Pradnya Garud
Touré F. Reed, professor of 20th-century US and African American History at Illinois State University, speaks with Round Table India on a wide range of topics related to US history and politics. In Part 3, he focuses on Black History in the USA.
Pradnya: For a global audience, how should we understand black-led movements in the US?
Touré F. Reed: This is a uniquely thought-provoking question, because I tend not to think in constructs like “black-led movements.” The meaning of “black-led” and “movements” matters so much for a question like this.
I’ll begin by saying something that should be obvious to all. The great political movements like abolitionism and the Civil Rights Movement would not have happened if black Americans had not organized social, civic, and political groups advancing the cause of antislavery and black equality. The issue is that had Free People of Color accepted slavery and discrimination as the natural order of things, then there’s no compelling case that slavery denied fundamentally equal human beings their so-called natural rights. Likewise, if blacks had simply accepted the imposition of second-class citizenship in the post-emancipation era, then there would be no basis for dismantling Jim Crow and advancing black civil rights.
As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Blacks had to first demand equality if they hoped to achieve it.
But the fact of the matter is, the demand, by itself, is not enough.
Most of us born after the 1960s tend to see the Civil Rights Movement as a mix of televised demands articulated by presentable if not stylish black men and women that were punctuated by random acts of dignified defiance. In the popular imagination, all of these public declarations of resistance are bathed in the purifying waters of righteous moralism in part because too many of us see this political movement as a “speaking truth to power” project that afforded activists opportunities to “make their voices heard.” The problem with the collective memory, though, is that the realities were far more complicated.
Obviously, the crucial work of organizing and what went into that would not have been televised. What’s also lost on most of us, though, is that civil rights leaders tailored their public demands for equal accommodations, voting rights, workplace antidiscrimination legislation, fair housing legislation, and so on to their particular contexts—national, international, and local. And this is the point to stress because the scope of civil rights or racial justice, or whatever you want to call it, is contingent. Simply put, the sensibilities that inform black American politics at any given point in time are not uniquely black; rather, they reflect the unique zeitgeist of each moment.
As I’ve already alluded to, what black Americans might conceive of as the struggle for equality looks very different during the New Deal and World War II, or during the Keynesian Consensus and the Cold War under Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and even Nixon, or under Neoliberalism from Reagan through Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. What I’m getting at is the parameters of the conceivable and the achievable are very different across these moments.
Because black Americans are captives of time just like every other human being, we are shaped by the same cultural and political sensibilities that shape our white compatriots in each distinct era.
This is why many blacks during the New Deal and World War II, bearing the imprint of New Deal industrial democracy, believed racial and class exploitation were inextricably linked. This conception translated to the view that “black American liberation” (to be anachronistic) might only come with the liberation of the American working-class.
As one should expect, though, black political sensibilities and ambitions post-Reagan reflect the Neoliberal Consensus. This is why many Americans today, across racial lines, imagine one can separate race from class— conceiving race and class as discrete identities that intersect, which means that one can somehow distill racial or gender issues from each other or from class. Like black American leftists of yesteryear, I tend to think of race, class, and gender not as identities but as categories that announce social relations. The historic work performed by race and gender in the US is that they reify hierarchies that are organic to material power or capitalism. I should stress that I am not suggesting (nor have I ever) that a working-class political agenda would obviate antidiscrimination policies. I am just making two narrow points here. First, gender and race have long been among the “naturalized” conceptual frames through which Americans view class inequalities and that this disposition is less the product of organic group affinities but is more the result of political prodding and nurturing. Second, since gender and race have long functioned to treat capitalist inequalities as products of nature or God, gender, race, and class are infused and are thus not distillable as separate identities.
The notion that races represent distinct identities may not sound conservative to a lot of people reading this, but the commitment to seeing race as identity is itself an expression of the larger point that I’m making—that racism and sexism do not insulate black Americans from the prevailing cultural and political winds of their moment.
To amplify this point, I’m going to remind readers that following the brutal murder of George Floyd—during a global pandemic coinciding with an election year in which the Democratic Party was trying to beat-back broad support for “Medicare for All” – “support black business” became one of the dominant slogans and aims of racial justice. Activists and meme posters weren’t the only advocates for this vision. Corporate media, streaming services, and online retailers likewise endorsed this project. This particular vision of racial justice— influenced by the popularity of reparations—was an expression of liberals’ but also foundations and corporate America’s acceptance of the view that closing the “racial wealth gap” should be the principal goal of racial justice.
