One example of how race reductionism is hurting black Americans is taken up by Adolph Reed who analyzes how Joe Biden is not only seriously out of touch with the issues that actually affect most African Americans, paradoxically Biden is billed as the candidate who serves the best interests of the “African American community” because he has not supported universal healthcare. Worse, the Affordable Care Act maintains that “the lower official premiums are in one’s area for that second-cheapest silver plan, the more low-income people actually have to pay for health care.” This is one of many ways that class-consciousness would address the very issues that result in poverty and police violence that affect a whole range of poor Americans to include black, Latino, and white Americans.
While Jesse Jackson has written about class bias and the excessive use of force by the police in reference, the need to focus upon historical material readings of current events is still not hitting home for many. Sam Mitrani notes that the police were created to “protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.” Even as we know how police violence functions and who is in its crosshairs, many angry protestors are demanding us to repeat the incantation, “Black lives matter” with literally no class analysis in sight.
I'll start by affirming what I think this article gets right. It's much better than the usual anti-BLM rants in that it doesn't commit a lot of category creep and seems to at least acknowledge the difference between postmodern, Marxist, and capitalist-liberal critiques of racism; it doesn't conflate anti-racism, black supremacy, wokeness, identity politics, identitarianism, social-justice-warriors etc. It's right that DiAngelo isn't helpful and shouldn't be considered an authority on this subject. It's right that racism isn't just about who has racism in their hearts but rather about the subtler ways it manifests in society, even through individuals who don't intend it. It's right that we mustn't overlook a class-based analysis (I'll come back to that) and that the civil rights movement actually has roots in Marxism (not just Adolph Reed but also A. Philip Randolph and others) and that these intellectuals do tend to be hostile to identity politics. It'sright that many of the things which restrain black Americans are economic.
It's half-right when it makes the Model Minority argument (in reference to Asians, in this case). The obvious counter to that argument - made by MLK and many others - is that Asians, Jews, Italian-Americans etc weren't enslaved on American soil for centuries and then suddenly set free with no grants, no social programs, no access to white neighbourhoods, and three fifths of a vote. But notice we're already reverting to a class-based analysis when we make this argument, so even that contains a concession to the author.
But notice that it describes racism as "byproduct" of class differences rather than the other way around, which is a historical anachronism at least with regard to the above point. I'll have to read Nathaniel Lewis's study (linked from the Counterpunch article) but we do know that black Americans are four times as likely to be incarcerated for marijuana use, despite similar rates of usage, as compared to white Americans. We also know that this pattern holds even when you exclusively look at poor black Americans and poor white Americans. What this suggests is that racial injustice has taken on a life of its own, even if it is historically rooted in class antagonism (and in the case of the war on drugs it is, in fact). Doesn't this suggest that addressing economic inequality won't be enough to undo the emergent racial inequalities?
Since the article crowbars in the Soros myth, and repeats Maxine Peake's baseless and anachronistic claim that the US police force learned neck-kneeling from the IDF, and that this had any link whatsoever to the treatment of George Floyd, it's also worth noting the form of racism which economic class-based analysis is incapable of adequately dealing with: antisemitism. Jewish Americans are on the whole higher-earning than the average American, and nobody who is obsessed with this issue fails to notice that we are "over-represented" in positions of economic, political and cultural power. Antisemites don't look down on, or dismiss, Jews as a rightfully impoverished class which refuses to take personal responsibility; rather antisemitism is a racism of envy and conspiracy. Marxism simply cannot deal with that without treating Jews as oppressors (which is in fact how the partly-Jewish Marx approached the question). And it fails to provide an explanation for why antisemitism is prevalent across the entire political spectrum. Why is it so common among black supremacists (take the Nation of Islam as a case in point) as well as white supremacists? I would argue it's because both groups need an excuse for their perceived or statistical shortcomings in order to hold together the theory that in the natural order of things they would come out on top. Why Jews? Because we "pass", which makes us a perfect target for paranoia. I posit a simple claim: examples like this show that racism is not simple economic oppression, and that a purely economic class-based analysis cannot answer these questions.
