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Why the Black Elite Wants to Talk about Race instead of Class
Focusing on race makes rich black people the heroes of America’s story and costs them nothing. Focusing on class makes them part of the problem and threatens their economic privilege.
Adolph Reed provides two examples:
At Neoliberalism & Black Politics: A TBS Conversation With Adolph Reed, Part 1, he said,
‘I’ve been teaching mainly in the Ivy League for 35 years, and I’ve been watching this type coming down the conveyor belt on the assembly line. In fact, probably as early as ’83, I had a sister in my Black American thought class at Yale who was a graduating senior, it was a grad/undergrad class. I know her aunt, who is an old friend of mine, and an English professor, and I know her parents a little bit. We were talking one night, and she said something that just led me to remark without even thinking about it, “If I didn’t know better I would think that you’re saying that the whole point of the civil rights movement was [so] that people like you could come to Yale and then go to work at Morgan Stanley,” which is what she was going to do. She said, “Yes, absolutely.” Without thinking again, I said to her, “Well, I wish somebody had told Viola Liuzzo that’s what the movement was going to be about because she might have stayed home in Detroit and watched her children grow up instead of…