As I said in response to a previous question, a vision of racial justice centered on growing black wealth by supporting black owned businesses is an intraracial trickle-down project. Why would we think that trickle-down is progressive when it’s applied to black Americans? This is a “kinder gentler” vision of Reaganism that, at best, treats the diversification of America’s oligarchy as racial justice. It’s also worth stressing this view only makes sense if one presumes that there is something called “the black interest,” encapsulated in “black identity,” that exists apart from class interests. Since the racial reckoning, I have asked every white person I know—no joke— if they have been personally enriched by Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or the other 700+ white billionaires in America. I hope this doesn’t surprise, but with the exception of one big stockholder, every white person I’ve asked has told me that the existence of white billionaires has not enriched them, personally. And yet, the more than 40 million blacks in the United States are supposed to be enriched by supporting black businesses with the ultimate goal of growing the ranks of black millionaires and billionaires. This will definitely help the black millionaires and billionaires, but it won’t do anything for the rest of us—just like our white compatriots.
I need to connect this to why frameworks like “black-led movements” aren’t usually the first conceptual lens I reach for. A few or more years before the murder of George Floyd, Patrice Cullors and BLM had identified support for black business as a way to address the so-called racial wealth gap. Does BLM’s advocacy for this project make “support black business” a black-led movement rather than a corporate-backed movement? Does the fact that “support black business” had the stamp of approval from the three queer black women who founded BLM (a group that was on the right side of criminal justice reform) offset the implications of corporate America’s and centrist-Democrats’ embrace of entrepreneurialism as an alternative to living wage policies? I am not suggesting that the leaders of BLM didn’t purport to want more black millionaires/billionaires and living wage policies. They did. But these are two antipodal goals. And if one were interested in nurturing a brand, let’s say, it would have been obvious from the start which of the two would resonate with corporate America and the mainstream of the Democratic Party. I mean, how did the Democrats respond to the Sanders campaign?
Corporate and Democratic support for black entrepreneurial uplift was not evidence of cooptation of a black-led movement. Black activists’ equation of entrepreneurialism with racial justice is evidence of Neoliberalism’s sway over black American politics and culture.
The sensibilities that dominate black politics today are very different—and not necessarily better—than those that dominated black politics in the 1930s and 1940s. The goal posts are unquestionably different today. But this isn’t because “we” have been advancing forward on the same playing field since 1935. No, we’re actually playing on a very different playing field today—one that is much better in some ways, but worse in others.
I say all this because I think constructs like “black-led movements,” the “black freedom movement” or the “black radical tradition” often strip black life and politics of complexity and, of course, contingency by imagining that our positionality as oppressed people insulates black Americans—like no other human beings, ever— from all proximate cultural, economic, and political influences except for racism and sexism.
The bottom line, though, is that the political gains black Americans have made have always been the product of contingent, utilitarian, cross-racial political coalitions or agreements. This is among the reasons the scope of blacks’ conceptions of both inequality and equality, how blacks conceive the obstacles confronting them, what black Americans perceive to be social justice, along with the terrain on which the fight for a just society can and will be fought, are different depending on when and where you’re talking about. And then, of course, there’s the matter of ideological and political differences among black Americans within each period.
There is no doubt as to the historic importance of groups like the NAACP, the National Urban League, the National Negro Congress, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, CORE, SCLC, SNCC, the Black Panther Party and so on. These and other organizations absolutely shaped the civil rights movement’s scope, strategies, and goals. Organizers educated and mobilized the masses to pursue particular policy ends. And this is leadership, right? Still, activists’ organizing campaigns and goals took place within parameters that were invariably beyond the control of black political leaders—be it the Crisis of the 1850s, the collapse of the second two-party system, secession, the Great Depression and the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, or the Neoliberal Consensus.
I guess what I’m getting at is if one is looking to black Americans to lead this or any other nation out of the darkness into the light, one is attached to a messianic vision that’s both dehumanizing and is doomed to fail.
Pradnya: Is there a transhistorical Black movement that can be traced from anti-slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, to Black Power, and to Black Lives Matter?
