Class, Race and Marxism. David R. Roediger
of history and of current political possibilities. Focusing on the case of Brazil, Bourdieu and Wacquant contend that United States–inspired, United States–funded and United States–produced research works to impose a “rigid black/white social division” offering the rest of the world a “poisonous” export. Such imperialism insinuates itself, in Bourdieu and Wacquant’s view, despite the fact that its arguments are “contrary to the image Brazilians have of their own nation.” It does so by trading on a perverse and unspecified combination of antiracist rhetoric and neoliberal financing for scholarship.
However, a series of withering critiques, especially from the Brazilianists Michael Hanchard and John French and from the cultural theorists Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, have dismantled Bourdieu and Wacquant’s contention that race is somehow a peculiarly US concept that would have to be exported. The critical responses show that in neither the United States nor Brazil is race regularly deployed for purposes of accusation rather than analysis, and that what Bourdieu and Wacquant call the “neutralization of historical context” is a charge that might be turned back on their own reductive understanding of Brazil. Most importantly, the critics show that the scholars accused of spreading “imperialist reason” and rigid caricatures of the Brazilian social system actually continue a long line of argument within Brazil that has consistently featured nuanced debates engaging both United Statesian and Brazilian scholars who well realize that the historical context of displacement of indigenous people, empires, slave-trading and slavery produced a very different, but not incomparable, racial system in Brazil than in the United States. When Stam and Shohat show that the analysis produced by Wacquant and Bourdieu is not devoid of universalistic views of race (and presumed colorblindness) found in French imperialism, the argument that we need a fuller and more complex discussion of race and empire rather than an end to debate is squarely put on the table.
Does Moving Away from Race Move Us toward Class?
The very first words in Darder and Torres’s After Race attempt to improve on Du Bois’s “dictum” regarding the color line: “We echo his statement but with a radical twist. The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of ‘race’—an ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the smokescreens of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness.” After Race centrally holds that race is a biological myth at long last invalidated by science, but now dangerously recreated because scholars persist in using the term, thereby decisively aiding the rise of culturally based neoracisms and even the recrudescence of biological racism. On this view, the “idea of race” itself, not capitalism, is somehow the “lynchpin of racism.”
Like the early sections of Gilroy’s Against Race, the work of Darder and Torres holds out the hope that retreating from the invocation of race will actually empower a more effective struggle against racialized hierarchies. Indeed, they approve of Barbara Fields’s uncharitable contention that “liberal, leftist, or progressive” writers dwell on the “homier and more tractable notion” of race to avoid being “unsettled” by talking about racism. However, as in Gilroy’s case, the emphasis on racism is not sustained and neither race nor racism function as what the book calls “categories of analysis”—that is, they cannot be the reasons for people acting as they do, but must themselves be explained.
Insofar as Fields, Darder, Torres and others contend the inattention to class distorts inquiry into all inequalities in the United States, they are exactly right. However, the strategy of banking on the retreat from race to solve that problem is a highly dubious one. It leads to an extremely embattled tone, and to ignoring the most exciting work building on materialist insights. From Cheryl Harris’s brilliant studies of whiteness as property, to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s research on racial systems, to somewhat older South African scholarship on racial capitalism, to Lisa Lowe’s important observations on race, universality, and labor at the start of Immigrant Acts, much work seeks to revive the class question by bringing racism and class together more systematically, but you would not know it from After Race.
Indeed, at critical junctures, the book is so eager to be against race that it departs dramatically from historical materialism and thus cannot much be for class. Darder and Torres praise the liberal sociologist William Julius Wilson, for example, for supposedly demonstrating that “the significance of class has increased and is now far more salient than ‘race’ in determining the life chances of African Americans.” This either/or, class-not-race, position leads After Race to ignore the devastating counterarguments Melvin Oliver, Thomas Shapiro, and others have made to Wilson’s work and to subordinate to an endnote their own appreciation of the fact that Wilson’s work is about as distant from Marxism as possible. That note promises a different approach, focusing “with specificity [on] the dialectic between the means of production and the process of racialization,” but so far Darder and Torres have not produced such analysis. Indeed, After Race emphasizes theological matters, not slavery, settler colonialism, and the primitive accumulation of capital, in accounting for the origins of racialized groups. Such a view is very much consonant with the book’s emphasis on “racisms”—including the tendency to “inferiorize” whites—to the exclusion of any systematic discussion of white supremacy.
This same inattention to white supremacy makes it almost impossible for After Race to contribute to pressing discussions of how to build Latino/Black working class unity. The book’s puzzling title—clearly race was no more real in 1670 than in 2004—makes sense in terms of the book’s structure, one that culminates in chapters on Asian-American and Latino experiences and emphasizes that the “browning of America” will shake old certainties regarding racism. The danger here lies in marking the possibility of abandoning race in terms of the Latino (or “brown”—both categories are insufficiently interrogated) population exceeding that of African Americans. This would leave us passing out of a period of “race,” during which blacks predominated, and into a raceless one in which Latinos do. But there is then no sustained analysis of African Americans, of African-American Studies, or of the tradition of Black Marxism, as would seem necessary to calibrate such an argument. Moreover, that African Americans practice “racism” is a consistent refrain of the study, which persistently lays all manner of mischief at the door of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The former, we learn, emphasized a “liberal, rights-centered political agenda [that] undermined the development of a coherent working-class movement in the United States.” Here the reflexive move away from seeing racism as having critical explanatory weight at times lets white supremacist trade unionism off the hook and leads to the missing of the centrality of jobs, union organizing, welfare rights, poor people’s campaigns, and point-of-production organizing—of class—to the civil rights and Black Power movements. Missing class, it becomes possible to charge that Black Power “seiz[ed] the moment in the name of antiracism and ‘black autonomy’,” shutting off debate over the consequences of using “the language of ‘race’ to do battle with racism” and to loosely link a movement animated by anticolonialism, anticapitalism and nationalism to the Nation of Islam’s extravagances on “white devils.”
While Darder and Torres allow that “racism” is still a problem worth addressing, the recent writings of the radical political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. are done even with all that. Sounding more like Debs than any major left commentator on race and class in recent memory. “Exposing racism,” he argues, is “the political equivalent of an appendix: a useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment that’s usually innocuous but can flare up and become harmful.” Reed’s two late-2005 articles, “Class-ifying the Hurricane” and “The Real Divide” are in other ways as well the signature pieces so far of the retreat from race. They appear in relatively popular left/liberal venues, The Nation and The Progressive respectively, and represent attempts by a prominent activist to speak broadly and frankly. Moreover, Reed’s scholarship offered significant opposition to liberalism’s retreat from race during the Clinton era, especially in his collection Without Justice for All. “Class-ifying the Hurricane” appeared while the horrific impact of Katrina in Reed’s hometown of New Orleans was fresh in readers’ minds, when racist reporting contrasting Black “looters” with white survivors shown doing precisely the same foraging. It noted “manifest racial disparities in vulnerability,