No one is denying that racism exists

I can’t remember the first time I pointed out the working of our class system in racial exploitation and was told I was denying the reality of racism. But I remember the first time I read that someone else had experienced this. In 2009, Adolph Reed wrote:

Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and those who deny it.

Given antiracists’ name, it should be no surprise that they reduce every problem to racism. But I’m struck by the way they are as unaware of capitalism as fish are of the sea. Antiracists talk about structural racism and fail to see that its structure is the capitalist class system. They say everyone who grows up in a racist society is racist and never consider that if the influence of society is so powerful, there would be no rebels. We live in a capitalist society. Do they think there are no socialists and no conservative religious people who reject capitalism?

I agree with Adolph Reed: racism exists.

I also agree with Malcolm X that “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” In theory, you can have capitalism without racism, but in reality, the US’s limited class mobility means that its class hierarchy will always be…