Touré F. Reed: The short answer is no. I think I covered the main points in my previous answer. So, I’ll just say the following.
It should be a given that black Americans disliked slavery and Jim Crow. It should be a given that black Americans dislike being discriminated against in the public sphere—in the labor market, in housing markets, at school, on the streets, in their cars, in shopping centers, etc. We can say, then, across time, black Americans objected to and resisted myriad forms of exploitation and racial discrimination in myriad ways. The problem is that the forms of exploitation and discrimination aren’t the same. The mechanisms that made people slaves, were not the same as those that made people sharecroppers under Jim Crow, which were different from the mechanisms that disadvantaged black American workers, renters, and homeowners in northern ghettoes during the first half of the 20th century, which were different from the mechanisms that contribute to blacks’ overrepresentation among the poor, the unemployed, welfare recipients, and inmates today. I’m sure readers will intuit that the fight against each of these injustices would have to look different. But I need to stress that the role played by race in each the above forms of discrimination was different as well. This reality draws attention to the need for a more complex understanding of these injustices and what the fight against them looked like and needs to look like today.
Here’s an easy example of what I’m talking about. In recent years, we’ve seen a push to link mass incarceration to slavery. Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th, helped popularize the basic premise, but legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow whet the appetite for these claims. A simple demographic reality, however, hints at the profound difference between slavery and mass incarceration. Whereas 100% of antebellum chattel slaves were black, blacks comprise only about one-third of the inmate population, today. Slavery was undeniably a system of racial domination. To be a chattel slave in the 19th century, one had to be of African descent, with the status of one’s mother sealing the deal. But slavery was first and foremost a system of economic exploitation. Slaves were not collectables, like living Pokémon cards or something. They were a captive workforce, which is to say they were rightsless laborers. The point of slavery was to generate profit or wealth for slaveholders. It took some time and a lot of necessity for slaveholders and the governments and intellectuals who loved them to develop the explanation for why slaves were exceptions to liberalism. That explanation is, of course, race. However, it took no time for slaveholders to see the utility of a captive labor force in tobacco, sugar, cotton, or rice production.
By contrast, the point of mass incarceration is neither to dominate blacks, nor to establish a captive labor force. As I indicate above, if racial domination were the goal, then the prison system is incarcerating way too many non-blacks. Likewise, in contrast to slavery, prison labor isn’t that important to the economy of the South or any other region in the US. Yes, most inmates are compelled to work, but most prison workers are maintaining the prisons to defray the costs of incarceration and perhaps to add a layer of humiliation to inmates’ punishments. Only a tiny fraction of the inmate population is working to generate a profit, which is what chattel slaves did.
The prison system does serve an economic function, of course, but it’s very different from chattel slavery. As my friend Cedric Johnson has argued, the economic function of prisons is to warehouse surplus labor—the unemployed and underemployed. Race, at least as Americans would define it, is not the mechanism for inclusion in this system, obviously. Technically, the mechanism is conviction of a crime, but the backdrop for crime, in most instances, is poverty.
What does this have to do with the problem of the notion of a transhistorical black freedom movement? Once more, the notion presumes that blacks across time and place are confronting the same struggle—racism—which translates into a shared political movement.
Given the race reductionist discourse around mass incarceration today, what I’m going to say next will be hard for people today to believe, but in the 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority of black Americans and their black elected officials supported tough-on-crime policies. Surveys between the late-1980s and early-1990s found that something like 80% of blacks reported that punishments for criminals were not harsh enough. This tracked right along with whites. For reasons I will elaborate on shortly, lower-income blacks were more likely than upper-income blacks to claim support for tough-on-crime policies. It shouldn’t surprise, then, that about two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the 1994 crime act.
It was evident, in real-time, that the Clinton era crime act was going to put more black men in prison. If nothing else, the language elected officials used when talking about criminals was highly racialized. At the time, both Republicans and Democrats regularly engaged in fearmongering about the immediate and long-term threats to civil society posed by superpredators and crack babies— frames that clearly connoted black people. Because hegemony transcends racial categories, even black Americans often talked about criminals and welfare recipients in racialized ways— echoing the then-bipartisan consensus about criminals.
