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INTRODUCTION: THE ERA OF RACE REDUCTIONISM

The 2016 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination condensed around two distinct visions of social justice. One, advanced by Hillary Clinton and the party’s corporate wing, accepted the limits of the neoliberal regime of upward redistribution even as it embraced fairness for nonwhites, women, gender-nonconforming people and other specified populations within the system. The other, asserted by Bernie Sanders, reaffirmed the public-good framework—established during the New Deal and carried through the postwar period—that was crucial to both the exponential growth of the American middle class and the modern civil rights movement.

Although I enthusiastically cast my ballot for Sanders in Illinois’s 2016 Democratic primary and look forward to voting for him again in 2020, when Senator Bernie Sanders announced his presidential campaign in April 2015, I feared the Democratic Party and the corporate media would succeed in their efforts to cast him as a novelty candidate. I have always appreciated Sanders’s politics, but I had presumed that a quarter-century of neoliberal hegemony had crowded out space for a return to the public-good-oriented domestic agenda that he championed.

To be clear, I refer to Sanders’s platform as “public-good-oriented” rather than “democratic socialist,” not because I have an aversion to socialism or dispute the candidate’s self-identity and long political history on the left. Rather, casting Sanders as a democratic socialist or social democrat obscures the fact that the Bernie Sanders who campaigned for the Democratic nomination ran on a platform in step with the best of New Deal liberalism.

Today, Sanders’s calls for free public higher education, universal health care, tax hikes on the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations, massive reinvestment in the nation’s infrastructure and an invigorated union movement sound like a plan to infuse alien Scandinavian social democratic policies into American democracy. However, in the 1930s and 1940s and even in the quarter-century or so following World War II—the era that most Americans reflexively think of as the golden age of the middle class—Sanders’s political platform would not have been so unusual for a Democratic presidential candidate.

During the New Deal (1933–40), American workers won a number of concessions from capital that would help pave the way for the postwar expansion of the nation’s middle class. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the Social Security Act (SSA) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) would afford the workers covered by these laws: a much-strengthened right to collective bargaining; insulation from financial hardship wrought by termination, workplace injury, the loss of a wage earner, or just growing old; a forty-hour work week; and a floor below which workers’ wages could not fall. In the same decade, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) would create long-term mortgages, making homeownership possible for most white workers for the first time in the industrial era.

World War II dampened the New Deal’s social democratic potential—which was always restrained by Roosevelt’s overarching mission to create a sustainable model of capitalism—both by stifling labor and civil rights militancy and by displacing the “regulatory state” model of government stewardship of the nation’s economy in favor of the more conservative, growth-oriented “compensatory state” model.¹ So, while the New Deal may have been as close to social democracy as the United States has ever been, the comparative strength of American capital by World War II ensured that New Deal liberalism would be far removed from socialism. Still, President Roosevelt and the New Dealers did advance a vision for a social corporatist democracy that sought to mitigate capitalism’s harshest implications for American citizens while alleviating the tensions between industrial capitalism and republican democracy. Thus, in his final State of the Union on January 11, 1944, President Roosevelt laid out what he termed a “Second Bill of Rights,” updated for the industrial age, which would establish the right to a job, a living wage, a decent home and health care.²

While Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights was in step with the sensibilities of most Americans by the end of World War II, it would not come to pass. Indeed, by 1947, a combined Republican and Dixiecrat congressional supermajority swiftly rolled back workers’ rights and tamped down labor militancy. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947)—which eliminated the closed shop, card check and sympathy strikes while placing restrictions on unions’, but not corporations’, political activities—was crucial to this project.³ But despite intense opposition from Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats, President Truman’s 1948 presidential platform promised to build on the New Deal’s economic liberalism. Truman’s “Fair Deal” called for the repeal of Taft-Hartley, national health care, full-employment policies, the expansion of public works and comprehensive housing legislation. Truman would likewise become the first Democratic president to adopt a formal civil rights platform—which included a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and federal anti-lynching and voting rights legislation.⁴

Truman won reelection, but the combined Republican and Dixiecrat majority in Congress foreclosed the Fair Deal. Nevertheless, even Republican president Dwight Eisenhower’s America continued to reflect the New Deal’s influence. Indeed, by the late 1950s one-third of the workforce was unionized. Unionized workers, and even a growing number of nonunionized workers, had access to employer-sponsored health insurance plans—which major employers had just begun to establish as an alternative to a taxpayer-funded health care system. Robust state contributions to public higher education ensured that tuition at public universities was either free or extremely inexpensive. And the highest marginal income tax rate was about 91 percent.

