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 2, he focuses on Race and Class Reductionism.
Pradnya: Racial identity is often seen as central to understanding social and economic inequalities in the U.S., from slavery to the contemporary carceral system. In your book Towards Freedom: A Case Against Race Reductionism, you critique this perspective. Can you explain what you mean by “race reductionism,” and what are the major pitfalls of a race-reductionist approach?
Touré F. Reed: I argue that since the Cold War, American discourse on inequality has condensed into what I call race reductionism. This is a direct response to a claim that emerged in the last decade— popularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates— that Democratic domestic policies have been incapable of redressing racial disparities because liberals have consistently refused to acknowledge racism as an evil distinct from class inequality. In other words, liberals’ alleged “class reductionism” has translated into Democratic policies that have failed to address the deleterious influence of race and racism in American life.
Although it is unquestionably true that liberal social policies have failed to eliminate racial disparities, even as they have helped mitigate them, I argue the culprit is not liberals’ alleged class reductionism. I argue that the problem is liberals’ demonstrable “race reductionism,” meaning that liberal policymakers have tended to divorce racial inequalities from capitalism. Simply put, liberal thinkers and policymakers (now, across racial lines) have tended to attribute disparities to either race in the form of blacks’ alleged epigenetic cultural deficiencies or racism in the form of whites’ alleged epigenetic cultural deficiencies (racism is our “original sin” or is “a virus that infects us all”). Liberals have tended to reject, however, explanations for racial inequality that are rooted in political economy.
Since the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Democratic race reductionism has translated into policies that have included good and important things like workplace antidiscrimination laws and executive Orders (Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and Executive Orders 10925 and 11246), fair housing legislation (Civil Rights Act of 1968), and job training programs like Job Corps. But race reductionism has also translated into draconian policies like President Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistant Act (1965) and the Clinton era 1994 crime act and 1996 welfare reform act—all of which were informed by race reductionist or, dare I say, racist culture of poverty or underclass tropes like superpredators and welfare queens.
I know people commonly say that Johnson, Clinton, and Obama did focus on the economy and not race. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Joy Ann Reid made some version of this claim almost a decade ago. But rhetoric notwithstanding, the issue is really what those Democrats identified as the economic problems and fixes. Even though Johnson is distinct in many good and important ways from Clinton and Obama (both of whom were Neoliberal Democrats), each of the three shied away from or rejected New Deal-style direct intervention in job and labor markets. Instead, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama were growth oriented Democrats who set out to create jobs and housing indirectly by cutting taxes on businesses and upper-income earners (Johnson) or cutting costs for businesses via deregulation of industries (like Clinton did with banking, energy, and telecommunication) and/or provision of subsidies and bailouts for industries [like Obama did for the banking and auto industry (though TARP was begun by Bush II) and green energy] absent requirements that the beneficiaries pay their workers a living wage. This kind of growth politics has recently been rebranded as “abundance,” but it’s all some form of trickledown. “A rising tide raises all boats” and “trickledown” are different metaphors for the same project.
The notion that Democratic policymakers focused on class rather than race gained a lot of traction (despite how wrong the claim is) in putatively liberal circles during and since the 2016 Democratic primaries, partly because the DNC used it, successfully, to impute a patina of progressivism to its attack from the right targeting Bernie Sanders’s left calls for a return to American social democracy— or the best of New Deal Industrial Democracy.
I really need to stress that Johnson, Clinton, and Obama did not ignore race nor did they reduce disparities to class inequality. In fact, when all is said and done, they all presumed that black poverty was exceptional to capitalism. The Johnson administration’s response to the problem of black poverty was two-fold. First, it set out to counter racism via the previously mentioned civil rights acts and executive orders (these were good, but inadequate measures). Second, it also tried to address the matter of race, or poor blacks’ alleged cultural defectiveness, via the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (which provided federal assistance to local law enforcement) and cultural tutelage initiatives like Community Action Programs. This second component was somewhere between bad and not great, even if CAP wasn’t without some merit. But no matter what “race reductionism” permitted the Kennedy and Johnson administrations a path for sidestepping the disproportionate impact on blacks of the structural transformation of the US economy.