But why did most black Americans support tough-on-crime policies? Well, the most straightforward reason is that blacks were overrepresented among both perpetrators and victims of violent crime and property theft. If I recall correctly, in 1990 blacks committed close to 50% of all murders in the US, while comprising just 13% of the total population. To understand why blacks would have endorsed tough on crime policies, the thing one has to consider is that African Americans were more than 90% of those killed by black murders. The black property theft rates were also many times higher than white rates, and, of course, since most crimes are opportunistic, most of the victims of black muggers, burglars, etc, were themselves black.
Was race driving this problem? No, poverty was. The high crime rates were especially devastating to black lower-income communities. Lower-income blacks were more likely to be victims of crime. And this is precisely why lower-income blacks were more likely than upper-income blacks to endorse tough-on-crime policies. Moreover, as studies by scholars like James Forman, Jr have demonstrated, the vast majority of black inmates in this period were poor, usually possessing little more than some semblance of a high school education—much like their white and Hispanic counterparts.
I want to be very clear about the point that I’m making. Black Americans generally supported tough-on-crime policies despite knowing that such legislation would increase the number of blacks in the prison system because, at that time, few Americans of any race cared about the fate of convicted criminals. What’s every bit as important to understanding this story, though, is that Clinton Democrats, taking their cues from Reagan Republicans, were crystal clear that they would offer no fixes to poverty— the ultimate source of most crime in this country. What New Democrats would do, however, is address a tragic symptom of poverty—violent crime and property theft—through draconian law enforcement policies.
Because, as I said in a previous answer, black Americans are people who are captives of time like everybody else; most of us, understandably, took the only path available to safe and stable communities, which, at that time, was tough on crime legislation.
I had previously mentioned that blacks even came to accept a racialized language of crime. What I was referring to is that by the late-1980s, most black Americans came to view crime and poverty through the lens of “underclass ideology” (though not by name), which was the dominant class-free racialized language to explain disparities. Constructs like superpredators, welfare queens, and crack babies were expressions of underclass ideology.
Although class appears in the compound word, underclass ideology explained material inequalities in expressly culturalist rather than economic terms. Within the frame, black poverty could be traced to a dysfunctional culture (that many believed had taken on a life of its own, impervious to external influence) characterized by violence, substance abuse, promiscuity, welfare dependency, disregard for education, and so on. The legacy costs of redlining, deindustrialization’s impact on the employment structure, and Neoliberal public sector retrenchment were largely irrelevant to underclass-informed explanations of contemporary black crime and poverty. In fact, in the hands of Republicans and Clinton Democrats, the underclass framework helped justify both tough-on-crime policies and public sector retrenchment.
As this class-free, expressly culturalist but fundamentally racialist frame became the only acceptable language available to explain disparities, African Americans embraced it, too. You can see this in black mass culture like the hood films of the 1990s; you can see the influence of underclass ideology in Obama’s speeches on race; and frankly, you can see the underclass frame narrowly applied to black men in bell hooks’s horrendous, We Real Cool.
Even constructs like “black-on-black crime” or the “epidemic of black male violence”—both of which were commonly used by African Americans at the time— were also expressions of underclass ideology’s sway over black thought. Despite the fact that most crimes take place within racial groups, I have never heard anyone talk about “white-on-white crime” because no one—other than black nationalists, maybe— ever holds up white criminals as evidence of “white cultural pathologies.” And while one might argue that the crime disparities justify the conceptual contrast I point to above, the crime disparities largely track along with disparities in poverty— a fact obscured by this kind of racialist framing that treats “the black experience” as exceptional to capitalism. As I said previously, poverty is the strongest tie that binds inmates across racial lines. Of course, the fact that the US Justice Department records inmates’ race but not their class background helps ensure this problem, while forcing researchers to use education as a proxy for class.
I want to add some personal texture to what I’m laying out for you, to help readers understand where I’m coming from. I was a young man during the Clinton years. In fact, I entered the doctoral program in History at Columbia during Clinton’s first term. My dissertation, which was the basis for my first book, was a backdoor critique of underclass ideology. So, I was an outlier then, too. But what made me an outlier, then and now, is that I viewed the material inequalities that do, indeed, impact blacks disproportionately, but not exclusively, through a class lens rather than through the race-racism binary that I have termed “race reductionism.” Racism is real and consequential, so the effects of racism inform my analysis. But because class has been absent from liberals’ analytical tool chest for decades, white liberals and even many blacks and other non-whites who may or may not identify as liberals tend to explain the inequalities that cannot be explained by racism in terms of race—blacks’ alleged epigenetic cultural failings. As I said before, blacks are captives of time like everyone else.
