Evolution of Race and Racial Justice under Neoliberalism

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* Article: The Evolution of ‘Race’ and Racial Justice under Neoliberalism. By Adolph Reed Jr. and Touré F. Reed. Vol. 58: Socialist Register 2022: New Polarizations, Old Contradictions. The Crisis of Centrism.

URL = https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/37651


Abstract

"Social or cultural resentments – including racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia – certainly played a role in the rise of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald J. Trump. But to acknowledge the important influence of race in American political and social life is not to insist that it operates independently of evolving political and economic relations of power. The problem is that the discourse of social justice now dominant presumes, even demands, an either/or construction of the relationship between inequalities rooted in capitalist class dynamics and those attributable to ascriptively-based ideologies of hierarchy such as race or gender. Postwar racial liberalism generated a moralistic discourse that seems rhetorically powerful. However, because it is devoid of meaningful content, moralism – affirming, though it may be – offers neither useful interpretive frameworks nor practical remedies capable of redressing the social, historical, and political-economic dynamics that reproduce inequalities of all sorts in US capitalism. High-minded idealist constructs such as ‘racism is our nation’s Original Sin’ or ‘our national disease’ or, more recently, that ‘racism is in our DNA’, are evasions that deflect attention from the historical and material sources of racial inequality past and present.


Many self-identified liberals and far too many leftists continue to embrace these evasive metaphors that treat ideological or cultural attachments as if they can, in fact, ‘take on a life of their own’. Such constructs have become especially appealing in recent years because, much like underclass ideology, they allow one to sidestep the proximate material and cultural processes that inform the constitution of racial ideology and its evolution. Ironically, this ostensibly antiracist view, in asserting that race/racism transcends specific historical and social contexts, is itself quintessentially racist.


There is no doubt that racism is real and has negative consequences for people’s lives. This is why we have consistently argued for the continued value of anti-discrimination policies. But race reductionism’s insistence on uncoupling disparities from political economy lends itself to individualist reforms (anti-racism training and swelling the ranks of black capitalists) as responses to structural ailments. We must reject race-reductionist analyses and refuse to accommodate charges that a left focused first and foremost on critique of and challenge to capitalist political economy as such, with its corrosive human consequences, is unacceptably ‘class reductionist’. To summon an old Maoist slogan, at a time such as this, it is imperative that we clarify who are our friends and who are our enemies."

(https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/37651)