DH: It's the "prejudice" problem. Having identified it, what do you do about it? Just pointing the finger and saying "racism" often is a form of moralizing and celebration of the anti-racist's own virtue, but what is the political action that you subsequently take? It's more a subjective/psychological category than a political one.
APR I think I made this point in the last go-round on this… It seems to me that, just because the Wise-an anti-racists can’t get beyond the politics of prejudice doesn’t mean that the rest of us haven’t. At the same time, I find that a great deal of the resistance to the kinds of advocating for “*for living wage laws, free college tuition, single-payer health insurance, better labor laws” and “Criminaliz[ing] less behavior and jail[ing] fewer people. Institute single-payer and make unemployment benefits more generous. Punish and fire brutal cops, etc.”* – in short the resistance to class/justice-driven left/socialist politics I run into – is deeply tinged with racial prejudice on the one hand and a preoccupation with race and culture that absolutely impedes recognition of structural racism (which I never suggested Henwood and Reed were anything but wholly familiar with) much less the ways that the kinds of politics and policies Reed and Henwood push for will float all boats while service the poor, disadvantaged and disempowered – the numerical majority of which are white – the most.
APR: You write: “*On income disparities, there are cumulative effects of race, e.g.,* the fact that black people have only a fraction of the wealth of white ones at the same income level.” as if this was something that was widely understood… it is not, which you also know, I know. What I can’t figure out is how one might increase the number of folks committed to the politics you and I agree on without explicitly extending this kind of analysis as part of the argument. No one here who’s arguments I give any credence to has advocated fort an “anti-racist” politics driven by self-aggrandizing and virtuous moralizing about other, bad, peoples’ irresponsible prejudice. I am saying, however, that – among a good number of people I’ve dealt with for a long time, and for the vast majority of my students – the neoliberal discourse of post-racism actively reinforces their unreflective and selectively classist racism, which reinforces their predilections to resist left/socialist politics. I neither start with race (or gender, or… choose whatever reified identitarian politics you’d like to insert) nor end with race but I find I always have to deal with race and racism – at both the level of prejudice and structural conditions.
APR: Getting back to structural racism, you ask “where does it get you?” It gets me past the whole super-virtuous moralizing attacks on overly-race conscious and insecure potential allies. It does not define the political goal but advancing it has always been necessary to making the kinds of political connections that move people away from their native classist individualism. Perhaps it is different for you and Adolph, but if I try to introduce left political agendas in public or professional settings, I almost always have to engage race issues – and that includes addressing the ways that Wise-ans are utterly wrongheaded in their politics but also unpacking the ways that peoples’ prejudices are constructed through and reinforce their alienation and disempowerment.
APR I have to tell you that the Anti-Marx text only served to reinforce my sense of all this. I don’t think the majority of the critiques of Reed’s polemics are examples of right wing discourses masquerading as liberal defenders of antiracism as politics. Do you? Furthermore, and I guess it is possible that I am misinterpreting Reed here, if Rayford Logan – civil rights activist understood the necessity of social (voting) and industrial (union) democracy to racial justice then it is hard for me to accept that the civil rights movement was just about voting laws. Racial democracy may have supplanted social democracy as the movement developed and spread – particularly in the late 50s and early 60s with young Progressive northern white involvement and the necessity of direct involvement with federal government institutions – and this trajectory may have fed the rise of liberal “anti-racism”, but what a slap at the folks of all races committed to social democracy who stuck with the civil rights movement and committed themselves to political movements more radical in character than the civil rights movement finally proved to be to say that civil rights was exclusively about liberal reform…
Here, Reed’s paragraph on the neoliberal celebration of the inclusion of black and brown people resonates with Doug’s seeming assertion that Blacks/Browns/Yellows/Reds can’t be racist towards their own – esp. if they are cops, or at least the fact that historically oppressed minorities think ill and brutalize their poor cousins, means that anti-racist politics is useless. But, like others here, I just can’t accept the reification of race in Doug’s position or how it undermines the political potential of pointing out the class- and classist ideology driven racism of many historically oppressed minorities. Pointing this racism out and arguing for its importance doesn’t represent the goal of our politics but I can’t see – given the relative hegemony of the post-racial neoliberal state of the world – building a class politics without working through this stuff with potential allies. So few people I meet know that Doug and Reed know.
Of course, “*the struggle against racial health disparities, for example, has no real chance of success apart from a struggle to eliminate for-profit health care”* but how do you convince people raised in and socialized within the ideological world of a neoliberalism that insists on its own post-racist, post-classist, post-sexist individualism without an analysis of structural forms of repression other than class? The people I meet genuinely do not understand the history of racial disparities nor the history of the ideology by means of which they understand those disparities. Maybe the real difference between Robert and I and Doug and Adolph isn’t in our end politics but in the point of the process of getting there we’re concerned with.