OK, what does all of this have to do with the notion of a transhistorical black freedom movement?
Well, Free People of Color in the Early Republic and in Antebellum America had a vested interest in ending slavery. As long as slavery remained legal anywhere in the nation, FPC were vulnerable. They or their loved ones could be and sometimes were kidnapped and sold into bondage. Racism was wed to slavery. After all, blacks’ alleged inherent inferiority, their subhumanity, was how slaveholders squared chattel slavery with liberalism. So, FPC, correctly, understood their fate to be linked with slaves. Slaves and Free People of Color fought slavery in complementary ways. Slaves ran away, sometimes with the assistance of Free People of Color. FPC formed and were active in abolitionist societies. Nearly 200,000 slaves and Free People of Color would also join the Union Army during the Civil War to do their part to end slavery.
All of this would appear to reveal a trans-class, black interest, right? I’m convinced. But does the solidarity of FPCs and slaves in the Early Republic and antebellum period reveal a transhistorical rather than contingent black interest?
Well, if you think of incarceration as the new Jim Crow or the continuation of slavery by another name, as is now common, then most black Americans in the 1980s and really through the early 2000s would be betraying their so-called racial group interest by endorsing policies that put more blacks, men in particular, in prison. In other words, they would be betraying their ancestors’ fight against bondage.
If you think about the different issues informing black life in 1990 rather than 1790, though, then to suggest the above would be absurd. But how else can one interpret blacks’ support for the tough on crime policies if the interpretive lens we are to apply to black life insists on a transhistorical freedom movement? It seems to me you either have to forget about the above, as most of us have, or focus, instead, on the small number of blacks who were “on the right side of history” at the time. For what it’s worth, I actually sat out the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections and cast a protest ballot in 2000, because I could not cosign Bill Clinton’s racialized war on poor people—which included New Democrats’ racist tough-on-crime rhetoric and policies. Of course, I wasn’t channeling the spirit of the ancestors. I was in a privileged position, insofar as I only lived in a high-crime neighborhood for just one year of my 20s. So, my class position afforded me the privilege of standing on principle.
But, once more, I was an outlier. The righteous “black interest” from the late-1980s through Obama basically included tough on crime policies and, believe it or not, welfare reform. By contrast, the righteous “black interest” since Trump’s 2016 presidential victory has included police reform and reparations—a hypothetical welfare program from which only blacks can benefit, at least if reparations is anything but a catchall for targeted policies, at this point. These are nearly dead opposite expressions of the alleged “black interest,” which should beg the question: if there is a transhistorical “black interest,” which one of these two very different visions is it?
The contrast above jumps out at me because these two antipodal visions for doing right by black people are separated by just a decade, not a century. Again, you can go to Netflix, Prime, or YouTube and see expressions of Reaganism’s unambiguously reactionary sway over black thought about poverty, welfare, crime, and punishment from the 1990s through Obama in movies like Boyz in the Hood or Precious, Oprah’s discussions of black poverty on her talk show, standup by black comedians, or, once more, President Obama’s speeches on race. This does not require a deep dive, though it does require an understanding of the specific political context.
This very recent shift in black political sensibilities—from the focus on race (blacks’ alleged epigenetic cultural deficiencies) to racism (whites’ alleged epigenetic cultural deficiencies)— should lead to one reasonable conclusion. There is no such thing as a transhistorical or universal “black interest.” Unfortunately, those who insist that there is – tend to ignore the often vast differences in perspectives among blacks about the sources of and fixes for real inequalities via exceptionalist narratives like “the black radical tradition.”
Pradnya: What do you think about using the Indian caste system as a framework to explain racial inequality in the United States, as Isabel Wilkerson does in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents? Can you also trace the historical trajectory of caste discourse in the US?
TTouré F. Reed: This is a tough question for me since, like most Americans, I know very little about caste. I do think, though, that Americans’ collective ignorance of caste hints at both the appeal of and the problems revealed by caste’s return to American discourse on racial inequality.
