Arguments on the Left: Class and Race

https://portside.org/2021-09-04/arguments-left-class-and-race

Portside Date: September 4, 2021

Author:

Date of source: August 2, 2021

Dissent

Multiple Mainstreams

Only public investment will deliver a media that can serve the news needs of our time.

Carla Murphy

I suppose I’m meant to care how “the left” talks about race and class. I fit the profile; I’m a black female journalist. My stories since the early 2000s have featured men and women made invisible or marginalized by society, sometimes by their own communities, and certainly by newsrooms. But as a news gatherer, I’ve always tinkered on the borderlands of mainstream and progressive journalism, the left’s gathering space. I never fully committed. That’s because early in my career I settled on an important distinction: it’s not how you talk about class and race that matters; it’s to and for whom. Audience determines how.

Left conversations about race and class rarely center my folks as their audience: the precarious middle-class, working-class, and working-poor residents of my Brooklyn street; recent immigrants; and native-born Americans like them. Left conversations seem unaware of the value of redistributing news media power such that non-whites and working people construct their own left conversations about race and class. This, to me, is the problem—not how the left’s well-educated upper-middle class, unharmed and unbothered by journalism’s poverty wages, talks about race and class.

As a journalist I always conceived of my role as working for folks who are not in the room. I don’t view the progressive or liberal journalist’s pursuit of news about marginalized people as progress. From my view in the borderlands, the progressive mission should be to expand the production of news (about race, class, and gender) for these audiences. It should be to create multiple mainstreams strong enough to compete with the mainstream. Producing news about low-wealth people for a better-off, highly educated audience carries a high civic and socioeconomic cost for folks on the losing side of economic inequality and those of us driven to expand democratic participation.

It never made sense to me to believe that a shooting in a New York City outer borough has gotten sunlight because a white guy in Greenwich, Connecticut, read about it in an issue of the New York Times. What does informing him have to do with journalism fulfilling its public service for the people living in that outer borough? Where is their trusted mainstream for surfacing debate, sifting truth from misinformation, and building consensus?

I come from city blocks that at one point seemed to be losing one member of every five households to Rikers and to prisons upstate. No mainstream outlet has ever covered that phenomenon commensurate to its effect on generations of families in the sending and receiving zip codes. The affected persons—black, brown, and white—aren’t whom those outlets produce news for. Otherwise, we would see newsroom beats like “community health and safety,” “justice,” or “the prison economy”—instead of “crime.”

The way that mainstream news media covers healthcare, housing, and higher education, for example, is also shaped by the audience it values. These outlets don’t consistently answer the practical, mundane, or even existential questions of people and communities that are low wealth, of color, or immigrant. They answer the white guy in Greenwich’s questions. However those outlets talk about race and class, it’s for him. They explain the world to him. They center him. They seek to expand his world. They seek to persuade and convince him. They engage and value him. They believe his civic participation matters more than that of the audiences I value.

Meanwhile, the nation is browner in real life, and even browner on Gen Z’s TV shows and social media. Right now, to paraphrase Ian Haney López, white people are trying to figure out what it means to be white in the United States. For low-wealth families the cost of upward mobility is prohibitive. Is our news system designed for now? It makes sense to me that the journalism industry should serve pluralities, or multiple mainstreams—not only the imagined white, suburban one penning in the black and brown inner-city. That’s a throwback to when white-majority society was culturally dominant and dominating, and that was accepted even if not acceptable. Discursively, “whiteness” has been displaced. We are in a different era.

New media organizations must fill the local news vacuum and fellowship with publics that never trusted mainstream news in the first place. This will require community ownership. It will require paying living wages to attract journalists who both come from and want to produce stories for ordinary working people. Considering the ubiquity of misinformation, it will require that news be plentiful and free; that means no more paywalls in front of news articles. It will require free or subsidized broadband for low-wealth and low-news-consuming communities. All of the above is media policy—a subject that was not part of my master’s degree in journalism but should have been.

From the nineteenth century through today, the businesspeople, publishers, journalism schools, and politicians creating media policy have allowed outlets producing news for low-wealth, immigrant, and indigenous communities, or communities of color, to fail. All those disappeared local outlets had expanded, complicated, and enriched discussions of race and class. Imagine if over the past twenty-five years, media policy had created a path for that diversity to thrive.

