Socialism

Given the timing of its publication, David Roediger’s latest book, Class, Race and Marxism (Verso, 2017) is addressed to this new terrain of Trumplandia, and the book’s introduction takes up the debates within the American Left that reached fever pitch during the 2016 election cycle. The book, however, is not a collection of new essays, but rather a compendium of Roediger’s writings over the last ten years. As such, it is an attempt to reassert his position on how we should think about questions of race and class in American life and history, and what role Marxism might play in that process. This essay examines Roediger’s latest book, but also takes stock of the interpretative assumptions of some three decades of whiteness studies in academe, and its consequences for left thought and action. Throughout what follows, I offer alternative historical analysis and case-study illustrations to demonstrate the limits of whiteness discourse, and how we might approach questions of class power and interests instead. [...]

Whiteness studies has produced a form of anti-racist politics focused on public therapy rather than public policy, a politics that actually detracts from building social bonds and solidarity in the context of actual organizing campaigns, everyday life, and purposive political action. This political problem is not strictly Roediger’s, but is one that besets the contemporary left more generally and is derived from the cultural turn within Western academe and the U.S. Left since the sixties, the rejection of modernist political projects as irredeemably tarnished by histories of racism and imperialism, and a resulting deep, pervasive suspicion of constituted power. Whiteness studies, as Roediger illustrates, had its origins in the distinctive needs, challenges and aspirations of white New Leftists, who sought to bridge their own alienation within the affluent society and their social justice commitments with the shifting black nationalist sensibilities that transformed black political life from a focus on defeating Jim Crow and securing full citizenship towards demands for self-determination from the middle-sixties onwards. [...]

The interpretive problems and faulty political assumptions of whiteness studies have become entrenched through the emergence of a therapeutic industry dedicated to rehabilitating interpersonal racism and addressing white privilege through acts of contrition, and have grown more dangerous as they have been amplified and degraded via social media. There is not much evidence that the expansion of this mode of anti-racist trainings over the last few decades has produced a different politics, a willingness to take risk, to sacrifice one’s privileged position to make substantive changes in society, or even altered day-to-day behavior. [...] If anything, whiteness deprogramming provides a ready means of egress, a way to demonstrate sympathy without making more difficult, sustained political commitments that might entail contesting institutionalized power. Neither does it require shedding or sharing the actual trappings of middle class privilege, i.e. better salaries, savings and assets, high performing schools, the capacity to travel, social networks, etc., which are codified in popular speech as white privilege, even though these same goods may be shared by other middle class and wealthy ethnics. Whiteness training encourages sharing one’s origin story, failings and sense of torment, but beyond charitable giving, it does not necessitate sharing resources at the level of redistributive public policy, i.e. through expansion of the universal social wage, commuter taxes, consolidation of urban-suburban school districts, revenue sharing across metropolitan divides, federally-managed public works projects etc. [...]

The work of building solidarity lies elsewhere, not in therapy aimed at self-actualization, but in lived social relations and sustained political work that transforms participants’ social consciousness and collective sense of historical possibility. Those everyday social relations and the context of political work are always defined by the presence of differences, whether those are differences of background, perspective, maturity, knowledge, insight, power, capacity, and passions, and none of these are calibrated strictly in concert with racial, ethnic, gender or other corporeal identities. Although Roediger and others condemn “class reductionism,” their work too often succumbs to a reductionist view of black political life that does not comprehend different material interests and ideological positions among African Americans. What is lost in the din of whiteness discourse, and certainly in the reparations hustle that Roediger defends, are the strategic choices made by black people who have sought working-class solidarity and action, despite the fact of political disenfranchisement, segregation, and repression. It would seem that latter-day historians, activists and bloggers are more preoccupied with difference than those black teamsters who joined the 1892 general strike in New Orleans, or those African American and Puerto Rican parents who fought alongside white teachers, social workers and community organizers to end lead poisoning in Rochester. [...]

https://nonsite.org/article/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/comment-page-1