In the mid-1960s, when the American middle class was on even firmer footing, the union movement was still strong; tuition at public universities remained either free or inexpensive, and the highest marginal income tax rate was then about 75 percent. The Johnson administration’s Great Society, moreover, extended health care to two classes of Americans—the aged and the poor—who did not have the benefit of employer-sponsored health insurance.⁵ And the public-good framework that informed the above would prove indispensable to the civil rights movement’s major legislative victories—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968—even if these acts were incapable of redressing the structural economic sources of racial disparities.

The Keynesian consensus—as the aforementioned period is called—birthed and nurtured the American middle class of lore. But the zeitgeist of that era was, in many ways, far removed from the political-economic orthodoxies of the conservative neoliberal era, ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the wake of stagflation (1973–75). Perceiving government intervention in labor and housing markets for the public good as an encumbrance on otherwise rational markets, neoliberal Republican and Democratic administrations—from Reagan to Trump and from Clinton to Obama—have, to one degree or another, whittled away at the social safety net, consumer protections and workers’ rights that were the product of the Keynesian consensus.

The poor have certainly paid the price for neoliberalism’s rejection of the public-interest model of governance, but so too have America’s working and middle classes. Since the mid-1950s, the share of the American workforce that is unionized has declined from a high of more than 30 percent to fewer than 10 percent today.⁶ The decline of the union movement has contributed to a massive upward redistribution of wealth since the late 1970s. In 1965, the average CEO earned forty times as much as the average worker; today, that number is more than 300 times as much. Since 1980, wages for the top 1 percent of wage earners have risen ten times faster than those of the bottom 90 percent of workers. Today, the top 5 percent of households possess nearly 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 60 percent of American households have actually lost wealth over the past few decades. And the atrophy of the public sector—wrought by privatization schemes and tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest citizens and corporations—has not only contributed to the decay of America’s infrastructure, but state budget cuts to public higher education have likewise resulted in soaring college tuition costs.⁷

All of this is to say that there really was an outsider candidate in 2016 who ran on a platform aimed at addressing the problems impacting working people in the United States, and his name was Bernie Sanders.

The pain inflicted on the nation’s working and middle classes notwithstanding, I had presumed that a quarter-century of bipartisan commitment to neoliberalism’s central doctrines ensured that a presidential campaign that sought to reinfuse New Deal liberalism into US politics would be crushed by corporate media and Democratic elites before it even got off the ground. So when Sanders announced his 2016 presidential campaign, I could never have imagined he would ultimately win twenty-three of fifty-seven Democratic primary contests. Even if the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) decision to stack the deck of primary races in favor of Hillary Clinton was cause for outrage, the fact that Sanders’s platform resonated with 43 percent of Democratic primary voters was cause for optimism about the prospects for a progressive political agenda capable of pushing back against the neoliberal assault on working people.

But if the strength of Sanders’s primary challenge gave reason to believe that neoliberalism’s grip on the electorate’s political imagination had weakened, the Democratic and identitarian-left backlash to Sanders and his supporters revealed a deeply rooted reactionary tendency in contemporary liberal discourse related to race and inequality. Democrats and many self-identified progressives not only dismissed the utility of Sanders’s platform for African Americans—characterizing his redistributive agenda as “class reductionist”—but they coalesced around putatively left identitarian formulations to attack his program from the right.

The charge that Sanders was a class reductionist was, and still is, a red herring. Desperate to shore up its support among black voters, the Clinton campaign deftly used identitarian constructs to deflect attention from the full implications of their commitment to market-friendly neoliberal policies. Representative James Clyburn (SC), for example, opposed Sanders’s call for a return to taxpayer-funded (free) higher education by arguing that Sanders’s plan—which Clyburn grossly mischaracterized—would hurt historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) by diverting resources to publicly funded, predominantly white institutions (PWIs).⁸ Clyburn, who sat on the board of a private HBCU, ignored the benefits of Sanders’s proposal for both publicly funded HBCUs and the large number of poor and working-class African American students who can only finance their college education by taking on student loans.

Hillary Clinton likewise deployed the language of structural racism and intersectionality to obscure the impact of her husband’s legislative agenda on disproportionately black voters. Without so much as a hint of irony, Secretary Clinton asserted that Sanders’s calls for banking regulations and redistributive policies were of little importance to black and brown Americans as such proposals would do nothing to end the systemic racism that, she claimed, was the root cause of the subprime mortgage crisis and mass incarceration.⁹ Beyond the fact that African Americans have been overrepresented among victims of predatory mortgage lending and the carceral state thanks, in no small part, to laws enacted by President Bill Clinton, regulation of the banking industry and the establishment of a living wage would likely do much to redress disparities in both wealth and the criminal justice system. Indeed, banking regulation could eliminate predatory lending altogether. And as political scientist Marie Gottschalk has shown, income inequality, cuts to state indigent legal services programs and the return of for-profit prisons are at the heart of African Americans’ overrepresentation in the criminal justice system.

Curiously, liberal critics frequently cast Sanders’s platform as anachronistic, but without any formal acknowledgment that he was simply calling for a return to the kind of public-interest approach to governance—ushered in by the Democratic party of Roosevelt—that not only grew the American middle class but had also helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement. Those progressive critics who did reference American history, such as the acclaimed public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates, often did so to no good effect. Though Coates ultimately declared his support for Sanders, he too cast the Vermont senator as “class reductionist.” Specifically, Coates rebuked Sanders for proposing a platform that sought to “ameliorate the effects of racism through broad, mostly class-based policies—doubling the minimum wage, offering single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education.” According to Coates, Sanders’s proposed redistributive policies were just “the same ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ thinking that dominated Democratic anti-racist policy for a generation.” Sanders’s proposals thus, Coates claimed, suffered from the same wrongheaded presumption that doomed the War on Poverty—postwar liberals’ refusal to acknowledge that racism was not merely “a relative of white poverty and inequality,” but it was “an active, distinct evil” of its own.¹⁰

Coates’s historical analogy failed on its merits, insofar as he conflated the Johnson administration’s efforts to mitigate poverty via a conservative growth agenda with Sanders’s progressive redistributive proposals. Still, had Sanders’s platform been wed to calls to repeal extant antidiscrimination legislation, Coates’s fear that blacks would not benefit equally from the Vermont senator’s proposals might not have been unreasonable. However, Sanders did not run on a pledge to end or even “mend” affirmative action or any other antidiscrimination policies. The Democratic presidential candidate who had run on that platform was Secretary Clinton’s husband.¹¹

To be clear, I have no interest in relitigating the 2016 Democratic primary race. In fact, the specter of a Trump presidency not only motivated me to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election, but I encouraged others to do the same.¹² Still, the 2016 Democratic primaries revealed a critical fault line within Democratic and progressive politics. Just as the popularity of Sanders’s call for a return to a public-good-oriented approach to governance drew attention to a broad cross section of the electorate’s disillusionment with a quarter-century of neoliberal hegemony, liberals’ dismissal of Sanders as a “class reductionist” announced corporate Democrats’ and a stratum of identitarian progressives’ commitment to a class politics—shrouded in a language of identity and attitudes, uncoupled from political economy—that has long failed disproportionately black and brown working people.

There is little doubt that Secretary Clinton (much like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other contenders this time around) and her surrogates’ strategic use of racial identity politics reflected the convergence of issues that were unique to the second decade of the twenty-first century. Sanders’s strong showing in the Democratic primaries and caucuses forced the centrist-Clinton campaign to the rhetorical left on trade, education and wage policies. To counter the insurgency, Clinton needed to shore up her support with black voters, who were a reliable, economically diverse constituency that—as Clinton had learned in 2008—wielded disproportionate influence over Southern primaries. Clinton thus shrewdly wrapped herself in the legacy of the nation’s first (neoliberal) black president—a strategy that would have been all the more appealing given Donald Trump’s racist and xenophobic campaign stump—helping her win “the black vote” handily, despite the disproportionate damage inflicted upon African Americans by President Bill Clinton’s welfare, criminal justice, labor and trade policies.¹³

Nevertheless, the specific issues informing the Clinton campaign’s use of identity politics in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary were merely vulgar expressions of a long-standing and deeply problematic tendency in liberal thought and policy pertaining to race and inequality. Indeed, as I will explore in the chapters that follow, those who had claimed that Sanders was following in the long tradition of liberal “class reductionists” who have ignored systemic racism’s impact on disparities were both mischaracterizing postwar antipoverty efforts and misidentifying the root causes of liberal policymakers’ inability to redress racial inequities. Democratic presidential administrations—from Kennedy to Obama—have unquestionably failed to address the structural sources of racial disparities. However, far from reducing race to class, liberal social policy since the Cold War has tended to abstract racial disparities from the political-economic forces that generate them. Simply put, the deficiencies of postwar racial liberalism derive from its attachment to race reductionism, rather than class reductionism.

To be sure, liberals and progressives did not always separate race from class. Influenced by New Deal industrial democracy, civil rights and labor leaders of the 1930s and 1940s generally presumed that racism was inextricably linked to class exploitation. Civil rights leaders of this era thus identified interracial working-class solidarity as essential to racial equality.

The rightward turn in American politics ushered in by the Cold War would displace analyses of race rooted in political economy. By the 1950s, liberal thinkers and Democratic policymakers began to coalesce around culturalist conceptions of inequality that formally rejected race as a biological category but ultimately imputed a rigidity to ethnic group culture—uncoupling it from proximate material influences—that treated race as a social construct in name only. Drawing on concepts like ethnic pluralism/diversity and the culture of poverty/underclass ideology, late-Keynesian and neoliberal Democrats alike would trace racial disparities to whites’ ingrained prejudices and poor blacks’ cultural deficiencies.

Liberals’ tendency to divorce race from class has had dire consequences for African American and other low-skilled workers. Specifically, race reductionism has obscured the political-economic roots of racial disparities, resulting in policy prescriptions that could have only limited value to poor and working-class blacks. Despite the fact that African Americans have long been overrepresented among unskilled workers and public-sector employees, postwar liberal policymakers have generally ignored the impact of issues such as automation, deindustrialization, public-sector retrenchment and the decline of the union movement on blacks. Instead, modern liberal antipoverty efforts have generally bound macroeconomic growth agendas to a mix of antidiscrimination policies, cultural tutelage, job training and punitive measures ranging from welfare reform to the carceral state. Thus, Democratic policymakers—from the War on Poverty through the postracial presidency of the nation’s first black commander-in-chief—have not simply eschewed progressive redistributive economic policies in favor of conservative growth politics, they have in fact used a language of racial reductionism to advance this agenda.

The chapters that follow explore the trajectory of the liberal thought and policy related to inequality, outlined above, through examining race reductionist thinkers and policymakers —among them Oscar Handlin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Barack Obama¹⁴ and Ta-Nehisi Coates—contrasted with economic structuralists—such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Michael Harrington and Charles Killingsworth. Chapter 1 examines the class orientation of black politics during the New Deal and World War II. Chapter 2 explores the influence of ethnic pluralism over postwar racial liberalism via a critical analysis of the work of acclaimed immigration historian Oscar Handlin. Chapter 3 proffers a critique of the Moynihan Report that explicates the relationship between the Johnson administration’s embrace of culturalist conceptions of inequality and the War on Poverty’s rejection of the kind of redistributive policies advocated by contemporary labor-liberals and leftists such as Randolph, Rustin, Killingsworth and Harrington. Chapter 4 explores the complementary roles played by President Obama’s postracial presidency and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reparations politics in bolstering support for neoliberalism’s ongoing assault on public-good-oriented governance. And, finally, I conclude with some reflections on liberals’ and left-identitarians’ tightening embrace of race reductionist frameworks during the Trump presidency.

The unfolding 2020 Democratic primary makes clear that progressives will either reject race reductionism or reject the policies that can actually end racial disparities and other forms of inequality. There is, of course, no doubt that race/racism continues to adversely influence the lives of blacks and other people of color in the United States, ensuring the continued utility of antidiscrimination measures for the imaginable future. Still, given that the wages and wealth of the bottom 60 percent of American workers have been on a forty-year downward slide, a policy agenda that seeks only to redress disparities will be incapable of ending precarity for the masses of black and brown workers. If we hope to improve the material lives of poor and working-class black and brown people, we must demand a return to a public-good model of governance that presumes the general welfare necessitates not just antidiscrimination policies but a robust public sector and direct state intervention in labor and housing markets for the benefit of all of the nation’s working people.