In this century, new outlets have taken on the challenge of producing news for either ignored or talked-about communities. Their audiences don’t consume news like the mainstream, so these outlets are also upending anemic and solipsistic industry conventions. Via SMS text messaging, Outlier Media in Detroit provides news about housing, utilities, and COVID-19. The audience of Enlace Latino NC is rural workers who may not read or write well in either English or Spanish, so it produces news for the ear and short, easily understood text messages. City Bureau in Chicago trains and pays residents to monitor local government. MLK50 in Memphis produces news for ordinary working people. A 2019 investigation it undertook led the city’s largest nonprofit hospital to erase $11.9 million in debt owed by the city’s poor.

Will these outlets and others like Documented, Scalawag, and El Tímpano be allowed to fulfill their missions? Without public investment, no, I don’t believe so. In our monopoly market, they are climbing Everest without oxygen. The scavenger’s yard that is the journalism industry belongs to Alden, Google, Facebook, and the New York Times. Local and regional news outlets for marginalized communities need far more than the nominal sums they currently receive. But philanthropists will never fund these outlets the way they fund mainstream-serving organizations like ProPublica. They’ll never give those outlets a similar chance to maximize their public service potential. Those outlets don’t talk to audiences that white philanthropists value. Only public investment will deliver a media system that can serve the news needs of our time, which is a critical mass of well-funded and community-owned outlets throughout the United States.

A Unified Story for a Divided World

Wars of position that pit race against class are tired.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Wars of position rage between “race reductionists” who insist on the political primacy of race and their “class reductionist” counterparts. But some of us, especially those of us who make use of racial capitalism as a set of frameworks, insist that such debate is tired.

In Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers an intricate definition of racism: “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” It follows that races are divisions of populations into hierarchies of vulnerability to premature death (the likely fate of the materially insecure).

What’s the difference between “race” and “class,” then? They are two, compatible ways of explaining how society is split into strata of material security. Class zooms in on how global production was and is organized: capitalists own the means of production, the proletariat owns its labor, enslaved people own neither, and Indigenous and colonized peoples are targeted for elimination or assimilation into one of the other categories. Alongside this hierarchy in function is a hierarchy of material security; to be a capitalist, after all, one must have secure access to the “means of subsistence,” and a proletariat becomes possible when this same security is unavailable for masses of people.

Race asks more generally: how is society organized? Slavery and indigeneity were legal and social statuses that approached rightlessness. The racial categorizations fashioned out of these colonial designations marked certain groups of people as available for plunder, domination, and subjugation in social life, well beyond the workplace. Indigenous and enslaved people have always faced systematically higher levels of social violence and predation of all kinds, and thus death. And this stratified distribution of security remains necessary to sustain exploitative social arrangements: as the South African activist Steve Biko once put it, “that we are oppressed to varying degrees is a deliberate design to stratify us not only socially but also in terms of the enemy’s aspirations.”

The history of racial capitalism helps explain how the broader racial organization of the whole of global society emerged from regional economic and political distinctions. Starting in 1492, European empires and descendant states atop the Atlantic system created racial governance systems to divide and rule their colonies, ranging from the straightforward to the dizzyingly complex. Justifications were varied—based on religion or pseudoscience—and were often helped along by a thick layer of convenient obfuscations (“racecraft,” as Barbara J. and Karen E. Fields famously put it) and longstanding habits of political thought.

The political stakes of racial divisions, however, were less variable than the myths that justified them. In the colonies, as a social stratum’s ancestral proximity to the European elite increased, so did its presumed share of social rights and protections. As a stratum’s ancestral proximity to the Atlantic system’s most exploited and plundered populations increased—those dispossessed of their land or labor—its presumed share of rights and protections dropped precipitously. This organization, and consequent differences in social and geographic distribution of rights and resources, proliferated and hardened over time as colonial conquests and economic links expanded. The system built across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans took over almost the entire world.

Today, many of the institutions and laws permitting explicitly racial stratifications of exploitation and predation have been effectively challenged. But stratifications remain, as do the organizational logics that inform them and the group social identities built out of them. Globally, racially marginalized communities are still the most polluted, policed, and preyed upon; progress on racial justice has been far less sweeping than advertised.