Unfortunately, the Johnson administration was the high point, since Neoliberal Democrats Clinton and Obama both identified race—black cultural defectiveness—as a big problem. As I said, previously, during the Clinton years, this translated into draconian welfare and criminal justice policies. I think Obama is somewhat complicated since his justice department had prioritized enforcing antidiscrimination law. Even so, Obama’s post-racial rhetoric pushed blacks to focus on what they could do to improve “their own communities” rather than sitting around complaining about racism.
So, once more, what you have here is race reductionism rather than class reductionism.
I know that I am often characterized as a class reductionist, so let me take a moment to address that charge. If a class reductionist is someone who thinks racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc., are inconsequential or irrelevant to the lives of real-life human beings, then I am in no way a “class reductionist.” Chapter 4 of Toward Freedom is, in part, an explicit critique of President Obama’s post-racialism, which—for reasons I sketched previously—I would characterize as color-blindness by another name. Better yet, I have not only witnessed racial discrimination, but I have experienced it to a degree that once compelled me to file a formal race discrimination complaint at a job.
This should make clear that I am in no way denying the realities and consequences of extant discrimination. I do, however, argue that the race-racism binary I’ve described, race reductionism, has worked to the detriment of poor and working-class black Americans, along with everyone else who works for a living. Race reductionism has undermined us all by compelling us to attribute inequalities to the failings of groups or individuals as an alternative to addressing the structural economic sources of inequalities that do, indeed, impact blacks disproportionately, but not exclusively.
That said, when all is said and done, I make just a few simple claims. One, racism is real and necessitates antidiscrimination programs (I am a leftist, not a conservative). Two, affirmative action and other antidiscrimination programs are important and have been quite impactful. Among other things, I wouldn’t have grown up in the black homeowners’ community in Atlanta, Georgia were it not for the fact that Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 opened labor and housing markets to my college-educated black mother and black father. However, and this is the important part, the ability of anti-discrimination policies to eliminate poverty/disparities was predictably (already clear in the 1960s) undercut by deindustrialization and the shift in the US economy from unionized manufacturing work (black Americans were overrepresented among unionized manufacturing workers and even in the non-elite building trades) to white-collar, high-tech, and service. Absent those good blue-collar jobs (automated out of existence but also eventually off-shored), Title VII and Title VIII of the CRAs of 1964 and 1968 were going to have a limited impact. Three, if what we want to do is address the material inequalities that do, indeed, impact blacks disproportionately, we have to return to the kind of politics that successfully grew the white middle-class of lore— a politics in which the government intervened directly in economic affairs, creating jobs, funding public higher education, supporting unions to help working people earn a living wage and shape management decisions, etc. And four, because African Americans are only a little more than 13% of the US population and we’re overrepresented among but don’t account for the majority of the people at the bottom, the only path forward is political coalitions of the sort advanced by civil rights activists of yesteryear.
If it’s still not clear, I have never suggested that we focus on class instead of racial discrimination. Chief among the reasons I haven’t suggested that we need to focus on class instead of race, is I don’t know how one can distill class from race or any other facet of social life human beings encounter in a capitalist society. I am arguing, however, if race is the only lens with which we have to make sense of inequalities because we take class hierarchies as the natural order of things, then what we’re going get is affirmative policies that mainly benefit the black and brown Professional Managerial Class (myself among them), draconian law enforcement and welfare policies that disproportionately impact poor and working-class black and brown people, and a hell of a lot of race-baiting (now bipartisan) intended to offload onto other powerless people the structural economic roots of inequalities that effect all so-called identity groups (straight white men among them) even if they impact black and brown people disproportionately. If we want to improve the lives of poor and working-class black and brown people and to push back against fascism (it is clearly too late to stave it off), then we have to address the structural economic sources of inequality.
