https://convergencemag.com/articles/the-white-republic-response-by-barry-eidlin/
‘The White Republic‘: Response by Barry Eidlin
by Barry Eidlin
June 21, 2021
Convergence
To defeat the white republic, we must understand its material basis in capitalist economic relations.
A Convergence Series
In “The White Republic and The Struggle for Racial Justice,” Bob Wing contended that the U.S. state is racist to the core, and this has specific implications for our movements’ work going forward, especially the need to replace this racist state with an anti-racist state. Barry Eidlin argues that organizing against the white republic must be anchored to an understanding of the material basis of white supremacy, and powered by interracial working-class solidarity – rather than a cross-class alliance. OrgUp has published a number of other responses to Bob Wing’s article as well; we encourage readers to add your voice, and to check out the contributions from Bill Fletcher, Jr., Gerald Horne, Erin Heaney, Peter Olney & Rand Wilson, and Van Gosse. This discussion then wraps up with some concluding thoughts by Bob Wing.
Look to class struggle to beat the white republic
Thank
you to Bob Wing for writing this sharp, energetic game plan for
defending democracy, and to Organizing Upgrade for inviting me to
respond to it.
There’s a lot to agree with here. Clearly any
movement for social and economic justice in the U.S. must place the
struggle against racism and white supremacy at its core. More
specifically, it’s hard to find fault with his assessment that “race is
the pivot of U.S. politics” and that the contemporary Republican Party
has doubled down on naked, overt racism as its fundamental appeal.
Likewise, his call to strengthen the labor movement is vitally
important.
My core concern with Wing’s analysis is that
capitalism does not figure prominently enough in his analysis of racial
capitalism. This leads him to misread the historical dynamics of U.S.
racism and struggles for racial justice. But perhaps more importantly
for readers of Organizing Upgrade, it leads him to advocate organizing
strategies and alliances for today that do not adequately confront the
power structures underlying the white republic.
For our purposes, it is not necessary to delve into what Cedric Robinson did or did not mean
by “racial capitalism.” For simplicity’s sake, we will take it to mean,
as Wing puts it, that “U.S. capitalism and racism are inseparable.”
This
insight is a fundamental starting point for any analysis of U.S.
society and politics. But it’s vital not to lose sight of both aspects
of that inseparable whole.
Wing is far too seasoned an activist
and far too insightful a thinker not to know this. However, as he
develops his argument rightly placing racism at the heart of his
analysis of the U.S. political terrain, capitalism fades into the
distance.
We see this from the outset when he states that “the
U.S. government was, from the very beginning, built by and for whites
and as a dictatorship over Black and Native peoples.” This is
descriptively accurate as far as it goes, but what’s missing is any
explanation for why the U.S. state was built this way.
Name the material base
Perhaps
it is too obvious for Wing to be worth mentioning, but it’s important
to keep in mind that the atrocities committed against Native peoples
were aimed at territorial dispossession to gain access to land and
natural resources. Likewise, the political dictatorship over Black
people was a necessary component of maintaining and reproducing a slave
system of economic production.
Does this mean that racist
domination of Black and indigenous peoples was and is simply an
instrument of economic exploitation? Far from it. Ideologies often take
on a life and logic of their own once established. But just as it is
impossible to understand capitalism without integrating racism into the
explanation, the reverse is equally true.
Without accounting for
the role that indigenous dispossession and racialized chattel slavery
played in the development of U.S. capitalism, we risk falling into an
understanding of racism and white supremacy that views it as an
atavistic, sui generis phenomenon, perhaps drawing on something inherent
in the human psyche. It’s as if, as Barbara Fields
put it, “the chief business of slavery were the production of white
supremacy rather than cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco.” (One could say
something similar about indigenous dispossession).
How we
conceptualize the origins of the white republic matters for strategizing
about how to dismantle it today. If the white republic is ideologically
based, a system perpetuated by a ruling class alliance “united by and
for the system of white privilege and racist oppression,” then the
solution is an ideological counter-alliance united against the system of
white privilege and racist oppression. This is the “cross-class front
against the white republic” for which Wing advocates.
If on the
other hand the white republic has a material base in systems of economic
appropriation and exploitation, then “broad-front” alliances based on a
minimum of ideological agreement may be too broad.
Who’s in the front?