Caste is an analogy. As an analogy, however, it is very unsatisfying. The way analogies normally work is that one deploys them to explain a concept or an item that is alien to one’s audience by comparing it (analogizing it) with a similar concept or item with which one’s audience is already familiar. For Americans, the caste: race analogy does the dead opposite. What I mean is that all American adults have, at minimum, an intuitive understanding of race. However, very few American adults have any understanding of caste, intuitive or otherwise. So, what I’m saying is “caste” seeks to explain a concept that Americans do, at least, kind of know by comparing it with a concept Americans are, generally speaking, utterly clueless about.
For those unfamiliar with American history, Isabel Wilkerson has helped resurrect the caste: race analogy. Caste was first ushered into the era of the modern social sciences by sociologist/anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, whose influential 1936 article “Caste and Class” would shape liberal discourse on race and inequality from World War II through the start of the Cold War.
Since caste had faded from the collective memory, the first thing one should ask about its current sway is: Why, after all these years, did caste as a vehicle for making sense of race come back into the popular conscience around 2020? I would suggest that caste’s current appeal is informed in no small part by the combination of Bernie Sanders’s left-leaning political insurgency’s challenge to Democrats’ decades-long commitment to Reaganism-lite and, of course, how liberals and the Democrats want us to interpret the election and re-election of Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024.
To help make sense of the claim I make above, it’s useful to reflect on black sociologist Oliver Cox’s critique of caste’s analytical appeal in the 1940s. Cox argued that caste was a vision of “race relations”—meaning that it viewed the power dynamics in the Jim Crow South and America at large through groupist and culturalist conflict that was essentially uncoupled from capitalist exploitation.
Since this is for an international audience, I should say that among the striking or telling things about the southern Jim Crow regimes is that they didn’t just divest black Americans of citizenship rights. They also impacted southern whites. Jim Crow regimes stripped a lot of whites of the right to vote—poor whites, specifically. Chief among the aims of Jim Crow was to quash and then salt the earth that gave rise to the complicated, but nonetheless interracial Populist political insurgency, which had threatened the hegemony of the South’s planter and nascent industrial classes. Here, it is important to understand that the abolition of slavery did not end southern elites’ demand for a captive workforce. But to establish and maintain a basically rightsless labor force in the post-emancipation South in a way that was vaguely compatible with the 13th Amendment, southern elites had to disenfranchise nearly all blacks and as many as half of southern whites, depending on the state.
To be compatible with the 15th Amendment (which granted black men the right to vote), disenfranchisement could not be formally racial. It required seemingly race-neutral mechanisms like literacy tests, grandfather’s clauses, property requirements, etc. This would necessarily impact poor whites. However, poor whites were not merely collateral damage in a war on African Americans. The scope of the people southern elites now needed to disenfranchise had to include poor whites, since they, along with southern blacks, were politically mobilized, unwilling victims of sharecropping and the crop lien system (a credit system that indebted landless farmers to plantation owners). The interracial nature of post-emancipation class exploitation is why de jure segregation (Jim Crow) was necessary to keep blacks and whites separate—to shame whites who fraternized, potentially politically, with blacks and to threaten with incarceration, violence, or murder blacks who associated with whites or just bucked the system in any other way.
Simply put, to secure the rightless labor southern agribusiness required to maintain profitability post-emancipation, the South’s ruling class had to separate and disenfranchise the system’s losers—blacks and poor whites.
As Cox argued, the “modern caste school of race relations” reimagined the dynamics driving southern life—and race in the US more broadly— in a way that placed tribalism at the center while making economic exploitation a secondary or even peripheral concern. Cox, obviously, saw the economic issues as the primary impetus, with race functioning as an essential political component to stabilizing a regime centered on material exploitation. The “untouchable” status of blacks, thus, spilled over onto poor whites not by happenstance, but as part of a larger project to establish a now somewhat interracial captive workforce.
In Cox’s day, caste gained traction during a moment in which the American working class was as well-organized and politically militant as it would ever be. Thanks in no small part to the Communist Party’s Popular Front, the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (the largest industrial union in America) commitment to organizing black workers, the broad (if unintended) implications of the National Labor Relations Act, President Roosevelt’s wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee, and the US’s anti-Nazi propaganda, the working-class movement of the day posed budding and important challenges racism.