This history is a unified story about both kinds of division. Asking whether we should talk about class or race, it reveals, is like asking whether we should talk about guitars or musical instruments: confused. We could do both by doing either.

Some criticisms confuse the phrase “racial capitalism” with its analysis, such as the accusation that it focuses excessively on racial divisions (as opposed to gender, nationality, ability, and others). But the “what” of racial capitalism is less important than the “why”: the historical processes that explain why society is racially organized point us to the events that are formative of the same world order that is also unjust with respect to gender, nationality, ability, and countless other aspects of social life. By paying attention to this broad global and historical context, rather than focusing all of our attention on production, the racial capitalism approach can “open up, as opposed to foreclose, more complex analyses,” as Charisse Burden-Stelly recently argued.

This also helps answer another common criticism: how could race even be real, much less fundamental, if it means one thing in France and another in Brazil? One could just as easily notice that what counts as “middle class” differs even more wildly across different contexts, though people are curiously more reluctant to infer from this fact that class does not exist.

But the deeper answer is that racial capitalism is a way of thinking about the world’s history, not just any particular country’s. If we were focused on the networks that actually produce commodities and circulate capital rather than the ones that dominate political discussions—seems like the more materialist thing to do, right?—we might lose our appetite for the pretense that we live in separate social systems. Multinational institutions and investment patterns of shareholders half the world away govern the lives of people on this planet just as surely as their local and national governments—and in many cases, more so.

As the philosopher Vanessa Wills reminds us, it is production as a social process that is properly at the center of materialist thought, not class as an identity. Our economic systems are and have long been global: individual states (capitalist or not) are themselves components of a planetary economic system. Racial capitalism encourages us to think globally, which is essential in an era of global climate crisis.

If there’s reason to use “racial capitalism” over just “capitalism,” one would be to acknowledge the various African scholars and intellectuals who helped shape the term, from the South African revolutionaries like Neville Alexander who brought it into use to the Dar es Salaam school of intellectuals like Samir Amin, Marjorie Mbilinyi, and Issa G. Shivji, which further developed the world-systems approach that informed later theorizing on racial capitalism. But acknowledgement of these figures and their intellectual contributions doesn’t depend on the name we use for analyses of history or for the system we live in. Call it whatever you want. What matters are the substantive commitments we decide to take up, and what we do with them.

Gilmore’s framework doesn’t answer every question we could ask about race and class. But as Cedric Robinson, a seminal scholar of racial capitalism, said in the preface to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism: “As a scholar, it was never my purpose to exhaust a subject, only to suggest that it was there.”

The Political Economy of Racial Inequality

The material causes of racial inequality can be overcome only with massive economic distribution.

Touré F. Reed

In 1965, in response to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s anemic War on Poverty legislation, the labor and civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin joined with Leon Keyserling, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, to draft “A Freedom Budget for All Americans.” Their $180 billion proposal ($1.4 trillion adjusted for inflation) would have established a living wage and guaranteed employment through public works projects and urban revitalization initiatives. Randolph and Rustin were socialists who viewed racial inequality through the lens of capitalist labor and housing markets. They correctly anticipated that neither the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s antidiscrimination measures nor the War on Poverty would be capable of eliminating black poverty. As Randolph asserted at the March on Washington: “Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers black and white?”

The Freedom Budget represented the fading embers of the social democratic sensibilities that had burned in black politics during the era of the New Deal and the Popular Front. As political scientist Preston Smith has argued, Cold War anticommunism helped pave the way for the triumph of a more conservative “racial democratic” vision of civil rights—which rejected racial discrimination but accepted the legitimacy of class stratification—over a more egalitarian politics. By the late 1960s, rhetorically militant Black Power leaders and postwar liberals both embraced culturalist interpretations of inequality, which divorced racial inequality from the capitalist processes that engendered disparities. Poverty and upward mobility alike were attributed to the cultural characteristics of the poor and middle class.

From the rise of Ronald Reagan through the presidency of Donald Trump, the absence of class-based understandings of racial inequality gave us crack babies, super-predators, and many other underclass tropes. While the past two years have witnessed widespread calls for a racial reckoning—influenced in no small part by the horrors of Trumpism—a majority of Democratic politicians and corporate media figures have preferred to frame events in moral terms, using a cultural, race-based analysis of inequality that is antagonistic to social democratic politics.