I
mean “too broad” in two senses. First, from a purely mobilizational
standpoint, the minimal basis of political agreement for the broad
fronts Wing describes is almost entirely negative. Wing’s own shorthand
for the broad front is an “anti-Right alliance.” This negative basis of
agreement may be sufficient for defensive actions like denying Trump a
second term in office. But it is entirely inadequate for constructing
the kind of transformative politics that can actually confront and
defeat the white republic.
A basic tenet of organizing is that
you do not move people to action by telling them about everything that
is bad in their lives. They already know that. Organizing requires
providing people with a positive vision of how their lives could be
different, and a realistic plan for achieving that vision. A purely
negative vision based on a shallow shared opposition to a set of ideas
and policies provides neither of those.
Second, the “broad-front”
alliance that Wing proposes is too broad in that it explicitly calls
for a “cross-class antiracist alliance.” It is unclear exactly from the
text, which talks of uniting “the progressive people” with “the
oppressed,” which classes should come together in such an alliance. Wing
is clear that the alliance should be “the broadest possible,” and
equally clear that “numerous issues divide this broad front.” He
provides a long list of such axes of division, but aside from mentioning
a class division specifically among people of color, there is no
mention of general class cleavages within the alliance.
At the
same time, Wing argues that “the primary form that broad unity against
racist authoritarianism takes is…voting Democratic to defeat…a
Republican Party that is all in for white tyranny.” He characterizes the
Democratic Party as “a vital terrain of both unity and struggle between
progressives and the ruling class and elitist forces.” Later on, he
describes the “corporate class” as “an unstable opponent of racism and
authoritarianism.”
Should we read this to mean that the
cross-class antiracist alliance includes segments of the ruling class?
If so, what are the ground rules for such an alliance? Given that, as
Wing says, this same ruling class uses its power “to fashion the society
as a whole in its image and interest,” what strategies and safeguards
are in place to ensure that the broad front is not commandeered to serve
ruling class interests?
This is not to say that alliances with
ruling class elements should never be established under any conditions,
especially when it comes to the tortured terrain of U.S. electoral
politics. But the rules of engagement must be clear. And clarity starts
with specifying who the ruling class is and how they exercise their
power.
Identify the ruling class
Unfortunately,
Wing leaves the ruling class strangely underspecified on both counts.
He asserts that “the ‘state’… is the most potent form that ruling class
power takes.” But without diminishing the power of the state, who is
this ruling class, and where do they get the power to exert control over
the state? If there is a ruling class that is independent of the state,
does that not necessarily imply that they possess and exercise a
separate power that is at least as powerful as that of the state, if not
more?
I suspect that if asked directly, Wing would identify the
ruling class as the capitalist class, which gains its power over state
and society through its control over economic production. But despite
many mentions of ruling classes, class fractions, class forces, and
class alliances, this fundamental statement about who the ruling class
is and how it derives its power is nowhere to be found in the text
itself. And yet this is an essential starting point for understanding
the power structure underlying the white republic. Absent this, is it
difficult to understand who is building the U.S. state, and why they are
building it for whites. You can’t understand capitalism without racism,
but you also can’t understand racism without capitalism.
By
extension, without clearly identifying the actors involved in building
the white republic, it is hard to develop an adequate strategy for
dismantling it. Wing characterizes the current U.S. political
polarization as being between an “overtly racist alliance” and a “broad
and diverse anti-right alliance.” While there are particular features
that distinguish the current racist alliance, Wing sees it as merely the
latest iteration of an alliance that has been “united by and for the
system of white privilege and racist oppression throughout its history.”
While
it would be unfair to expect Wing to spell out an entire strategy for
dismantling white supremacy and establishing “a systemic racial justice
democracy” in such a short piece, the core of the strategy appears to
be: 1) electorally defeating the political expression of the racist
alliance, namely the Republican Party; and 2) “building the independent
strength of the most determined racial, social, climate, and economic
justice constituencies.”
These are both important tasks for the
Left. But by themselves they are insufficient for accomplishing the
strategic goals that Wing articulates. The first is at most a defensive
maneuver, since in practice it involves supporting and voting for a
corporate-dominated Democratic Party. The second amounts to a general
call for strengthening the Left’s fighting capacity.
In both
cases, the basic assumption is that we take the existing political
terrain and alliances for granted, and just fight harder. Through
savvier tactics, more and better organizing, we keep fighting until we
win a systemic racial justice democracy.
