Why Liberals Separate Race from Class [View all]

[Catherina]

This is worth reading in entirety. Snips don't do this justice

Why Liberals Separate Race from Class

The tendency to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality has a long liberal lineage.
by Touré F. Reed


Demonstrators in the June 1968 Poor People's March in Washington, DC. Warren K. Leffler / Library of Congress

The horizontal organization of Black Lives Matter ensures a diversity of perspectives among participants and even branches. Nevertheless, the now-commonplace claim at the heart of the recent Black Lives Matter protests against Sanders is that white liberals have long reduced racism to class inequality in order to deflect attention from racial disparities.

This is not just wrong, but the formulation — which ultimately treats race as unchanging and permanent rather than a product of specific historical and political economic relations — undermines both the cause of racial equality in general and pursuit of equitable treatment in the criminal justice system in particular.
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But by the 1950s, the anticommunism of the Cold War had a chilling effect on class-oriented civil rights politics, setting the stage for analyses of racism that divorced prejudice from economic exploitation — the fundamental reason for slavery and Jim Crow. Indeed, this was the era in which racism was recast as a psychological affliction rather than a product of political economy.

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This is why the March on Washington demands included not just anti-discrimination measures, but a full-employment economy, jobs programs, and a minimum-wage increase. Randolph and Rustin would go on to ally with economist Leon Keyserling to draft the 1966 Freedom Budget For All, which laid out a plan for social-democratic policies addressing black poverty by confronting its ultimate source — the erosion of well-paying jobs for low-skilled workers that had once served as the pathway to the middle class for white people.

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If one views the excesses and failures of the criminal justice system solely through the lens of race, then victims of police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct tend to be black or Latino. However, if one understands race and class are inextricably linked, then the victims of police brutality are not simply black or Latino (and Latinos outnumber blacks in federal prisons at this point) but they tend to belong to groups that lack political, economic, and social influence and power.

From that vantage point, the worldview expressed by Johnson and others misses the mark and falls into the same trap that, ironically, liberals have offered a stratum of credentialed black Americans for decades: opportunity within a market-driven political and economic framework that disparages demands for social and economic justice for all (including most black people) as socialist, communist, un-American, or even class-reductionist.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement/