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YES, *PLEASE* TALK ABOUT RACE! But Never Erase Class.
Identitarians don’t talk about class for the same reason the oil industry doesn’t talk about climate change—and when either has to acknowledge the elephant, they downplay it for the same reason.
When universalists talk about class, identitarians insist we don’t want to talk about race. It’s easy to understand why. They prefer the neoliberal anti-racism of Bell, Crenshaw, Kendi, Coates, and DiAngelo to the class-first anti-racism of Du Bois, King and Malcolm X. Talking about class threatens the class privilege that they crave. The contradiction of wanting a fair world and wanting to be much richer than the rest of us results in angry outbursts and arguments based on their hurt feelings rather than logic.
Yes, maybe I should title this piece “Bourgeois Fragility”.
Cognitive dissonance forces them to focus on proportionality instead of prejudice and ignore the fact that “Systemic Racism” Can’t Explain the USA — but Class Mobility Can. They fail to see Why #BlackLivesMatter should be #PoorLivesMatter. They can’t grasp that there are Two Kinds of Anti-racists: Identitarian and Universalist, and universalist anti-racists are continuing in the tradition of the greatest opponents of racism.
Adolph Reed Jr. noted in The Myth of Class Reductionism:
