Race, Class, & Belonging on the American Left

Some personal reflections.

WEB Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, and Dorothy Hunton.

Three childhood memories of mine come to mind when I think of much of the current discourse in the American Left on the rise of fascism and the role of race, class and identity in its resistant and constructive alternative.

The first is a WEB Du Bois biography, the name of which I can’t remember, old, worn out, and with the center falling apart, that I consumed religiously in middle school. I had seen the famous portrait of Du Bois, neatly dressed in his Edwardian suit with a stern facial expression, many times as a child, but this was my first time actually picking up a book about him, learning his name, and entering his story. The book mesmerized me, so much so that even as its pages fell out and its cover wore out, I carried it to and from school every day, enthralled by this radical intellectual. Perhaps I saw myself in him, in his ambitious drive for education and academic accomplishment, in his acute analysis of the racial terror that plagued his people, in his defiant and counter-cultural radicality and refusal to go along to get along. Through Du Bois, I felt that my own ambition was not only achievable, but valid, and for a child growing up on Chicago’s west side surrounded by the endemic nihilism and apathy of deprived ambition, this was like manna from heaven.

The second memory is of standing in my family’s West Side apartment on an October day when I was about 7 years old, listening helplessly as my mother cried over the phone with Commonwealth Edison, the primary utility supplier in Cook County. “It’s my baby’s birthday!…”, she pleaded, referring to my then two year old brother, as the representative on the other line repeated himself in an aloof rhythm, “Ma’am, I’m sorry. There is nothing we can do.” I was too young to understand my family’s economic situation; my parents limited discussion about money to typical cliches, often a working-out of self absolution for the shame of being poor. “Listen Lique, we’re struggling”, they’d say in calmer moments, “We can’t afford that right now.” Other times their tone was more harsh, the sharpness and frustration of their voices a mere depiction of internal embarrassment. This day was different, too serious for calm and too exhausting for rage, now there was only grief. Mom’s tears subsided as she hung up the phone and buried her hands in her head. ComEd seemed to have money, I thought, or a lot of power. After all they were turning off our lights, and that seemed like only something a powerful person could do. Why couldn’t they help us?

The final memory is of my father sitting me down and showing me the aftermath of a police shooting of an unarmed Black man, Philando Castile, in Minnesota. “Liquey, come look at this,” he said and pointed me to his phone. As I watched this man bleed, cry in agony and pain, and slowly die, it was as if I was entering another realm of reality, as if the Bible studies and Christian school lessons about hell and its horror became as real to me as the tightening of my chest. But what struck me then was not just the atrocity, I had seen some before that, nor was it his girlfriend weeping in shock or his baby wailing in confusion. It was my father’s stone cold facial expression as he witnessed his Black son get that much closer to becoming a Black man, the mode of which was seeing what happens to other Black men during a traffic stop.

These memories, though placed very differently in my mind, both served to transform me from a naïve Black boy burning with optimism and love of country, into a Black man with an unambiguous education on the complex relationship between race, class, and my place. Each radicalized me in different ways. Through Du Bois, I was convinced that being Black wasn’t synonymous with what the TV news had told me, and far too many older Black people repeated, ignorance, sloth, laziness, violence and materialism. Black was beautifully intelligent, astute, comprehensive, and daring. The lights being cut off at our apartment, though dimming our home, enlightened and illuminated my consciousness; now I knew what “we’re struggling” really meant, and that the helplessness of the representative was a gross lie, if not a preventable fate. After watching Philando Castile’s murder, I was more aware of my place in my country. That I, a sensitive and large Black boy, was a scary, threatening, intimidating monster to the state.

These are the memories I bring with me to the spaces that claim to care about these issues of class, race, power, authority, and public perception the most, and who proudly proclaim that they are not only critics of the social order, but prophets of alternative vision for it. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which I have been a member for the last four years, says it the best, I think, “Another world is possible.” The inevitability of history, of the movement of people and institutions toward or away from justice, though well propagated by a certain class of historian, is a myth. History is changing, the autonomous exercise of people to form and create conditions, and then tear them down, and then build them again. We are within our rights and well within our power, therefore to shift our present, bending and turning it toward a more humane society, the forces against us be damned.