I don’t quite get how what I layout above sounds like a deflection from addressing racial inequalities or even sounds conservative to some, but I know it does. I do get, though, that anything that might be branded as “antiracism” is going to sound progressive, since racism is necessarily illiberal and, thus, a fundamentally conservative construct. Still, I don’t think it’s accurate to describe as progressive, an antiracist project that rejects the downward redistribution of wealth in favor of promoting black entrepreneurship as a vehicle for growing the ranks of black millionaires and billionaires (aka growing “black wealth”). I would say the same about an antiracist project that is fundamentally about increasing black/brown representation at an ever-shrinking table. This is a pluralistic reimagining trickledown as a racial justice project, that presumes that black Americans have as much in common with bees or the Xenomorphs from the Aliens franchise as they do with other human beings. Simply put, ensuring that 13% of billionaires and millionaires are black would not do anything for me or any other black person who isn’t the child or spouse of said black millionaires and billionaires.
Pradnya: You have argued that universal policies—such as those that emerged from the 1930s New Deal—benefited Black people despite certain exclusions. Can you trace the history of universal policies and make the case for why we should advocate for them today?
Touré F. Reed: Let me begin by addressing the peculiar, popular contention that blacks received no benefits from the New Deal. This is just untrue. The essence of the claim was popularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates and then gained traction during and since the 2016 Democratic primaries. Though inaccurate, the contention was appealing then for two reasons. First, the claim functioned, once more, as a rhetorical tool with which to attack Bernie Sanders from the right via a superficially progressive racial justice discourse. Second, the moralism that usually drives this claim legitimates an ahistorical assessment of the New Deal that, consciously or not, insists on viewing New Deal politics through the antiracist sensibilities and expectations of 2024. Of course, if one were interested in making sense of race and the New Deal or even the origin of black civil rights, then the more appropriate point of reference would be 1924, not 2024.
I know some will reflexively take my second point above as a deflection. But here’s what’s truly frustrating. I first learned about the racial discrimination that marred New Deal direct relief and work relief programs as well as the problems with the Social Security Act and mortgage policy when I was an undergraduate with a major in American Studies—basically US history and social science. The thing that matters, though, is I graduated from college in 1992. If I learned about the New Deal’s racial limitations way back then, then it should be obvious that historians of the US have not ignored discrimination during the New Deal.
What is no less true, however, is that many historians, myself among them, who were looking to make sense of the Civil Rights Movement and its origins, have identified the New Deal as foundational to the black American Civil Rights Movement. It’s not just that the kinds of black protest activities that took place in the northern states during the so-called depression decade looked similar to the protests that would take place in the southern states during the 1950s and 1960s. The real issue is a confluence of developments that both shaped and were shaped by the New Deal would transform American democracy, making it feasible, legally but also culturally, for citizens to demand that their government intervene in both public and private affairs for the public good. The origin of this turn absolutely pivoted from New Dealers’ desire to create a sustainable model of capitalism that was also more compatible with republican notions of freedom and democracy than could be possible in a laissez-faire economy. But even as our origin story was about making capitalism “more fair,” the courts and Franklin Roosevelt himself (pressured by black activists and even some labor leaders) would use the power of the federal government to curb racial discrimination in the workplace even before the conclusion of World War II.
That said, two things can be true at the same time. Black Americans most certainly benefited from New Deal programs. In fact, they were often over-represented among relief recipients, particularly in the North. It is also true, however, that blacks faced discrimination in the administration of New Deal relief programs, especially in the South. So, while African Americans were over-represented among relief recipients in the aggregate, they were often under-represented in relation to their need—their very high rates of unemployment and poverty.
The benefits blacks received through the New Deal, along with the growing black civil rights and labor alliance, resulted in the so-called black vote flipping from more than 70% Republican in the presidential election of 1932 to more than 70% Democrat in 1936. This is when black Americans began voting Democrat in national elections—almost 25years before the election of John F. Kennedy, Jr.
I’m stressing this because blacks migrated to the Democratic Party in 1936 precisely because they benefited from the New Deal.
That said, even though blacks benefited from the New Deal welfare state, the big problem with the universal programs associated with the New Deal and postwar welfare states is that they weren’t actually universal.
