Antiracist activism and scholarship proceed from the view that statistical disparities in the distribution by race of goods and bads in the society in which blacks appear worse off categorically (e.g., less wealth, higher rates of unemployment, greater incidence of hypertensive and cardiovascular disease) amount to evidence that “race” remains fundamentally determinative of black Americans’ lives. As Merlin Chowkwanyun and I argue, however, disparity is an outcome, not an explanation, and deducing cause simplistically from outcome (e.g., treating racially disparate outcomes as ipso facto evidence of racially invidious causation) seems sufficient only if one has already stacked the interpretive deck in favor of a particular causal account (Reed and Chowkwanyun 2012, 167–168). We also discuss a garbage in, garbage out effect in studies that rely on large-scale aggregate data analysis; gross categories like race may mask significant micro-level dynamics that could present more complex and nuanced understandings of causality. Put another way, if you go out looking for racial effects in data sets that are organized by race as gross categories, you will be likely to find them, but that will not necessarily lead to sound interpretations of the factors that actually produce the inequalities. As likely as not that purblind approach can lead to missing “the extent to which particular inequalities that appear statistically as ‘racial’ disparities are in fact embedded in multiple social relations” (Reed and Chowkwanyun 2012, 150–151, 158–159). This issue is not a concern for antiracist politics because its fundamental goal is propagation of the view that inequalities or injustices suffered by black Americans should be understood as resulting from generic white racism. Its objective, that is, is rhetorical and ideological, not political and programmatic....
In the antiracist political project white supremacy/racism is—like “terrorism”—an amorphous, ideological abstraction whose specific content exists largely in the eyes of the beholder. Therefore, like antiterrorism, antiracism’s targets can be porous and entirely arbitrary; this means that, also like antiterrorism, the struggle can never be won...The “politics” that follows from this view centers on pursuit of recognition and representation on groupist terms—both as symbolic depiction in the public realm and as claims to articulate the interests, perspectives, or “voices” of a generic black constituency or some subset thereof, e.g., “youth” or “grassroots.” It is not interested in broadly egalitarian redistribution.
Notwithstanding its performative evocations of the 1960s Black Power populist “militancy,” this antiracist politics is neither leftist in itself nor particularly compatible with a left politics as conventionally understood. At this political juncture, it is, like bourgeois feminism and other groupist tendencies, an oppositional epicycle within hegemonic neoliberalism, one might say a component of neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness; it is thus in fact fundamentally anti-leftist. Black political elites’ attacks on the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential nomination campaign’s call for decommodified public higher education as frivolous, irresponsible, or even un-American underscores how deeply embedded this politics is within neoliberalism....
As A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and two generations of labor-oriented black activists...understood, first, the exploitation and oppression of black Americans was linked to more general dynamics of exploitation and oppression and, second, the only way to attain and especially to secure benefits for black Americans is to win them for everyone. That lesson has been lost for many antiracist activists and commentators enamored with contemporary race reductionism; instead, they channel the performative militance associated with Black Power politics as the insurgent, racially authentic tendency in the late 1960s and 1970s....
Yet Black Power politics consolidated as a less potentially transformative, class-skewed alternative to the black-labor-left, social-democratic approach advocated by Rustin, Randolph, and others (A. Philip Randolph Institute 1966; Randolph 2014a, b; Rustin 1965, 1966; Reed 2015, 2016a, 2017a; Le Blanc and Yates 2013; Logan 1944). Black Power politics was fundamentally a petition politics, albeit a loud and flamboyant one. For all their overheated rhetoric about self-determination, including even in some cases what now might be called cosplay fantasies of armed struggle, Black Powerites generally depended on ruling class largess for realization of their programmatic objectives. That was their alternative to trying to form broad, popular coalitions and to navigate the compromises and constraints that sort of politics requires. As a practical politics, Black Power was fundamentally directed toward government institutions, private or philanthropic funding sources, and other agencies capable of conferring or ratifying claims to represent a generic “black community” (some referred to the style at the time as “militant begging”; I suppose today it could be considered an institutional species of aggressive panhandling.) Contemporaneous critics like Harold Cruse (1968, 193–260) and Robert L. Allen (1969) pointed out the Black Power program’s class character, and Rustin presciently suggested that its most likely outcome would be “creation of a new black establishment” (1966, 36) (emphasis in original)....
