"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...
Moynihan’s dystopian vision — which presumed that African-American poverty had taken on a life of its own, making it nearly impervious to economic intervention — had become liberal orthodoxy.
While centrist liberals like Presidents Clinton and Obama have encouraged conversations about race and have been willing to concede that racism can undercut the life chances of blacks and Latinos, they are more likely to trace poverty and inequality to the habits, attitudes, and culture of the poor than to the disastrous effects of labor or trade policies or even the health of a particular sector of the economy.
Sanders is thus more likely to draw attention to the linkages between racism and class exploitation than the sitting Democratic president or other presidential contenders, not because he is a liberal — like centrist liberals Carter, the Clintons, or Obama — but because he is, by today’s narrow standards, a leftist...
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."
This is really interesting.
There is a very real white-liberal thing to assume that continuing racial disparities are caused primarily by class disparities, so economic policies can solve the racism. I have friends who have told me that they do not wonder about my experiences of racism because I am economically privileged, so they assume that I do not experience them. In reaction to this reality, in an attempt to subvert this thinking, I imagine that people commonly make statements that - if taken outside of the context of their intent - can seem to suggest that racism is distinct from economic inequalities.
This essay is making me think more critically about when I might be doig this.
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