Why Race Cannot Be Reduced to Class
Lately, I have found myself asking a question that I don’t particularly enjoy admitting: Is the work I have been doing at LA Progressive a waste of time?
For nearly two decades, my husband, Dick Price, and I have published LA Progressive. We have written, edited, curated, and published tens of thousands of articles about racism, economic inequality, war, criminal justice, healthcare, labor, democracy, and the many other issues that animate progressive politics.
Race has always been central to our work. We have argued repeatedly that racial hierarchy is not peripheral to American political life but fundamental to understanding it.
And yet, perhaps because I am Black, other progressive organizations still frequently ask me, “How do we engage more Black people and other people of color to work with us?” The central problem is understanding that recruitment and coalition building are not the same thing.
Questions like that—and what I see in our own organizing—sometimes make me wonder what the hell I am doing.
Right now, we are organizing our annual Left Coast Forum, a convening of progressives trying to figure out how we build political power. To put on this event, we rely on volunteers, almost all of whom are white. Five or six of us meet regularly on Zoom. One central purpose of the Left Coast Forum has always been to grapple seriously with race’s central role in American political life. Yet week after week, our discussions move toward economic inequality, labor, immigration, militarism, healthcare, climate change, and electoral politics, while race somehow drifts toward the margins.
One organizer has often challenged my emphasis on race by arguing for the primacy of class consciousness, sometimes suggesting that racial inequality can ultimately be reduced to class.
I raise this because I think it reflects one of the most persistent weaknesses of the American Left – the lack of understanding that racial hierarchy exists everywhere in America including on the Left. Racial hierarchy corrupts class consciousness itself.
The Right is intentional about it. The Left often ignores it, minimizes it, or conflates it with class. Why?
Three books help explain why this matters:
- The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres;
- Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, by Jonathan M. Metzl; and
- The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee.
Read together, they point toward a conclusion progressives need to sit with: race and class are intertwined, but they are not interchangeable. Racial hierarchy performs a political function that class hierarchy alone cannot perform. I want to emphasize again that one of its most important functions has been to prevent class solidarity itself.
Race and Class Do Different Work
Class tells us about our relationship to economic power: who owns, who works, who controls capital, who determines wages, and who struggles to pay rent.
Unlike race, class presents a political problem for capitalists and oligarchs because people occupying similar economic positions have material reasons to recognize their common interests—and to organize for change.
Class creates what is perceived as a problem for the bosses – horizontal solidarity. But race mitigates that problem.
A white warehouse worker and a Black home-health aide may have different histories and identities, but both need higher wages, affordable housing, healthcare, strong public schools, labor protections, and a government capable of restraining concentrated corporate power. Will these natural allies organize together?
Without an intentional intervention, probably not, at least this is what we have consistently seen.
Because racial hierarchy introduces another kind of control over the masses: relative status—and with it, an obstacle to class solidarity.
A person may possess little economic power but nevertheless be offered something socially valuable: the assurance that another group occupies a position beneath his own.
Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness examines white communities where opposition to healthcare expansion, public spending, gun regulation, and other policies became intertwined with racial resentment and white identity. His case studies include gun policy in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas.
The disturbing lesson is not simply that racial resentment can persuade people to support policies that harm them. It is that racial position can become part of what people understand their interests to be.
Healthcare stops being simply healthcare. Public assistance stops being simply assistance. Government becomes the institution taking something from us and giving it to them.
At that point, defending racial position can become more politically compelling than improving one’s own economic condition. It is here that racial hierarchy can trump class interest.
Race is a social construct but it is not just a label. This is why reducing race to class is inadequate – it carries a different meaning.
Obviously, a Black person who becomes wealthy does not cease being Black, and a white person who becomes poor does not cease being white. But the important question is what those categories continue to mean in the lives of these people.
Racial status carries consequences. A lack of understanding of this truth is often one of the obstacles to building genuine multiracial coalitions.
A wealthy Black person may have access to excellent housing, healthcare, education, and financial security. Yes, class matters, and money protects people from many forms of hardship. But money does not purchase an exemption from racial hierarchy.
I have experienced this difference in an intensely personal way.
A close friend of mine spent more than twenty years in prison serving a 27-year sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. He eventually became gravely ill. He died in prison, shackled to a hospital bed.
I remember, during that period of enormous emotional turmoil, sitting with a white girlfriend as she cried because her dog had to be hospitalized to have a tumor removed.
Her pain was real. I cared about her, and I cared about her dog. This is not a story about whose grief was more legitimate. Human beings love their animals deeply, and losing—or fearing the loss of—one can be devastating.
But sitting there, I was struck by the radically different realities we were carrying.
She was confronting a terrible thing that had happened to someone she loved.
I was confronting not only the impending death of someone I loved, but the knowledge that he was dying inside a system that had held him for decades and that, even as his life was ending, kept him shackled to a bed. That distinction matters.
Race is not simply an identity we carry into a progressive meeting. It shapes our relationship to institutions, to authority, to vulnerability, and to the state itself. Two people can have comparable educations, comparable incomes, live in the same neighborhood, vote the same way, and sit beside one another in the same organization—and still inhabit profoundly different relationships to American society.
When predominantly white progressive organizations fail to understand this, they can mistake proximity for equality. They can assume that because everyone in the room shares progressive values—or even occupies roughly the same economic class—everyone has arrived there carrying roughly the same experience of the world. We have not.
And this is one reason that saying, “Class is what really unites us,” can land very differently on Black ears than the person saying it may intend. Class can explain a great deal about who has money and who does not. It cannot by itself explain who has historically been presumed dangerous, who is disproportionately exposed to state power, or why a dying prisoner might remain shackled to a bed.
A genuine multiracial coalition has to be capable of holding both truths at once: class matters enormously, and racial hierarchy creates forms of vulnerability that class alone cannot explain.
Until we can talk about that without treating the acknowledgment of racial difference as a threat to solidarity, the solidarity we are trying to build will remain incomplete.
Race Is the Wedge. Class Is the Harvest.
An oligarchy faces a simple mathematical problem: there are very few oligarchs and millions of working people.
In a functioning democracy, ordinary people have the numbers to demand progressive taxation, strong unions, universal healthcare, affordable housing, public education, corporate accountability, and higher wages.
So how does a tiny wealthy minority maintain an economic system that overwhelmingly benefits itself?
One answer is division. And in the United States, race has been among the most enduring instruments for producing it.
Tell working people their taxes are going to undeserving Black people. Tell them immigrants are taking their jobs. Tell them affirmative action is why their children did not get admitted. Tell them welfare rewards laziness. Tell them racial justice itself is discrimination against them.
Resentment begins flowing sideways instead of upward. The white worker becomes angry at the Black worker rather than at the economic forces holding down both their wages. The struggling citizen blames the immigrant rather than the employer benefiting from vulnerable labor.
Race is the wedge. Class is the harvest. The wedge splits the potential coalition. The harvest is concentrated wealth and power.
The political Right does not treat race as incidental. It repeatedly uses racialized appeals to define who belongs, who deserves, who threatens, who pays, and who supposedly benefits.
Crime. Immigration. Welfare. Voting. Schools. Neighborhoods. History. Government spending. The language may be explicit or coded, but the political effect is familiar: people who might otherwise discover common material interests can instead be encouraged to see one another as adversaries.
The Left handicaps itself when it imagines that talking more loudly about wages will automatically dissolve those divisions. It will not.
If racial hierarchy has been used to interfere with class solidarity, then understanding race is not a distraction from class politics. It is a prerequisite for successful class politics.
That is also the warning of Guinier and Torres’s The Miner’s Canary. Their metaphor is simple: miners once carried canaries underground because the birds would succumb to toxic gases before human beings did. The dead canary was not the problem. It was the warning.
Guinier and Torres use race in precisely this diagnostic way: racial inequities can point toward deeper problems in social and democratic structures that ultimately affect people beyond the groups experiencing those inequities first. They argue for cross-racial coalitions capable of challenging those structures of power.
Ignoring racial injustice because we want to discuss something supposedly broader is like looking at a dead canary and saying, Let’s stop talking about birds and get back to mining.
The bird is telling you about the mine.
If we are serious about confronting our poisonous mine we need to understand and and put an end to whatever is killing the canary.
It has to be the prerequisite for building the power that can tackle everything else.
This conversation doesn’t remain on this page.
It continues at this year’s Left Coast Forum, October 2–4 at California State University, Los Angeles. I hope readers throughout Southern California will join us—not simply to listen, but to participate in the difficult conversation about what it will actually take to build the solidarity we keep saying we want.