Antiracist politics is a class politics; it is rooted in the social position and worldview, and material interests of the stratum of race relations engineers and administrators who operate in Democratic party politics and as government functionaries, the punditry and commentariat, education administration and the professoriate, corporate, social service and nonprofit sectors, and the multibillion-dollar diversity industry. That stratum comes together around a commonsense commitment to the centrality of race—and other categories of ascriptive identity—as the appropriate discursive framework through which to articulate norms of justice and injustice and through which to formulate remedial responses. It has grown and become deeply embedded institutionally throughout the society as an entailment of the victories of the 1960s. As the society moves farther away from the regime of subordination and exclusion on explicitly racial terms to which race-reductionist explanations were an immediately plausible response, race has become less potent as the dominant metaphor, or blanket shorthand, through which class hierarchy is lived. And as black and white elites increasingly go through the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, operate as peers in integrated workplaces, share and interact in the same social spaces and consumption practices and preferences, they increasingly share another common sense not only about frameworks of public policy but also about the proper order of things in general.
Those quotidian realities put pressure on the reductionist premise that racial subordination remains the dominant ideological or material framework generating and sustaining systemically reproduced inequalities and class power. This tension underlies a source the appeal of ontological views of racism as an animate force that transcends time and context. Because it is an evanescent Evil that is disconnected from specific human purposes and patterns of social relations, racism, again like “terrorism,” can exist anywhere at any time under any manifest conditions and is a cause that needs no causes or explanation. That is why statistical demonstration of apparent racial disparities seems within antiracist discourse to be self-sufficient evidence of the persistence of racism’s paramount impact on black Americans, despite the fact that findings of disparity: (1) are not surprising considering how entrenched inequalities work; (2) do not tell us much, if anything, about the proximate sources of the disparities; and (3) do not point to remedial responses, although those retailing the findings often present them as though they do. As Chowkwanyun and I indicate, moreover, relentless commitment to finding disparities and insistence that manifest inequalities be understood in those terms despite those interpretive failings suggests the presence of other ideological factors:[Disparitarian discourse’s] commitment to a fundamentally essentialist and ahistorical race-first view is betrayed in the constantly expanding panoply of neologisms – “institutional racism,” “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” “colourblind racism,” post-racial racism,” etc. – intended to graft more complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently psychologistic racism/antiracism political ontology.... (Reed and Chowkwanyun 2012, 167)....
[A]ntiracist politics now is fundamentally antagonistic to a left politics of broadly egalitarian social transformation. Key elements of the black professional-managerial strata have been embedded in and are agents and minions of what we now call neoliberalism—as public functionaries, contractors, and aspirants—since its emergence in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, underclass ideology rationalized claims to a special tutelary role for the black professional-managerial class in relation to a rank-and-file black population that politics rendered invisible as postal workers, teachers, truck drivers, carpenters, clerks, warehouse workers, electricians or line workers, nurses, cable technicians, etc. or members of a constantly expanding industrial reserve army and represented as an undifferentiated mass to be ventriloquized and “uplifted.” Underclass ideology came with a remedy of inculcating “personal responsibility,” which conveniently permits public officials to deflect concerns with retreat from social service provision and other social wage policies in an era increasingly defined by regressive transfer. Neoliberal privatization also has produced greatly expanded commercial and career opportunities for black (and Latino, female, etc.) entrepreneurs under the rubric of community “empowerment,” “role modeling,” or “social entrepreneurialism” in a vast third sector economy driven by a nonprofit sector likely as not committed to privatizing public goods in the name of localist authenticity and doing well by doing good, as well as the steadily growing diversity industry. These developments legitimize an ideal of social justice shriveled to little more than enhancement of opportunity for individual upward mobility—within the strictures of neoliberal accumulation by dispossession.
Black professional-managerial class embeddedness has become increasingly solidified with the Clinton/Obama/Emanuel wing of the Democratic party’s aggressive commitment to a left-neoliberalism centered on advancement of Wall Street and Silicon Valley economic interests and strong support for social justice defined in identity group terms. But that is necessarily a notion of social justice and equality that is disconnected from political economy and the capitalist class dynamics that generate the most profound inequalities in the society. And militant opposition to conventional left norms of justice that center on economic equality unites the Clintonite neoliberal Democrats and race-reductionist antiracists. In this regard, the most telling moments of the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination campaign included when the random, self-selected Black Lives Matter activists attacked Sanders for supposedly not declaring his opposition to racism in a way that suited their tastes and when former civil rights movement icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and other prominent black functionaries denounced Sanders’s calls for greatly expanding social wage policy and shifting national priorities toward addressing the needs of working people as irresponsible. Perhaps most telling of all, though, was when and most of all how Hillary Clinton blithely and disingenuously blew off Sanders’s concerns with economic injustice. On the eve of the Nevada primary, she declared to a rally of her supporters “Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow – and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will – would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight? Would that solve our problem with voting rights, and Republicans who are trying to strip them away from people of color, the elderly, the young?” (Weigel 2016).
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