And yet, I’ve become increasingly aware during my time on the American Left of the lack of holistic interpretation, of our purpose and our enemies, that this shifting and change requires. Perhaps this holism would reveal our faults too clearly to us, or the raw nature of it wake us up from our dreams that we live in a European country in which liberalism and social democracy are taken for granted, or Latin America in which post colonialism and decades of repression and violence have inspired the long and difficult work of building socialist political infrastructures and electing presidents. Perhaps we’ve mistaken idealism with ambition, or complexity for impediment.

This lack has been best demonstrated in the discourse of many American socialists on race, identity politics, “wokeness”, and class. In wake of the failures of both of Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns to win over Black voters, many white socialists have been too embarrassed to accept the blunt truth that the reasons our electoral campaigns without Black candidates fail to make inroads with Black communities is because the racial politics of many predominantly white American socialist organizations and allied groups are incomplete, ahistorical, anti-Black, and serve as enablers to an increasingly identity-antagonist fascist right. Rather than taking the failures of these two campaigns as an opportunity to conduct an in-depth analysis and introspective internal criticism as to how to reach an admittedly more moderate Black electorate, too many on the Left have instead chosen to rehearse white supremacy through class reductionism and in so doing antagonize and belittle Black people by overly simplifying and dismissing large portions of African American history, advocating against attempts to rectify that history, and marginalizing the Black experience. These writers, critics, podcast hosts, and academics seem to think Black people and our experiences are an unnecessary nuisance, a distraction from what should be the “real” focus; the organization of the working class in America behind a class-exclusive politic.

A notable representative of this reactionary tendency is Ben Burgis, a Jacobin columnist and prominent voice on US socialism. Though he has spoken with righteous indignation in defense of Palestinians amidst a horrific genocide in Gaza and an apartheid-laden occupation in the West Bank, he does not have the same moral clarity when it comes to the experiences of Black Americans, notably Black women. While passionately arguing that Kamala Harris did not lose the 2024 election due to sexism, and using Mexico’s election of Claudia Sheinbaum as their President as an example, Mr. Burgis said,

“The coincidence of Claudia Sheinbaum romping to an overwhelming victory in the presidential election in Mexico shortly before Kamala Harris flopped in ours is awkward for commentators who want to center sexism (or "misogynoir" or whatever) as the big explanation for the latter.”

There are many things deeply flawed and incoherent in this statement. First, it is irresponsible, if not outright pedestrian, to compare the electoral politics of Mexico to the United States, as Ms. Sheinbaum succeeded an already overwhelmingly popular left wing electoral project in MORENA. Moreover, the election of women to high office in foreign countries to the south of the United States is not mutually exclusive with the unique experiences of institutional and structural sexism that women experience in said countries, and it certainly does not invalidate the role that sexism plays in electoral perceptions of women who seek public office, which are well documented. Perhaps most striking however, is the casual parenthetical dismissal of “misogynoir”, a term coined by Black feminists to describe the intersecting oppressive experiences of both racism and sexism among Black women. This “misogynoir or whatever” attitude, whether in ignorance or in some kind of cruel jest, does a gross disservice to the class struggle that Mr. Burgis so desperately wants us all to focus on, as Black women make up huge proportions of the working class in their labor and in organized resistance to capitalist exploitation. Simply put, the Black women Burgis puts down with his half-assed political analysis are the same people who will be of critical importance to the world which he claims he desires.

But Mr. Burgis attitudes toward race and gender are not reducible to his own personal failings, nor do they exist in a vacuum of thinking. Equally, if not more troubling, is how prevalent his anti-Blackness is, and how much it is rehearsed in the pages of the publication he writes for most frequently, the socialist magazine Jacobin. While few can deny the importance of Jacobin, a small but prolific socialist publication which is widely popular on the American Left, in dramatizing and analyzing the leech and pervasiveness of capitalism in both the political and cultural life of the United States, their intellectual engagement on the similar effects of racism are stunningly elementary at best, and racially regressive at worst.