As I said previously, black Americans in this time period and many of their white allies tended to view racial discrimination through the lens of class exploitation. Racism, within this frame, was a tool for employers and landlords to exploit all working people, irrespective of race, not just through divide and conquer in labor disputes or strikes. Employers and landlords paid so-called racial inferiors (which back then, included a lot of people who we consider white today) lower wages for comparable work and charged them more for worse housing. Since racial tiering of this sort was then legal, the practices were unambiguous—often published for all to see, however they might interpret them. The winners in this system weren’t white people, per se. Indeed, racially tiered labor and housing markets cut into the earnings of white workers and homeowners, insofar as the presence of alleged racial inferiors who commanded lower wages than whites for comparable work drove down whites’ wages just as the presence of so-called racial inferiors near or in “white neighborhoods” depressed white homeowners’ property values. This was the stuff of mutual interest for the farsighted, just as it was a basis for racial animus for the myopic.
None of this is to suggest that the union movement of the 1930s and 1940s was free of racism. Of course, it was marred by racism. How could it not have been, given the times? But leadership pushed workers to think in terms of class solidarity and to tolerate and respect people from backgrounds different from their own—be they northern European, Polish, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Mexican, or black. These sensibilities would inform the CIO’s Operation Dixie (1946), which was the union’s failed efforts to organize workers in the South.
Once more, in Cox’s view, the caste school of race relations diminished the foundational role of political economy in establishing both race and racial animus. Cold War politics compounded the tendency that Cox criticized, since any suggestion that racism or racial discrimination were tied to capitalist exploitation smacked of Communism and was career suicide. So, as historian Leah Gordon has argued, social science research on race in America turned sharply away from Cox’s vision toward race relations frames that rooted tribalism in cultural and group psychology.
This is all to say that a version of what made caste attractive in Cox’s day is responsible for caste’s return, today. The past ten years have revealed serious fissures and cracks in the Neoliberal Consensus. People across partisan lines are disillusioned with it, partly because trickledown failed to trickle very far. Trumpism is the predictable, crassest expression of Reaganism. The racial language and scapegoating that one gets from Trump is basically unvarnished Reagan. Trump is also fulfilling Reagan’s dream of dismantling the Welfare State—a project that was beyond Reagan’s grasp, thanks in part to the fact that Neoliberalism had yet to become consensus.
As I alluded to from the start, the bipartisan commitment to neoliberalism today is essential to understanding the resurgent appeal of the caste metaphor. Unfortunately, the Democrats have been complicit, in myriad ways, in the rise of Trumpism. NAFTA, signed into law by Bill Clinton, helped hollow out the once reliably Democratic Midwestern states. Clinton also signed into law the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (repealing the New Deal era Glass-Steagall Act), which helped set the stage for the subprime mortgage crisis. Obama’s Heritage Foundation-inspired Affordable Care Act threatened, by design, to bankrupt union healthcare funds. Worse yet, the nation’s first neoliberal black president opted to take a conservative approach to both mortgage relief and economic recovery, while stumping for more free trade legislation during the 2016 presidential race. Then there’s Hillary Clinton, who ran a subpar campaign but also carried all of her husband’s baggage with her into Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Midwest while being further hobbled by decades of often irrational personal hatred of her.
That said, liberals and the Democrats’ dogmatic, wealthy donors-paid-for commitment to Reaganism-lite, expressed in all of the things I sketched above and more, has compelled them to explain Trumpism in primordialist, tribalist language rather than the predictable outcome of a Neoliberal order that offered socialism to rich people and social Darwinism to the rest of us. The building frustrations and rage, driven in some part by the decades-long decline of the American middle class, had to go somewhere.
The Sanders insurgency was an expression of this disillusionment and anger that promised, at the very least, a more equitable form of capitalism—akin to the New Deal. But the DNC largely rejected Sanders’s calls for a return to the public good model of governance that birthed the American middle-class of lore and laid the foundation for the modern Civil Rights Movement. Instead, liberals and Democrats remained committed to an identity-based vision of a just society, which was wed to an identity-based understanding of the roots of injustice.
