ABSTRACT
Cedric Johnson’s essay advances a critique of race-reductionist thinking about black American politics and of defeatism regarding class solidarity. While race-centric approaches have promoted liberal anti-racism since the Civil Rights era, the origins of the more recent Black Live Matter movement can be related to the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. In both instances, the focus on racial disparity replaces rigorous class analysis with the meta-narrative of racial oppression. The subsequent race and class debates that accompanied the 2016 Sanders campaign portrayed the white working class as though it was a unified social category. If anti-racism is deemed by many to be necessary to revitalize the left, the idea that this will win black people to socialism is unfounded and patronizing. The promotion of race matters therefore has little to do with building a majoritarian left politics. Liberal identity politics, Johnson argues, legitimize neoliberalism by giving it a multiracial countenance. The rise of the far right should therefore be leading activists to build alternatives to accumulation regimes and their attendant modes of policing.