Even before the 2024 election results invited a flood of disastrously off-base opinions about the roles of race, gender and class in American politics, Jacobin was publishing articles attacking President Joe Biden’s program to provide federal aid to Black farmers as part of the COVID-19 relief effort. Rather than criticizing the admitted poor rollout of this program, which left many Black farmers not getting aid at all, with a journalistic deep-dive into how and why the program failed, Jacobin writers Dustin Guastella and Jennifer Phan only fleetingly mentioned the program’s logistical failures, instead labeling the program as “Anti-Racist Discrimination”.

“No doubt the impetus to offer debt relief to black farmers sprang from a genuine desire to right past wrongs. But the theory of “anti-racist discrimination” that informed the policy decision resulted in total disaster…Instead of supporting race-targeted policies that inevitably stir up animosity between black and white farmers, the Left ought to offer policy solutions that seek to curtail the power of the major agribusinesses and redistribute the massive wealth they have accumulated downward to struggling rural regions.

This analysis, elementary as it is, not only parrots a common talking point on the far-right, that anti-racism is somehow discriminatory against white people, but also seeks to shift the blame of the program’s failure from the White House and Department of Agriculture’s breach of a promise to the the program’s existence itself. Anyone with even a tertiary knowledge of the history of racial capitalism and apartheid in the United States knows the myriad of ways in which Black farmers were and continue to be denied access to land, capital, equipment, and self-sustenance. These inequities have little to nothing to do with class; they were specifically engineered in a way to discriminate against Black farmers to the advantage of white farmers. These are simple historical facts that are easily accessible and comprehensive. Why do Guastella and Phan seek to rewrite the narrative?

Moreover, to accuse this ill-fated program of causing “animosity” is the exact logic of Jim Crow defenders like President Woodrow Wilson, who argued that integration would create “friction” between the races and would result in a breakdown of relations between Blacks and whites (as if the relationship was harmonious before). It is an old, tired, and absurd line of thinking that suggests that policies designed to uplift Black people are the cause of racial animus, and not the prevailing racism of white America and its institutional and structural methods of dominance. It is, simply put, victim-blaming, the “dress modestly” apologia of racial denialists.

As much as one would again hope that such shallow articles would be a rarity, and not the norm, this cannot be said for Jacobin. It’s YouTube channel is full of the same class reductionist drivel, diminishing the role of chattel slavery in the development of the US economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, trivializing the racially discriminatory implementation of some New Deal programs with cherry-picked data, and arguing against reparations for the descendants of enslaved people (not to mention, the plethora of videos featuring Black Marxist Adolph Reed, as if he and he alone has a monopoly on the Black Marxist opinion, as opposed to Angela Davis and Gerald Horne, for example who have had only one interview each from Jacobin). These videos mostly repeat oversimplified talking points, ignore crucial historical data that would undermine them, and serve to instead foment and nurture a hostility between the predominantly Black and Latino anti-racist activists who may be less Marxist in their thinking and the predominantly white and Asian socialist organizing spaces. In other words, it attempts to “separate the wheat from the chaff”.

But what Jacobin’s racial incompetence distracts from, are the questions crucial to the coalition building and correct understanding of our history that is needed in this moment of existential and compounding social crisis. How is it mutually exclusive to both address the specific racial discriminations of the past and present while also coupling those efforts with the core socialist principles of universality? Is this not the false dichotomy posited by the wealthy liberal elites of The New Yorker and The Atlantic that we are seeking to deconstruct? Furthermore, who is served by a politics of class reductionism? Is it the Black working class mother on the west side of Chicago who fears for her Black son’s life at the hands of police at night, while during the day she labors for inadequate wages and subpar health benefits? What is she to think of her white working class neighbor on the southwest side, who votes for more “tough on crime” politicians even though he shares her economic plight? Is it the migrant farmer, who lives under the constant threat of deportation at the hands of Trump’s ICE because his neighbors, white farmers as poor and exploited as he is, have chosen their nativism over solidarity? And what human being on this whole wide earth does politics divorced from their identity?