Change the terms of engagement
What
this misses is a well-known insight among organizers: when faced with a
structurally more powerful opponent, you win by changing the terms of
engagement. This can involve changing the arena of struggle (i.e. moving
the conflict from boardroom negotiations out into the street) or
changing the size and shape of the opposing sides. This includes
bringing new constituencies into the fight on your side, as when
striking teachers ally with parents, or peeling off components of your
opponent’s alliance, as when environmental groups pressure pension funds
to divest from fossil fuel companies.
Wing himself hints at this
idea towards the beginning of his piece when he states that “no ruling
class can gain the broad social base needed for stability without
forming fairly durable but still changing alliances with other social
forces.” Later he gets more specific, identifying the durable “racist
white cross-class alliance of those who support white power and
privilege” that is “central to the U.S. ruling alliance and U.S. state.”
Building
on these insights, we can see that one of the central tasks of any
movement for racial and economic justice must be to break up the racist
white cross-class alliance. The question is how.
Here the key is
understanding the conditions under which political alliances can change.
Looking at the key inflection points in Wing’s historical narrative,
from the first Reconstruction, to its defeat, to the New Deal, to the
Second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights Movement, each of these
involved a major reconfiguration of political alliances.
While we
can identify these reconfigurations in hindsight, what is crucial to
keep in mind for our purposes is that none of them was preordained. Each
was the product of social and political struggles, where specific
groups and organizations faced off against each other: parties, unions,
social movements, armies, firms, state bureaucracies.
Wing is
right that throughout most of this history, a racist white cross-class
ruling alliance persisted in some form. But there were also moments when
the alliance frayed. These can provide clues for how the alliance might
be dissolved entirely.
The 1930s: A missed chance
The
New Deal era of the 1930s is particularly instructive here. In Wing’s
account, the period is an exceptional moment in U.S. history “where
class was the main animator of a mass fight for social justice.” He
contrasts it to the periods before and after, where he sees cross-class
movements as the main drivers of social change. The implication is that,
save that exceptional period, it takes a cross-class alliance to win in
U.S. politics.
The history suggests otherwise. Rather than an
exception, the 1930s present us with a missed opportunity. It was a
moment when an interracial working-class alliance was a real
possibility.
Class emerged as the “main animator” in the fight
for social justice precisely because the working-class upsurge of the
period challenged the white power structure and reoriented white workers
away from the racist ruling-class alliance, while linking principled
anti-racism to a broad program for economic justice. As scholars like
Manning Marable, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Michael Goldfield have shown,
it was an incipient labor-civil rights movement, the defeat of which
delayed the onset of the Second Reconstruction by at least a decade, and
profoundly shaped the Civil Rights Movement that did emerge.
Concretely,
this movement took the form of the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) organizing core industries like coal, steel, auto, meatpacking,
and textile on an industrial basis, meaning all workers regardless of
job classification. By necessity this involved organizing workers across
racial lines, as employers stoked racial divisions by creating racial
hierarchies among different jobs. Previous organizing attempts had
foundered on these job-based racial divisions.
The CIO was aided
in these endeavors by the Communist Party (CP) and other radicals, who
viewed antiracism as an integral part of the class struggle. In addition
to being among the most skilled and dedicated CIO organizers, they also
led major racial justice campaigns around lynching and criminal
justice, unemployment, housing, and sharecropping.
Did these
campaigns turn white workers into thoroughgoing, conscious antiracists?
Of course not. What they did do is transform alliances by convincing
workers of all races of the strategic imperative of interracial unity to
fight the boss. None of the major organizing campaigns of the 1930s
could have succeeded without this strategic interracial unity. Those
that failed to prioritize interracial unity, like the Operation Dixie
drives of the late 1940s, inevitably failed.
This incipient
labor-based civil rights movement was ultimately defeated, a victim of
internal anticommunist purges, vacillating Popular Front politics within
the CP, and a healthy dose of state and employer repression. But the
lesson we can draw from it for today is that the goal of today’s
antiracist alliance should not be to array one cross-class alliance
against another. Rather, it should be to realign the entire conflict
along class lines. That is what can erode the white power structure and
create conditions for a racial justice democracy.
This does not
involve downplaying anti-racist demands to appeal to white workers. Nor
is it a call to subsume racial differences under a “universal”
white-coded class identity. Indeed, this would be counterproductive, as
unity in action requires that all parties involved feel engaged and
included. Rather, it involves forging interracial solidarity through
common struggles that create a sense of linked fate.
