Jamelle Bouie and the Disconnection of Race and Class

When I first noticed Bouie, he seemed to be a generic race reductionist. Now he seems to be trying to engage more with class issues, though he still subordinates them to social identity in the way privileged people tend to. He wrote a defense of Bernie Sanders that was decent. I have sympathy for identitarians who acknowledge that under capitalism, Sanders’ universalist class policies would do the most for women and people of color because women and people of color are disproportionately working class.

I am curious about whether Bouie would still say what he said in 2015: “racism is orthogonal to class: They’re two different dimensions of disadvantage, and to improve the picture on one isn’t always to improve the picture for the other.”

His disconnection of class and race is typical of neoliberal identitarianism. Socialists have always seen racism as the product of the African slave trade which continued to be promoted by the rich to keep the working class divided, so we cannot treat class and race as separate issues. Like King and Malcolm X, we put class first, but we never ignore race. (For more on this, see Adolph Reed’s The Myth of Class Reductionism.)

The main things Bouie and I disagree on today are the 1619 Project — I’m with the historians who criticize it at the World Socialist Web Site — and reparations, which should’ve happened in 1865 but is fatally flawed today. How do you justify giving money to rich black Americans while giving nothing to three-fourths of the people in poverty? King had the right idea: Universal Basic Income excludes no one and helps everyone who has been failed by capitalism.