea of a colorless struggle for human progress is unfortunately back with a vengeance. Such is of course the case on the right in the United States, where what the legal scholar Neil Gotanda and others have called “colorblind racism” has underpinned attacks on affirmative action and even on the collection of the race-based statistics necessary to show patterns of discrimination. The high-minded, ostensibly freedom-loving names given to such initiatives—“civil rights initiatives” to do in affirmative action and “racial privacy acts” to undermine the amassing of basic knowledge regarding the impact of race—have contributed mightily to attempts to recapture the moral high ground by those thinking that a society in which white family wealth is about ten times that of African-American family wealth could possibly be a colorblind one.
Nor are such instances confined to the United States. With the blood scarcely dry from white Australian riots against Arab beachgoers in 2005, that country’s neoliberal leader John Howard reacted to press headlines screaming “RACE HATE” and “RACE WAR” by loudly declaiming that he heads a colorblind society. When the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the ruling party there and leading candidate to replace Jacques Chirac as president, recently suffered criticism on race issues, he quickly planned a late 2005 trip to Martinique to emphasize how little color matters in the French colonial world.
Sarkozy stood out at the time as especially harsh in his response to the rebellions of Islamic youth in France against police violence. He failed to join the president and prime minister in distancing themselves from a recently passed law requiring that French textbooks “recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa.” Sarkozy was so thoroughly unwelcomed by Martinique’s great politician, poet, and theorist of liberation Aimé Césaire and others that the publicity stunt had to be cancelled. But within France the pernicious role of long-established “colorblindness” operates so strongly that Sarkozy can remain a top presidential contender. The legislative left did not originally raise a serious protest against passage of the pro-colonialist textbook legislation and the nation adheres to the no-counting-by-race policy that racial privacy acts seek to enjoin in the United States. Ironically Sarkozy himself has recently called for limited “discrimination positive” (affirmative action) as a carrot operating in tandem with deportations and immigration restriction to quell French rebellions. But to put any “positive” measures into practice remains a problem. As the Economist recently put it, the French minister for equality remains practically alone at the top levels of government in advocating for finding a way to even “measure the presence of the children of immigration” in political structures, the bureaucracy, and the labor force. The prevailing logic is summed up by the nation’s prime minister: “We don’t want to take into account colour.”
Against Race but Not for Class:Raceless Liberalism, Postcolonialism, and Sociology
What is distressingly new, or at the least resurgent, is the extent to which indictments of antiracism, and even of the use of race as a concept, come now from liberalism and from the left. Electorally, of course, one hallmark of efforts by the Democratic Leadership Council to move the Democratic Party still further to the right has been an attempt to distance itself from specific appeals to, and identification with, people of color. Thus the constituencies most aware of both race and class inequities are marginalized in the name of appeals for “universal” programs, even as universal programs, such as “welfare as we know it,” are subjected to bipartisan (and anything but colorblind) attacks. The left was capable of dissecting such a shell game, most trenchantly when Stephen Steinberg analyzed it in 1994 as the “retreat from race,” and in what will presumably be Christopher Hitchens’s last serious book, his 1999 dissection of Clintonism, No One Left to Lie To.
But when no political alternatives to quadrennial returns to Democratic candidates who confine their tepid appeals for racial justice to the King holiday and Black churches, or support