Class, Race and Marxism. David R. Roediger
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so in this first essay Reed’s retreat from race could be read as simply a strategic one. “For roughly a generation it seemed responsible to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provide some remedial response from the federal government,” he wrote. “But for some time race’s force in national politics has been as a vehicle for reassuring whites that that ‘public’ equals some combination of ‘black,’ ‘poor,’ and ‘loser.’ ” Katrina lay bare both race and class injustices, but in part because of the growing strength of racism, an effective response to it would have to be strictly “class-ified.”
“The Real Divide” repeated, expanded and made more combative the arguments in the Nation article. Reed did continue to mention, in a labored construction, that he was “not claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not significantly racialized.” Indeed “any sane or honest person” would have to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of “racial disparities [that] largely emerge from a history of discrimination and racial injustice.” Nonetheless Reed follows up these generalizations by categorically declaring that “as a political strategy exposing racism is wrong-headed and at best an utter waste of time.” It is for Reed a dodge designed to make “upper-status liberals” feel morally superior as they vote for the deeply compromised Democratic Party. In one of the few bits of the article offering ostensible, if misguided, class analysis, exposing racism is said to serve “the material interests of those who would be race relations technicians.” As in “Class-ifying the Hurricane” the arguments are partly that racism, being “too imprecise” and too abstract, lacks power as an analytical tool. However, the point Reed develops more is that among whites the very “discussion of race” reinforces “the idea that cutting public spending is justifiably aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole.” The “racism charge,” on this view, is easily defeated by Republican appeals to “scurrilous racial stereotypes” and therefore should be jettisoned.
Gilroy’s Against Race at least acknowledges that a call for giving up on race-based traditions of struggle asks a lot of social movements rooted in communities of color. At law, for example, exposing racism is often the sole strategy available to protect, after a fashion, the rights of the poorest workers in the United States. Reed’s view that elite liberalism is the source of movements to expose and combat racism—a view much facilitated by his outspoken opposition to the reparations movements—forestalls consideration of such dynamics, making the retreat from race to be itself something of an abstraction.
Fortunately there is no reason to decide whether to organize or to analyze around either racism or class oppression, one to the exclusion of the other. The case of New Orleans, which moved Reed to present us with such a choice, offers good examples of why we should reject it. Compare, for example, Reed’s either/or insistence with the left activist and writer Mike Davis’s accounts of post-Katrina New Orleans. Davis raised a series of questions three months into the rebuilding process of New Orleans and perfectly captured the continuing color line:
Why is there so much high-level talk about abandoning the Ninth Ward as uninhabitable when no one is proposing to turn equally inundated Lakeview back into a swamp? Is it because Lakeview is a wealthy white community? And/or is it because the 30,000 reliably Democratic Black votes in the Ninth Ward hold the balance of power in Louisiana politics?
To what extent, Davis wondered, did “ethnic cleansing” and rebuilding coincide? Davis’s accounts have also been especially acute on the ways in which elites, including the Black political elite in New Orleans, have played on, and indeed created, Black/Latino tensions during the rebuilding process. How are we to conceptualize those tensions, and to struggle to overcome them, without discussing both race and class, as well as white supremacy?
In recent antiwar demonstrations after Katrina, the most fascinating sign has read: “NO IRAQI HAS EVER LEFT ME TO DIE ON A ROOF.” Its words recall haunting post-Katrina images and also sample the celebrated antiwar dictum attributed to Muhammad Ali: “No Vietnamese ever called me ‘nigger.’ ” The latter line was perhaps the quintessential late twentieth-century example of Du Bois’s insight, ignored by US-centered readings of his words, regarding how the color line in the United States existed in systems of racialized global inequality. We should allow that the twenty-first-century “NO IRAQI” sign’s variant of the earlier slogan is considerably more complex and expansive. Poor whites, and indeed the large numbers of Vietnamese resettled in the Gulf region and abandoned in Katrina’s considerable wake, could conceivably march under the “NO IRAQI” sign. In that sense the sign, and the reality of New Orleans, speaks powerfully to the most profound insight in Reed’s recent work, namely that the position of poor, mostly Black, New Orleanians suffer from a plight that is “a more extreme version of the precarious position of millions of Americans today, as more and more lose health care, bankruptcy protection, secure employment, affordable housing, civil liberties, and access to education. To combat such misery will require race and class analysis, as well as antiracist and anti-capitalist organization.
As Reed’s articles appeared in late 2005, the New York Times ran an article titled “For Blacks, A Dream in Decline.” It revealed that after a 1980s peak in which one Black worker in four was a union member, now the figure approaches one in seven. In the last year, African-American workers accounted for 55 percent of the loss of 304,000 union members nationally, although they represent only a sixth of all unionized workers. The article quoted William Julius Wilson himself as urgently calling on unions to address the issue. “They haven’t done so yet,” he added. Union leaders, according to the article, “resist viewing what is happening in racial terms.” One prominent labor leader quoted sounded for all of the world like Eugene V. Debs: “We see it as a class issue rather than a race issue.” It is both, and the retreat from race and class will get us closer to addressing neither.
Accounting for the Wages of Whiteness:US Marxism and the Critical History of Race
Nell Irvin Painter’s excellent 2010 study The History of White People maintains that “critical white studies began with David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: The Making of the American Working Class in 1991 and Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White in 1995.”1 I have spent lots of energy over the last twenty years in order to not be the figure Painter points to, and for some very good reasons. However, in this article, I want to acknowledge some kernel of truth in what she holds. The good reasons for disavowing being a founder (or cofounder) of critical whiteness studies are several. To produce such a lineage takes the 1990s moment of publication of works by whites on whiteness as the origin of a “new” area of inquiry, when in fact writers and activists of color had long studied white identities and practices as problems needing to be historicized, analyzed, theorized, and countered. The burden of my long introduction to the edited volume Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, is to insist on locating the newer studies within a longer stream on whose insights they rely. Moreover, even in the last twenty years, the most telling critiques of whiteness have come from such writers of color as Toni Morrison, Cheryl Harris and, now, Painter.2
My desire has thus been to acknowledge the critical study of whiteness as a longstanding tradition, pursued mainly by those for whom whiteness has been a problem, including some radical white scholars who now join the argument that an embrace of white identity has led to absences of humanity and of the effective pursuit of class interest among whites. To adopt this broader and more accurate view of the work that had been done seemed to me to most effectively guard against the view that studying whiteness was a fad, akin to passing fancies like “porn studies.” Writing an early article on “whiteness studies” in New York Times Magazine in 1997, Margaret Talbot distilled this view with particular venom and lack of comprehension. Lamenting that the fad was part of a larger trend toward “books that seem ill equipped to stand the test of time,” she chose to only consider white writers on whiteness, and indeed wrote under the title “Getting Credit for Being White.”3
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