Build interracial unity in the struggle
This
is easier said than done, but we can find examples throughout U.S.
history. A recent one is the “Red State Revolt,” the wave of illegal
teachers’ strikes that swept across conservative bastions like West
Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma in 2018. Organizing and winning these
strikes required not only uniting teachers of color and white teachers,
but also uniting teachers with parents and students, who were more
likely than the teachers to be black and brown.
Given where the
strikes occurred, many of the white teachers were self-identified
conservatives, even Trump supporters. This would place them firmly in
the racist cross-class ruling alliance. But mobilizing for the strike
put white teachers in a position where they had to unite with teachers
of color to win. The act of organizing together across racial lines
peeled white teachers away from the racist ruling alliance as they
challenged Republican governors and legislators.
It would be
wrong to claim that these actions eliminated racism among striking
teachers. But the collective struggle did dial down the salience of
racial divisions enough to allow for an interracial working-class
alliance. As a Black teacher in West Virginia recalled,
“I
didn’t feel any racism during the strike. You know, my next-door
neighbor is a Trump supporter, but she stood right next to me on the
picket line. I guess we were able to unite because we had a common
goal—if it meant being a little uncomfortable, or being around someone
you weren’t used to being around, that was okay.”
In sum, the
teachers’ class struggle against capitalist austerity required
interracial solidarity to win. The material fact of moving into struggle
led large portions of white teachers to question their political
alliances, and sometimes to change them.
There are many
shortcomings of the Red State Revolt which have been analyzed elsewhere,
but it offers a concrete example of how reorienting political conflict
along class lines creates possibilities for eroding white racist
cross-class alliances. Such examples would have to expand dramatically
to shake the foundations of the white republic. Still, it provides a
glimpse of what such a process could look like.
Wing has put
forth a provocative assessment of the tasks facing today’s Left. Chief
among these is figuring out how to confront and dismantle the white
republic. The goal is important, but without a clear conception of who
comprises it and how they get and wield power, it is hard to develop the
right strategy for confronting it.
An analysis of the white
republic that starts from an understanding of its material basis in
capitalist economic relations is essential for developing such a
strategy. This is what allows for a clear assessment of the power
underlying the ruling class alliance. And by extension, it allows us to
understand what kind of counter-alliance can best overcome that ruling
alliance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Barry Eidlin
Barry
Eidlin is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University, where
his research focuses on the study of class, politics, social movements,
and social change. His book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United
States and Canada, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.
Prior to embarking on his academic career, he spent several years as a
union organizer, mainly with Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
https://convergencemag.com/articles/the-white-republic-concluding-thoughts-by-bob-wing/
Convergence
Racial Justice
Democracy
Danger from the Right
‘The White Republic’: Concluding Thoughts by Bob Wing
by Bob Wing
July 13, 2021
Convergence Magazine
We need a strategic concept that recognizes the breadth of the alliance needed to defeat the Trumpist bloc: a democratic front.
A Convergence Series
Many thanks to the editors of Organizing Upgrade for coordinating responses to my essay, “The White Republic and the Struggle for Racial Justice.” And special thanks to Bill Fletcher, Jr., Gerald Horne, Erin Heaney, Peter Olney and Rand Wilson, Van Gosse, and Barry Eidlin for their thoughtful and comradely contributions to the discussion.
The respondents agreed that “white republic” is an accurate historical and strategic concept. Most used their responses to deepen, refine, and or apply it to their organizing work. They are well worth the read but too numerous for me to respond to here. However, I believe that a class realignment strategy, as outlined by Barry Eidlin, divides the antiracist forces and diverts the left from the historic racial justice struggle, so I will respond to it at the end of this note.
The structure of white minority rule
In my essay, I briefly discussed some of the critical remaining racist political institutions: the Electoral College, the Senate, gerrymandering, and various forms of voter suppression. I explored these in more depth in a previous essay, “Notes Toward a Social Justice Electoral Strategy.”
Here I want to brand this system of institutions as the “structure of white minority rule.” Without them, we would be thrashing the Trumpists. With them, we have a winnable but grueling fight ahead.
Notably, each of these institutions is part of the system of federalism enshrined in the Constitution that, among other things, purposely empowered the slaveholders at the expense of democracy.
The size of each state’s congressional delegation determines the number of votes it gets in the Electoral College. Thus, the notorious constitutional rule that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person even though they were disenfranchised enabled slaveholders to augment their representation in Congress and the Electoral College.