In recent years, some liberals and even a stratum of leftists have come to embrace metaphors that serve to naturalize racism. When racism is described as our nation’s “original sin” or “part of our DNA,” ideological or cultural attachments take on a life of their own. If racism is so ingrained, there’s nothing much we can do about it. Such constructs have become especially appealing in recent years because they allow us to sidestep the material causes of racial inequality, which can be overcome only with massive economic redistribution.

Cultural resentments—including racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia—undoubtedly played a role in Donald Trump’s rise. But we can acknowledge the important influence of race in American political and social life without insisting that it operates independently of the wider world of human affairs. Racists are not born, as is implied by the original sin and DNA metaphors; they are nurtured. Conservatives have long ginned up racial resentment for political gain. Likewise, prior to the enactment of antidiscrimination laws, employers and real-estate investors fostered resentment toward racial and ethnic groups through racially tiered labor and housing markets.

Since 2016, constructs like systemic racism and diversity have drawn attention to racial injustice, but they have also been deployed against egalitarian political projects that would benefit poor and working-class Americans, who are disproportionately black and brown. In the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, for example, Hillary Clinton presented herself as the anti-racist candidate while attacking Bernie Sanders’s calls for banking regulation, tuition-free higher education, and other redistributive policies. Clinton said she wanted “white people to recognize that there is systemic racism,” but she failed to adequately address her complicity in the 1994 crime bill or the subprime mortgage crisis, both of which hurt black people worse than whites. A similar pattern emerged following the brutal murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. Multinational corporations embraced concepts like intersectionality and structural racism, which provided executives like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon with a way to treat racial disparities as if they stemmed from fixed identities instead of capitalist processes.

The racial justice discourse that has gone mainstream lends itself to modest reforms to a system that is less and less capable of distributing its rewards to working people. Corporate-friendly visions of social justice that identify the wealth gap as the main barrier to racial progress offer poor and working-class blacks little more than vicarious wins. As policymakers and corporations promote black entrepreneurship, homeownership, and, of course, diversifying the ranks of corporate and government leaders, real structural change—of the sort proposed by Randolph and Rustin’s Freedom Budget—is forgotten.

If we don’t want to simply grow the ranks of black millionaires and billionaires but instead ensure that black children and adults have access to quality education, quality housing, well-paying jobs, and healthcare, then we need to insist on viewing racial inequalities through the lens of political economy. Doing so is the first step in improving the lives of masses of black Americans. It may also help promote the kind of cross-racial solidarity that will be necessary to prevent an even more frightening expression of the politics that gave us Trump.

The Race Class Narrative Can Win

The rich and powerful use racism to protect their interests and scapegoat communities of color. But there is an effective way to talk about both race and class when organizing for multiracial democracy.

Anika Fassia and Tinselyn Simms

We’re glad to be at a point in American political discourse where the question being posed is how to talk about race and class, rather than whether to do so. For too long, many on the left, especially white progressives, have shied away from talking directly about race and racism. Talking about race, they have argued, is divisive and costs us electoral victories. This approach centers the experiences of white voters, who don’t feel the direct impact of racism in our economy or democracy, and neglects the concerns of people of color, who make up a large portion of our base. It also ignores the fact that race is always being discussed by our opponents. By not responding to the racial sentiments of their narratives, we leave their potent messages unopposed. As a result, we lose persuadable voters and fail to mobilize our base.

Many of us who are doing the day-to-day organizing work to build a multiracial democracy struggle to find effective ways to talk about race and class. We often resort to tactics that either don’t connect with or alienate the people we are trying to move.

The Race Class Narrative (RCN), developed by Ian Haney López, Heather McGhee, and Anat Shenker-Osorio, is a rigorously researched framework that addresses these concerns. We can use it to fight back against the ways that strategic racism is weaponized by the rich and powerful to protect their interests, scapegoat communities of color, and leave us all fighting for scraps. It is a narrative structure that reveals the strategy of the right and builds cross-racial support for progressive policies.

