Here is the distilled essence of a recently published conversation between journalist Matt Taibbi and University of Pennsylvania professor Adolph Reed. The subject: whether “class-not-race” politics is outdated.
Taibbi: In Robin DiAngelo’s new book, Nice Racism, she seems to suggest that people who are focusing on economic justice are avoiding talking about racism, that the two ideas must be understood separately.
Reed: Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to. One of the things that’s happened over time is the material incentives.
Where the staff or whatever is going batshit crazy about how the leadership of the organization is all racist, sexist, whatever. One of the first calls is to bring in some minor-league version of Robin DiAngelo to do racial sensitivity training. It’s taken hold as part of what I’ve often described as the broader political economy of race relations.
Taibbi: There’s a line in her book that I missed originally: “I believe that white progressives caused the most daily damage to people of color.”
Reed: I don’t even know what to say to shit like that, I really don’t.
Taibbi: Her point seems to be that open racism is one thing, but the submerged version in the liberal suburbs does more to keep the system of oppression in place.
Reed: I’ll go to Lyndon Johnson on this. As he pointed out, the point of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was not to change people’s attitudes, it was to change their public behavior. And you’ve got a right to whatever fucked-up attitude you have.
Taibbi: Aren’t there some parallels in the antiracist movement to the reaction to Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church speech, when he came out against war in Vietnam? The pundits all railed against him and essentially said, “You’ve gone outside your lane.” Race is race, everything else is everything else, don’t mix.
Reed: It’s the kind of thing that makes me, at least once a week, want to put on Mahalia Jackson singing, “Soon, I will be done with the trouble of the world.” It’s so insidious, that it’s coming out of the labor movement now. Black workers can’t just be workers. They got to have some special black thing about them. But I’m not denying that black workers are black, as much as workers. Black is the adjunctive, worker is the noun.
The thing is always: how do we try to build the solidarities that we need to have, to change the society in ways that make it better for everybody who lives in it? The practice of race-first politics is completely disconnected from any sort of pragmatic question like that.