However, as Warren notes, “they point to a truth rarely narrated about the South, namely, that it has never been as solidly pro-slavery or even as anti-black as popular imagination has depicted it”; he goes on to cite as a crucial case in point the rise of the interracial Readjuster Party, which wrested electoral power from planter elites and governed Virginia from 1879 to 1883—nearly two decades after the antislavery western counties seceded to form West Virginia. Despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. Watching it this time, I remembered how startled I had been when Glory was released to learn that many people, including blacks and people on the left, dismissed or even disparaged the film as a “white savior narrative”—a phrase that is now a routine derogation of certain cross-racial sagas of resistance to white supremacy. But there’s been a much greater tolerance for a similar methodology when it comes to countering oppression. A great gulf exists between the large amount of media attention devoted to the issue and the very small number of people of color it will ultimately impact.

is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in studies of issues of racism and U. But as we have seen, against all the stereotypes, on many issues workers’ consciousness runs ahead of other classes in society even at times of relative social peace. But, to stick to the Black Lives Matter example and to the extent that supporters of Black Lives Matter mean what they say, there’s no reason to regard what the people in the streets wanted – an end to racialized police violence – as significantly different from what their corporate supporters say they want.and Walter Benn Michaels have been among the clearest voices critiquing the dominant race reductionism in American intellectual life and proposing a real egalitarian alternative. Reed’s 2013 essay “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism” mounts a rigorous Marxist analysis of the development of racial ideologies and the work that they do. However, the broader point is that one can eliminate racial disparities while still maintaining a fundamentally unequal economic system that relegates the majority of black people to miserable and precarious lives.

The effect of omitting such a central tactical debate was to depict the civil rights struggle as a simple extrusion of King’s larger-than-life persona against a pandemic racism—as a struggle, in other words, with virtually no politics to speak of. This, after all, describes the platforms of both the Republican and Democratic parties for many decades.promised to assist employers’ needs for rational labor force management and were present in the foundation of the fields of industrial relations and industrial psychology.

And while there are undoubtedly widely shared experiences that emerge from poverty, it’s unclear why anyone would want to celebrate these as an identity. After all, the trickle down feminism of the Clinton candidacy was, in many ways, similar to that espoused by Julia Gillard during her prime ministership. But for working class women, decent childcare can be life changing, removing a major source of social stress and bringing to an end a common form of drudgery. Conservatives who try to blame black crime on race and liberals who try to blame it on racism are both missing the point.The logical implication—Reed and Michaels have been pointing this out for a long time—is that if the men and women working these difficult, low-paying jobs were represented “proportionally,” which is to say if fewer Black women and more white men worked them, the problem would be solved. In tension with the mood for generalisation, there is also a strong contemporary tendency to focus on the particularity of experience rather than seeking common ground and understanding oppression as structural.