This work is essential if we want to beat the right. As McGhee writes in her recent book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, if we

try to convince anyone but the most committed progressives (disproportionately people of color) about big public solutions without addressing race, most will agree . . . right up until they hear the counter-message that does talk, even implicitly, about race. Racial scapegoating about “illegals,” drugs, gangs, and riots undermines public support for working together. Our research showed that color-blind approaches that ignored racism didn’t beat the scapegoating zero-sum story; we had to be honest about racism’s role in dividing us in order to call people to their higher ideals.

The RCN tries to do just that. Rather than saying “all people” or “everyone,” the narrative advises those writing scripts for canvassing or for social media campaigns to use more specific language, such as “people of different races and from different places” or “white, Black, or brown.” Mentioning race like this helps to turn our vision of cross-racial solidarity into a reality.

To give an example, here is a message from the RCN research designed to build support for progressive issues and push back against divisiveness from our opposition:

America’s strength comes from our ability to work together—bringing together people from different places and of different races into a whole. For this to be a place where everyone can thrive, we cannot let the 1% and the politicians they pay for divide us against each other based on what someone looks like, where they come from, or how much money they have. We need to join together to fight for our future, just like we won better wages, safer workplaces, and civil rights in our past. Coming together, we can elect new leaders who will deliver better healthcare for our families, quality schools for our kids, and a fair return on our work.

Across the country, organizations have used the RCN to move voters on important issues. In 2018, activists in Minnesota used it in Greater Than Fear, a campaign designed to push back against anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric and actions. Partners used the RCN research to build a strong campaign brand that included messaging guides, trainings, rallies, ads, print materials, and a digital strategy. On election night in 2018, the Minnesota House of Representatives flipped, turning blue. Democrats also won the gubernatorial, attorney general, secretary of state, and auditor races. Now, they are pushing an ambitious RCN-infused We Make Minnesota revenue campaign that could have long-lasting results for families across the state. They are not avoiding conversations about race and class but leaning into them to tell a story about how racism is deployed against all of us for the economic gains of a powerful few.

In the spring of 2019, People’s Action incorporated RCN into their deep canvassing program in Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, with the goal of increasing support for including immigrants in expanded healthcare coverage. These states were chosen because they had all seen an uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment and white nationalist organizing, and because they were important to the 2020 election. Deep canvassing goes beyond typical door-knocking. It involves longer, candid conversations where canvassers ask voters to share emotionally significant experiences. Even though the conversations did not explicitly mention the president, at the end of this program, researchers found a 3 percent decrease in support for Trump plus a 20 percent increase in support for expanded healthcare coverage that would include undocumented immigrants—a shift that was larger than the shift in vote share from Democrat to Republican between 2012 and 2016. More conversations like this could have huge effects on electoral politics.

The movements that have dared to use the RCN have shown how strategically naming race and calling for multiracial prosperity can lead to progressive victories. More recently, using RCN has proven successful in ballot measures and in get-out-the-vote efforts. It was used in mailers and scripts to successfully support expanding Medicaid to 230,000 Missourians and had a positive impact on returned ballots and early in-person voting in Wisconsin.

The RCN provides us with the beginnings of a roadmap to progressive victories, but more research is needed to create a strategy that can successfully conquer the right. We hope that the framework can provide a model for further research into the most effective ways to address strategic racism in its varied forms as we fight for a new democracy and economy.

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Carla Murphy is a journalist and educator who also consults on journalism industry reform.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, where he focuses on social/political philosophy and ethics. He is also a member of Pan-African Community Action and an organizer of the Undercommons.

Touré F. Reed is a professor of twentieth-century U.S. and African American history and is codirector of the African American Studies Program at Illinois State University. His research focuses on the impact of race and class ideologies on African American civil rights politics and U.S. public policy from the Progressive Era through the presidency of Barack Obama. He is the author of Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950 (UNC Press) and Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (Verso Books).

Anika Fassia is the co-director of the new home for Race Class Narrative implementation, We Make the Future Action. Prior to this role, she served as Director of Outreach and Training at Race Class Narrative Action, where she led the outreach and partnerships of organizations spanning seven Midwestern states.

Tinselyn Simms is the co-director of We Make the Future Action. Prior to this role, she served as Assistant Director of Communications at the Service Employees International Union, where she led communications for the Racial Justice Center. She spearheaded the labor union’s involvement in Race Class Narrative research.