Today, the Electoral College still subverts the fundamental democratic principle of one person, one vote. It effectively disenfranchises about 40% of the national Black presidential vote when white Southern reactionaries outvote African Americans and thereby garner all of the electoral votes of most Southern states for the Republicans. And it gives three times as much weight to an electoral vote from small-population (primarily Republican) states as large (mostly Democratic) states. As a result, the Republicans have held the presidency for twelve years since 2020 despite losing the popular vote in all but one of those elections.
The Senate is composed of two Senators from each state, allowing the numerous small states, now overwhelmingly Trumpist, to lock in their power. Ian Millhiser, writing for Vox, calculates, “the Democratic half of the Senate represents 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.” Thus, even if we eliminate the filibuster rule, the Senate is a bulwark of racist authoritarianism. Still, we can and must win the Senate.
Similarly, racist gerrymandering and voter suppression laws enable Trumpists to control state legislatures and congressional representation even when they lose the popular vote.
United front, popular front and democratic front
In my essay, I invoked the concept of the united front as the principal opposition to the racist authoritarians. In the 1930s and 1940s, that concept referred to building strategic unity among different working-class forces within the advanced capitalist countries. In most countries, that meant unity among social-democratic (and socialist) parties and trade unions and communist parties and unions, which together dominated the working-class movement in Europe. In the original conceptualization, the popular front was the multi-class front of all peoples’ forces against fascism, and it excluded big capitalists.
However, in my opinion, the most progressive political forces and movements in the U.S. have been multi-class for at least half a century: for example, the movements of Black people and other people of color, the multi-racial antiracist movements, the women’s movement, the movements for climate and health justice, against war, for LGBTQ rights, etc. Moreover, although working-class forces have been present in each of those multi-class groupings, they have been far weaker and less politically advanced than in Europe and the U.S. in the 1930s. At that time, they were undeniably the leading and most powerful movement.
Thus, although building the working-class movement, including working-class poles within the multi-class movements, is a crucial priority, it is likely that Black-led people of color and antiracist movements will continue to be the main anchor of the people’s movement.
Finally, I believe capitalist forces are crucial to defeating the MAGA movement, and I do not think this will change anytime soon either. By capitalist forces, I refer to most elite Democratic Party elected officials, funders, think tanks, and operatives; the mainstream media and corporate cultural institutions; large, moderate non-profit organizations and funders; liberal colleges, etc. It is significant that, so far, the only giant corporate entity publicly aligned with the Trumpists is Fox and that the mainstream media is virtually unanimous in opposition. Although the left and progressive forces have made massive gains over the last 10 years, we still have little to take the place of the crucial role those forces and institutions play.
Consequently, I purposely used the term “united front” to refer to multi-class forces united to defeat racist authoritarianism and fight for an antiracist democracy. And I believe it compels us to adopt another strategic concept that recognizes the breadth of the anti-Trumpist alliance, including capitalists: the democratic front.
Yes, including capitalists in the democratic front tremendously complicates unity and struggle dynamics within that front, with constant class struggle. But, in my opinion, that is the political reality on the ground, regardless of whether we recognize it conceptually.
Making strategic and tactical unity-and-struggle decisions regarding various capitalists is, in fact, a crucial task for virtually every social justice organization in the U.S. It is a constant in electoral, community, policy, and labor organizing and fundraising, and media work. It is almost impossible to seriously engage, let alone win any campaign, without making smart decisions about which capitalists might align with our immediate goals, which are unalterably opposed, and which might be convinced to stay neutral. This critical work is a combination of winning powerful allies and dividing our opponents.
Consequently, it is far better to consciously and strategically deal with this reality rather than allow it to blindside us or facilitate a devastating Trumpist victory by making enemies of all capitalists. We can only build the social justice movement if we can navigate the complex unity-struggle dynamics with powerful allies, even if those allies sometimes undercut, block, or even outright attack us. But, of course, this alignment of forces will almost certainly change once the white nationalists are defeated and before we win an antiracist democracy. In short, politics are in constant motion, and we need to be alert to changes that require changes in strategy and tactics. But this is my read at the moment.
Soon, I hope our movement will name itself (as the far right has) and replace the clunky concepts that we now work with. The Rainbow Coalition once accomplished this. Black Lives Matter is a significant step in that direction. Our ability to agree on a powerful identity will mark our maturation and unity and be crucial to our further development.