As the liberal classes have spent years denying that capitalism was the problem, reducing all of our nation’s ills to that of race, gender, sexuality, and other identities that we hold in difference because they were afraid of addressing the economic structures that shielded and empowered them at the expense of everyone else, so too have far too many American leftists embraced a politics that reduces our social ills to class and wealth, ignoring the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, etc. and the marginalization that comes with them create systems of dominance in it of themselves and shape our lives regardless of our class status. It would appear that both of these groups have chosen a politics of least resistance, feeding off of each-other’s willful ignorance to preserve their hero complexes. Liberals want to be our saviors from racism, and so they design HR training on sensitivity and show us their Robin D’Angelo books to convince us of how not racist they are. Leftists want to be our saviors from capitalism, and so they lecture us about how we need “no politics but class politics”, and how “wokeness” went too far.

Both of these groups have failed to understand that politics both is and is not about you. It is not a confession booth, where we kneel in penitence in hopes of absolution. It is not an exercise in moral self-actualization or a group therapy session, where we work out our feelings and emotions under the careful and sensitive care of a professional counselor or therapist. Politics is a power struggle, a brutal, long-suffering, and oftentimes extremely frustrating fight to determine who pulls the levers of power, them or us. It is a place where all aspects of ourselves, where we come from, who we are, our life stories, our differences and similarities, come together and are brought to, but are not at the forefront of, our collective mission. Politics is not devoid of emotion, or sentimentality, at least it shouldn’t be. But it also doesn’t tap dance to our fantasies, our self-delusions, our desperate need to be the most important or the smartest or the most powerful person in a room.

When I think about my place on the American Left, I am of two minds. The first is that I belong here; that my story, my family’s story, my ancestor’s story, of “stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod”, has given me a place in the struggle for freedom and the uplift of all people. That my faith, the most important aspect of my life, instructs me not to accept the world as is, but to join my God in the mission to build a better one, on earth as it is heaven, requires my presence here. That I must be here because my story isn’t the only story, my experience is not the center of this wide universe, and because community shapes, forms, and molds us into being better, more compassionate, wiser, humbler and just people.

The second, albeit smaller mind, is that I will always be a marginal presence in this space. That my Blackness will be seen as a distraction, rather than the anti-Blackness that has accompanied it. That the struggles of my ancestors will always be the “dreaded topic” of polite conversation, both from the liberals who fetishize it and the leftists who ignore it. That the fragile state of American socialism, the popularization of destructive ideologies, and the racial incompetence of some of the loudest voices within it will always mean that I don’t fully belong here.

It is when I think these things that I am reminded of my own rejoinder; politics both is and isn’t about you. While I can easily find reasons not to associate with the left, this would be an irresponsible choice. My freedom is not my own, but my brother’s, my sister’s, my siblings of all kinds; it is interconnected and bound together in commonality. I am not free as a Black man until the trans kids in Oklahoma are free, until the grandkids of Irish immigrants working 9-5 blue collar jobs are free, until the clock-in and clock-out office temps are free, until the grad school workers organizing a union are free, until the undocumented are free, until women are free, until all of us, in every corner of the United States can experience and enjoy freedom, not in spite of who we are, but the kind of freedom that embraces all of who we are. After all, there is no such thing as half-freedom; we either are totally free or are totally unfree.

This must be the prevailing ethos of the American Left, that to end our rendezvous with capitalism is an act of freedom, a liberation from the chains of exploitative labor that alienate us from one another, make us marginalize each other, and create systems of dominance and control. The constructive alternative that this freedom creates is universal public services and shared taxation as well as a proactive eradication of racism, misogyny, heterosexism, nativism, etc. We are not here to create a safe haven for fascists who are drawn to our economic goals but resent the Black, trans, and immigrant organizers making those goals possible. The mythological character of the white working class racist who joins the Left once we abandon “wokeness” is as real as the suburban voter in Gwinnett County, Georgia who voted for Kamala Harris after the Liz Cheney endorsement. Those on the right seeking to join this movement must know what they’re signing up for; they are buying into our vision rather than us capitulating to theirs. Ours is a movement that enfolds all of us, a movement for collective freedom; either join it or get out of the way.

We have a world to win, and everyone belongs in it.