The absence of antidiscrimination provisions from the National Labor Relations Act (which made it easier for workers to unionize), let’s say, meant that unions could discriminate—and many did. Of course, it’s also true that blacks comprised a large share of industrial union members, in part because the leadership in industrial unions understood the utility of interracial solidarity. FHA and VA mortgage policies were expressly discriminatory, proscribing mortgages to populations that might drive down property values—among them blacks and other “racial undesirables.” Early on, the Social Security Act also excluded workers not by race but by occupation. Because farm workers and domestics were among the dozen or so occupations excluded from coverage, about 65percent of black workers were ineligible for SSA benefits in the program’s early years.
There are a couple things worth considering, though. One, the courts began moving against discriminatory unions during World War II informed by “legal realism” and, of course, the more expansive view of public or state actors. At the same time, the Roosevelt administration looked to curb discrimination in unions via the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was created by Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, which black activists would pressure him to strengthen via Executive Order 9346. Two, discriminatory FHA mortgage policies were an expression of the New Deal’s commitment to righting a listing capitalist economy, which is to say the particular provisions that denied blacks and other non-whites government backed mortgages were drafted by the real estate industry. For all intent and purpose, the FHA turned best business practices into law. That absolutely made a bad situation worse, but that’s an expression of what we get when policymakers defer to capital. It’s not an expression of the inherent limitations of universal programs. Third, the SSA exemptions for domestic and agricultural workers weren’t likely motivated principally by racism, even as racism was unquestionably an important element of the story. The fact of the matter is that more than 70percent of the domestic and agricultural workers exempted from SSA coverage were white, while blacks—who were about 10percent of the total US population— comprised more than 20percent of such exempted workers. Here, too, what’s going on is that business was getting its way. Agribusiness lobbied successfully to exclude not just field hands but also farm owners themselves from SSA coverage. Agribusiness didn’t want to pay the tax, nor did they want government meddling in their affairs. And, of course, the farm lobby succeeded in delaying the inclusion of farm workers and farm owners for just 15 and 19 year,s respectively.
That said, civil rights organizers/leaders in the 1930s and 1940s and left civil rights leaders in the 1960s (Martin Luther King, among them) advocated not just for antidiscrimination policies. They insisted on the necessity of a robust welfare state that guaranteed the right to a job at a living wage, affordable housing, quality education, etc.
Unfortunately, the Cold War would push the bounds of the feasible further to the right. As a result, civil rights politics were, in some ways, a little less ambitious in the 1950s, which is to say the fight against the unambiguously antidemocratic Jim Crow laws (de jure segregation) took center stage. And though this was an incredibly important project, the struggle to putdown Jim Crow wasn’t about altering the basis of capitalist power. In fact, the fight against de jure segregation was ultimately folded into the US’s Cold War narrative in the era of decolonization, insofar as the federal government’s Cold War era opposition to formal segregation at the state level helped demonstrate the greatness of liberal capitalism. So policymakers—influenced by the Cold War and informed by social scientists—came to cast Jim Crow as a problem of race relations, not capitalist exploitation. In reality, of course, it was both.
But even as the early 1960s would witness a return of progressive political possibilities, the Cold War’s impact on liberalism remained clear. When confronted with civil rights and labor demands for New Deal style universal programs—like a domestic Marshall Plan which would include public works for the unemployed— the Kennedy and Johnson administrations took the more conservative path of cutting taxes on upper-income earners to stimulate growth, expanding social services, funding job training, and implementing antidiscrimination laws.
Three out of four probably sound pretty progressive. But the problem is this. The high rates of unemployment and poverty blacks were experiencing in the 1960s were owed to a combination of extant discrimination, legacy costs of discriminatory practices/laws like redlining (which left blacks hemmed-up in deindustrializing cities), and crucially the structural transformation of the US economy from manufacturing to high-tech and service.
Cutting taxes to stimulate growth could not address the fact that the well-paying unionized, low-skilled jobs that booster rocketed low-income whites from slums to the suburbs between 1945 and 1970 were being automated out of existence. From this vantage point, expanding social services—like unemployment assistance for single mothers or subsidies for food—was useful; however, this approach could only mitigate rather than end poverty because it addressed some of the effects of deindustrialization-driven precarity rather than the cause. Job training for jobs that may or may not exist is similarly problematic.