As the Democrats see it, Trumpism is incontrovertible evidence of whites’ primordial commitment to white-skin privilege. Within this paradigm, racial identities may have been conjured hundreds of years ago by laws, practices, and ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, but at some point, these culturally constructed categories allegedly “took on a life of their own,” eventually becoming group “identities” via some fuzzy epigenetic-like process. If, of course, socially constructed groups metamorphized into distinct, innate “identities” (as implied by notions of racial authenticity), then tribalist resentments become no less organic to who we are. This is why, for antiracists like Robin DiAngelo, racism is the “original sin” that requires “decent white people” to spend most of their waking hours fighting the urge to assert their superiority over non-whites.
The racecraft I describe above has permitted Democrats and liberal thinkers to view Trumpism through the lens of primordialism. This is the insistence that fear of diversity is what catapulted Trump to the White House two-times over, rather than economic resentments. If one has been paying attention to the past 50years of American domestic politics, it is difficult to imagine how it is possible to divorce “fear of diversity” from “economic anxieties.” As I said previously, conservatives have long equated affirmative action, diversity, and DEI (all synonymous in the popular conscience) with quotas that displace allegedly deserving whites and now Asians in favor of allegedly undeserving, incompetent blacks and Hispanics. A version of the same issue applies to immigration—where American workers in residential construction, agriculture, and hospitality have to compete with highly exploitable undocumented and documented workers, even as liberals insist that “immigrants are only taking the jobs that Americans don’t want” while adding to the richness and diversity of American culture. Similarly, talk of “the global economy” might be the stuff of cosmopolitanism for a stratum of elite, white-collar, polyglots, but to American factory workers, it’s the language of off-shoring, foreclosures, divorce, and substance abuse.
The above is the context in which the caste metaphor is currently attractive.
I am by no means suggesting that caste is primordial. No systems are eternal or unchanging. But precisely because caste is a hierarchical system that is, crucially, alien to Americans because it is not indigenous to the United States, the willingness to turn to Indian caste to explain American race is an expression of a desire to attribute tribalist hierarchies to the nature of human psychology rather than contingent social relations rooted in political economy. Within this paradigm, the parameters of racial in-groups and out-groups aren’t the product of a dialectical feedback loop of shifting political threats and alliances that are forged by the fluid processes of capital accumulation. Instead, caste helps to buttress the view that clustering around “like” and against “unlike” is just human nature.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton attributed her use of the superpredator trope in the 1990s to her and other whites’ unrecognized implicit bias. As part of her “the Devil made me racist” pitch, she said: “racism has been in our DNA going back probably millennia.” Since the US wasn’t even 250 years old then, the “our” in her formulation had to be referring to humans rather than Americans. Today, I could easily imagine HRC concluding this same formulation with: “Just look at what they’ve been doing in India for the last 3,000 years.”
Viewing caste through the lens of primordialism would be ahistorical if not mystical. But if people were genuinely interested in understanding the historical underpinnings of race in the United States, they wouldn’t look to a hierarchical system developed on the other side of the planet to make sense of an ideology, race, that sought to square American slavery and genocidal conquest with liberalism. Nor would they turn to India’s caste system to find the roots of contemporary disparities in housing, employment, poverty, incarceration, and education in the US.
I am not suggesting that comparative analysis can tell us nothing about the systems and ideologies that are being compared. Still, if race is, in fact, socially constructed—the product of specific laws, practices, and customs—then the exploration of the vague points of similarity between Indian caste and American race cannot offer clearer insights about the work each framework performs in its respective land than what we might glean from detailed analyses of the particular contexts giving rise respectively to caste and race.
As a scholar of African American history, this is where I think Cox’s criticisms of the work performed by the caste analogy are worth reflecting on. I also can’t help but wonder about the implications for Indians of the push to collapse caste and race into one. Obviously, I do not believe this project augurs anything positive for black Americans. Your readers will have to determine whether it augurs anything good for Dalits and other oppressed peoples in India.
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Acronyms
BLM: Black Lives Matter
FPC: Free People of Color
NAFTA: North American Free Trade Agreement
CORE: Congress of Racial Equality
NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
SCLC: Southern Christian Leadership Conference
SNCC: Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee
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Touré F. Reed is Professor of 20th-century US and African American History at Illinois State University. He is the author of Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950 (UNC Press) and Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (Verso Books). Professor Reed is currently working on his third book-length monograph, Menace II Equality: How the Entertainment Industry Sold Reaganism to Black Americans.
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