"Race vs. Class" is a Tactical Question Masquerading as a Question of Values

I find this a little strange.

On the one hand, I can grasp what Grim is getting at. On the other hand, it seems typical of the type of mangle you find a lot with this topic, in part because the question is so loaded. (You can kind of feel the sweaty palms that these tweets were composed with.) My confusion can be summed up in asking, if there is no such thing as a race-first person or a class-first person, and those are mere labels that get applied to people, then what are the constituent elements of the race-class narrative? Why would we preserve that frame if it refers only to two illusory fragments? I dunno.

I myself am a class-first leftist, and indeed the penultimate chapter of my new book is titled “Why is Class First?” And the answer is that class comes first because class approaches to politics are the best approach to combating injustice, including racial injustice. Being class-first is an instrumental position, not a moral one; it’s an approach to means and not a definition of ends. My basic gloss on racial inequality has been the same for forever: it’s futile to try and get everyone to not be interpersonally racist, but we can economically empower Black people and other people of color such that interpersonal racism no longer has the power to hurt them. A lot of people hate rich people, hate them reflexively and passionately. It doesn’t matter because rich people have money and money gives them power, which means the hate that’s directed towards them is impotent. Interpersonal racism, the state of some people hating other people because of their race, is unlike any other form of human hatred. But the same basic logic applies - if we dismantled Black people’s economic disadvantage, the structures that make up structural inequality, then the interpersonal hatred just won’t matter to anything like the degree it matters today. Of course I want people not to walk around with personal racial animus, but politics is about what can be achieved materially, not about manipulating people’s emotional attitudes.

You could contrast this with, say, Robin Diangelo and her obsession with ending micro-aggressions. Even if you could eliminate all of those little vestiges of social racism (you can’t), doing so would not put a dent in the Black-white wealth gap or eliminate mass incarceration of Black men or anything of that nature. That kind of focus does, however, fit comfortably with the social expectations of the kind of educated white liberals who buy her books.

The reality is that a class approach to race does not and has never entailed sidelining race itself as an object of political consideration. Here’s where I point out that many of this country’s great Black political leaders would now be dismissed for failing to put race first. Even if we just restrict ourselves to the Black Panthers, we’ve got people like Bobby Seale, who said “Ours is not a race struggle, ours is a class struggle,” or Fred Hampton, who said “Racism is a byproduct of capitalism.” (The Panthers were Marxists for a reason.) You can get in a lot of trouble with that kind of talk, these days! Perhaps the Panthers and other Black leaders who emphasized class approaches to fighting racism were wrong, but the notion that prioritizing class politics responses to racial injustice is inherently racist is a profoundly 21st-century notion. (Indeed, that idea is a product of all of the bad incentives of academic politics spilling out of the universities and colonizing left discourse.) The fact of the matter is that Black people make up about 13% of the population of the United States, and thus can never secure their own needs through the democratic process without the help of sympathetic members of other races. That sucks, it’s not fair, it’s reality. The good news is that the entire philosophy of left politics lies in creating just those kinds of coalitions - you demonstrate to people who are unalike in some ways that they in fact share mutual self-interest on key issues. And most salient political issues are fundamentally economic.

That doesn’t mean that we must de-emphasize race in our messaging. Certainly not all the time, anyway. There are times when the politically expedient thing to do is to limit racial justice messaging, if doing so helps us win larger majorities - and, in turn, achieve racially just effects in material reality. You can lament the fact that this is sometimes necessary, but that’s politics, baby. I think just about everyone would agree that we’d rather win an election or a vote by minimizing race if doing so then enables us to reduce racial inequality in our system. If the fear is that we’ll end up never talking about race at all, I find that very unlikely, given just how much racial discourse dominates contemporary American politics. Sometimes we’ll go to war with a race-first message when that’s what’s appropriate, and we’ll work to do so in the most strategically effective way possible. Often enough, that strategic approach will involve appealing to the economic best interests of white people, as they are both the majority and overrepresented in our system. Again, if that results in policy and law that benefits people of color, that’s a win. Whether it’s fair or not is a religious question, not a political one. And we should always remember that there’s no vision of Black liberation that does not entail Black economic liberation.

I do, for the record, draw a distinction between being class-first and being class-reductionist in the book. While I would love to say they don’t exist, I have met a handful of people in my life who have said “It’s not about race” or that racism is just an epiphenomenon of classism. I think that’s dumb, and I’ve told people so. The good news is that, though I have been around class-fixated people for my entire life, I can probably number the people I’ve met who explicitly believe this on one hand. They’re just not a very influential force in the American left. It’s frustrating that so many people seem to see the class reductionist lurking behind every corner. If you meet someone like this, tell them the truth: while there are certainly class dimensions to racism, and organizing around class is our best bet to win a better world, racism is a very specific evil, with anti-Black racism wholly unique in a historical, sociological, and political sense. So broaden your mind and pledge to work to fight racial inequality with the best tools we have.

One belief that I’ve come to hold over the years, and it’s a kind of abstract or meta belief, is that in politics “how” questions are more important than “whether” questions. There is no doubt that there are dedicated racists out there who very much are not on board with fighting racism - their answer to the “whether” question of “should we end racial inequality?” is no. But the reality is that in 21st-century American life, almost everyone professes to hate racism and to want to destroy it. The lunatics at PragerU think they’re fighting racism. Your average Republican probably has some nominal commitment to dismantling racial inequality, even as everything their party does makes that task harder. And the people who say no to the “whether” question are not reachable anyway. So the “how” question becomes preeminent. And, look, people have very deep disagreements about how to accomplish a more racially just world. Certainly many people disagree with me. For my part, the experience of 2020 and its upheaval showed the failure of a certain approach to racial politics - waged by educated professionals, obsessed with language, focused on retribution against individuals perceived to be racially insensitive, organized according to the dictates of the managerialism that dominates 21st-century life. I feel strongly that we never really had the necessary conversation about that failure and thus haven’t learned from it. But if we’re to learn, let’s be clear about our terms, and recognize that the question of class and race is a question about means, not about ends.

(Did I mention that I have a new book coming out September 5th, and that you can preorder it now?)