Class, Race and Marxism. David R. Roediger
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of the US state, or of the capitalist class, or just of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Reed reported that Coates “sneers at programs of material redistribution,” as Coates had not done, when in fact reparations is such a program. “When I was working in the GI movement, when people like that would come into the meeting,” Reed added, “I’d just ask them ‘So which branch of military intelligence are you assigned to?’ ” Reed also, as a Sanders supporter, sniffed out a more immediate conspiracy: “The idea that Bernie Sanders becomes the target of race-line activists now, and not Hillary Clinton, is just beyond me and it smells. It smells to high heaven.” For him, Coates’s perfidy also directly reflected a class position, but this time the enemy was not bourgeois but the “professional-managerial class” that allegedly forwards the issue of reparations while Black working people, equally allegedly, do not. Coates’s stature, on this view, derived not from his writing and thought but from his utility to elites. Henwood asked: “This sort of stuff plays very well to guilty white liberals, doesn’t it?” Reed responded, “A friend, whom I won’t out, observed to me a while ago that one of the things that really irks him (and he’s a professor) about Coates is the way that white liberals gush over him and my informant said that it reminds him of the way that upper-middle-class liberals fawn over the maid’s son who has gone to college and ‘made something of himself.’ ”18
The slightly later response to Coates coauthored by Kenneth Warren and Benn Michaels accused Coates of purveying a “right-wing fantasy” because reparations would not do away with capitalist markets.19 Such pro-Sanders critiques of Coates ironically came at a moment in the campaign when it became clear the African-American vote was going overwhelmingly to Clinton and would be instrumental in securing her the Democratic nomination, arguably making the rejection of race-specific demands as questionable as political strategy as it is as theory.20
By far the most coherent, though rancorous, response came from the often perceptive political scientist Cedric Johnson, writing in Jacobin in early February 2016. Perhaps his editors gave the piece its mean-spirited title, “An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him.” However, the piece itself did regard the historical role of not only Coates but also and remarkably of James Baldwin to be “assuaging white guilt.” Alongside a particularly strident attack on reparations, Johnson held that Coates “updates the Cold War, anti-socialist canard that any attempt to build social democracy on US soil will inevitably be hobbled by racism.” However, his own article showed that social democratic reforms certainly were so “hobbled” even at their highest points during the New Deal.21
Johnson criticized the “handful of Black Lives Matter protesters” who interrupted Sanders events as forwarding the anti–“social democratic” position. He lamented, “But I’ve grown weary of this position—repeated with startling unanimity by students, activists, academic colleagues, social media commentators, and career pundits, who frequently reject any talk of a universal, broad-based leftist project.” To frame matters thusly threatens to read out of existence the whole strand of fighters like James, Claudia Jones, and Dr. King, all of whom very much believed in universal projects and antiracist demands. The problems of Johnson’s position in this regard were dramatically revealed when Coates announced that he was in fact a Sanders supporter, and declared himself to be delighted that socialism was gaining a popular hearing, despite his reservations on Sanders’s understanding of white supremacy. As he wrote in a specific rejoinder to Johnson, “But I do not believe that if this world [of social democratic reforms that he supports] were realized, the problem of white supremacy would dissipate, any more than I believe that if reparations were realized, the problems of economic inequality would dissipate.”22
Again and again, contemporary debates on race and class involve characterizations like Johnson’s of the supposed state of the existing discourse and policies as hopelessly tilted towards race at the expense of class. We need to bend the stick in one direction, it is said, because everyone else, or perhaps just liberals and neoliberals, so bend it in the other. So many well-positioned writers imagine that an increased emphasis on class can only come by toning down the race and gender talk that it is hard to see how they maintain the stance that they are lonely figures sacrificing to tell the truth. Academic emphases and those of NGOs are said to structure race-first distortions. Injecting a word about class becomes an act of extraordinary freethinking courage, defying a deck stacked against any such mention. No matter how repeatedly such mentions occur they get to count as speaking truth to power—itself perhaps an overrated practice.
On one level, as a Marxist who began writing in the 1970s when it was somewhat easier to be one, I get it. But we are hardly without platforms. Moreover, perceiving such a tilted-towards-race status quo sometimes creates too easy an alliance between those who wish to combine emphases on race and class and those who would rather see race off the agenda altogether on the theory that the poverty of people of color means that they can benefit from class-based reforms without the need for specific antiracist demands.
Consider, for example, the activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, her recent study From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and her reaction to Johnson’s attack on reparations. Her book is an estimable effort to take race and class struggles seriously. She argues well that without an emphasis on critically important questions of class only limited motion to toward racial justice can occur and a good society cannot take shape. Her book rehearses well some figures on racial disparities in wealth as well as disparities within the African-American population. Her knowledge of Black Lives Matter is as impressive as her respect for Black self-activity. The book is a cause for optimism that “race or class” sterilities might give way.23
However, at times, Taylor seems to so believe that Marxism is locked in an uphill battle to be heard that unexamined certainties interfere with her analysis, and even her fact-checking. A pat review of the objective character of class, for example, sees her school her book’s readers to the effect that “whether or not a group of workers has reactionary … consciousness does not change its objective status as exploited and oppressed labor.” She then moves to specifics: “Just because white workers may at times fully accept reactionary ideas about African Americans does not change the objective fact that the majority of the US poor are white.”24 But it isn’t. In 2013 just short of 20 million whites suffered in poverty while the combined Black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and American-Indian poor numbered 27 million.25
On social media, Taylor posted Johnson’s attack on Coates and on reparations with a headnote describing it as the “essential reading for today.” The post extracted a pull-quote highlighting exactly the passage in which Johnson expressed how put upon he felt in the face of race-forward positions “repeated with startling unanimity by students, activists, academic colleagues, social media commentators, and career pundits.”26 Since Taylor elsewhere avowed support for reparations, the attractions of the aggrieved tone would seem to override the disagreement with the central political issue actually raised by Johnson in this instance.
But the aggrieved tone itself is unproductive and at best half-convincing. The fuller story, as suggested above, is that substantive discussions of ending racial oppression and of ending class oppression both fight for a hearing against daunting odds. At the level of policy it cannot be said that demands for racial justice have had a sufficient presence in the program of Democrats over the last forty years to so stifle discussion of class. What would those demands be? At best, retreats from a half-hearted defense of affirmative action programs have typified Democratic practice, leavened by allegedly brave, and disgusting, attacks on family values among African Americans. That was the Bill Clinton approach, which advocated an “It’s the economy, stupid” rhetorical emphasis on the fortunes of the middle class as the unifying issue that would be jeopardized by appeals to (Black) special interests.27 Racial justice has, at the level of national politics, been marginalized in the service of lamentably vague class talk, even as nebulous talk about racial justice has sidelined debates over class.
As I argued at the start of the Bill Clinton years in a New Left Review essay titled “The Racial Crisis of American Liberalism,” timid and duplicitous race politics perfectly complement timid and duplicitous class politics.28 If—and I have held no illusions