Class vs class is a losing strategy
I believe the strategy proposed in Barry Eidlin’s response to my essay divides the antiracist forces and diverts the left from the frontlines of the historic struggle now raging. But his and similar views are influential in the Democratic Socialists of America, which, as a national organization, still holds back from making its potentially weighty political contribution to the fight against racist authoritarianism.
Eidlin states that he agrees with me that: “Clearly any movement for social and economic justice in the U.S. must place the struggle against racism and white supremacy at its core. More specifically, it’s hard to find fault with his assessment that ‘race is the pivot of U.S. politics’ and that the contemporary Republican Party has doubled down on naked, overt racism as its fundamental appeal.” He also positively invokes the concepts of “racial capitalism” and “the white republic.”
However, the article’s strategic punchline omits all of those racial justice affirmations in favor of the class struggle between workers and capitalists: “The goal of today’s antiracist alliance should not be to array one cross-class alliance against another. Rather, it should be to realign the entire conflict along class lines.”
The lynchpin of this class strategy is a belief that racial oppression and white privilege are merely ideological, not systemic, structural, or material. Eidlin writes: “Does this mean that racist domination of Black and indigenous peoples was and is simply an instrument of economic exploitation? Far from it. Ideologies often take on a life and logic of their own once established.”
This consignment of racial oppression to “ideology” has significant consequences. Only class exploitation is considered the “material base” and, in Eidlin’s framework, is far more important than ideology. He does not consider the vast economic and social differences between whites – capitalists and non-capitalists alike – and people of color to be “a material basis of racism” since they are not, in his view, class exploitation. This analysis leads to an antiracist strategy designed to “realign the entire conflict along class lines.”
By contrast, I believe a strategy that seeks to realign antiracist struggle to class struggle rather than directly confront systemic racism and the racist state is ephemeral at best and racist class collaboration at worst (expressed, for example, in the practice of the American Federation of Labor until fairly recently).
Eidlin acknowledges that rabid exploitation of African slaves and seizure of Native land were the chief purposes of racism in the U.S. But he ignores the development of the system of white privilege that gave white supremacy its unique shape, political dynamics, and power in this country, including racist state power.
The thirteen colonies and the U.S. were the only slave societies that produced a stark racial polarization based on the one-drop rule. And the United States was the only former site of African slavery that later legally instituted and enforced, often by white terror, a systematic Jim Crow color line of white supremacy/white privilege and Black oppression throughout its economy, society, and politics. Consequently, while sharp racial disparities, discrimination, and colorism are rife in countries where Europeans enslaved Africans, racial politics are far more potent in the U.S. than in the others, and the U.S. is the only one I consider to be a white republic.
Beyond the material base
The capitalist “material base” alone cannot explain any of these unique historical developments or comprehend their specific politics. Racist exploitation and white privilege have, from the beginning, led to the creation of a vast system of economic, political, legal, and institutional structures that permeate every aspect of U.S. life. Its politics cannot be comprehended in class terms alone.
Finally, the proposed class realignment strategy downplays the power of millions of Black and Latino(a) non-working class people who possess less net wealth than white high school dropouts and whose lives do not matter to racists or the racist system. A class-versus-class strategy diminishes the grievances and political importance of the millions of non-working class whites who oppose racism. And it underestimates the crucial role of tens of millions of white workers who, as we speak, are going to the mattresses for Trumpist racist authoritarianism.
In short, this strategy weakens the antiracist forces and oversimplifies the racist forces. The left needs to take history and politics as the basis of analysis and strategy rather than squeezing reality into a theory.
Should we ever win socialism and eliminate capitalism in the U.S., significant racist stratification of the working class and society, racial profiling, and voter suppression will undoubtedly continue. So we will need to continue to systematically root it out and defeat the racist forces within the working and middle classes that promote it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bob Wing
Bob Wing has been a racial justice organizer and writer since 1968. Wing was the founding editor of ColorLines Magazine, a national magazine of race, culture, and organizing, and edited and cofounded the anti-war newspaper War Times/Tiempo de Guerras. A longtime activist, writer, and editor, he has been active in national and international struggles, especially racial justice struggles, since the late 1960s.
You can find most of Bob’s writing at www.bobwingracialjustice.org or Toward Racial Justice and a Third Reconstruction (Lulu Press, 2018).