Finally, antidiscrimination laws would absolutely open opportunities to well-qualified non-whites (whatever their sex) and women (whatever their race), but the scope of such legislation was limited by a simple reality. To be the victim of discrimination, one has to first be qualified. If you’re talking about a post-industrial economy—which the US was already on the road to at the high point of the Civil Rights Movement—the individuals who are most likely to be qualified for white-collar work are those who have the good fortune of coming out of economically stable households. So, the people who are most likely to benefit from targeted antidiscrimination policies, absent a ton of other public investments, tend to be relatively well-off black and brown people and women.
The tragedy of the Civil Rights Movement is that antidiscrimination measures became law just as low-skilled workers’ pathways to the middle-class were narrowing.
If progressives want to address the problem of black unemployment and poverty, the only way to do that is through universal programs intended to directly address the growing precarity in late-capitalism. Investments in public goods—a right to quality tuition-free pre-K to college education, real national healthcare, a job at a living wage, and so on— would be essential to any effort to redress disparities in employment, housing, education, and even mass incarceration. Such policies would have to be universal, partly because you cannot generate political will to address such problems only for black Americans. We are just 13percent of the total US population. Moreover, blacks are not even the largest “minority” group in the US, at this point.
This is the most perplexing thing about reparations. Pointing to racial discrimination in the New Deal, some advocates of reparations have asserted that blacks can never benefit fully from universal programs because America is just too racist. These people likewise contend that Reaganism and Trumpism only affirm the rightness of this claim, since Reaganism and Trumpism make plain that whites are so racist they’d happily vote to eliminate the very welfare programs they benefit from just to ensure that blacks don’t receive a disproportionately large share of state largess.
To my thinking, this is a better case against, rather than for, reparations. If whites are, in fact, so committed to antiblackness that they would destroy a system they benefit from just to keep blacks from receiving relatively more of the very same benefits, then no one should expect whites to support black reparations— an unambiguous wealth transfer from whites to African Americans. Frankly, I don’t expect tens of millions of whites or any other so-called racial group to be motivated by altruism. And yet those of us who insist that the path to racial justice necessitates a universal approach to nurture white buy-in are the ones who are purportedly naïve about white people.
To reiterate, I am not suggesting for a moment universal programs absent antidiscrimination policies would eliminate disparities. In fact, I have consistently insisted on the enduring necessity of antidiscrimination policies, which is frankly one reason I held my nose and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I knew what a Trump presidency would mean for the Supreme Court and by extension the future of affirmative action and other antidiscrimination initiatives. My point is simply that antidiscrimination laws and initiatives absent a political program that seeks to directly address the economic sources of inequality that impact all Americans cannot end black precarity. The limitations of a singular focus on antidsicrimation policies as the fix have less to do with implicit bias (even as my own life experience tells me this is one factor) than structural economic issues that necessitate universal rather than targeted remedies.
Universal programs are only necessary, though, if the goal is to redress high rates of poverty, unemployment, welfare recipiency, and incarceration among black people. These are issues that I would really like to address. By contrast, if the goal is just to end the so-called racial wealth gap, we could do that mostly by growing the ranks of black millionaires and billionaires. After all, most of the racial wealth gap is between the richest 10percent of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. If you operate with a category called “racial wealth,” then what happens is all those white billionaires skew upward the total amount of wealth “white people” possess. If blacks accounted for 13percent of American billionaires—instead of about one hundredth of one percent— then the so-called racial wealth gap would be largely eliminated. People should reflect on the implications, though, and consider whether this is the vision of social or racial justice they really want. From my vantage point, diversifying the ranks of the nation’s fabulous oligarchs is not justice—racial or otherwise.
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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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Acronyms
CRA: Civil Rights Acts
FHA: Federal Housing Administration
VA: Veterans Affairs
SSA: Social Security Administration
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Read part 1 here. This interview was done via email in the summer of 2025. To be continued.
