Addressing an injustice connected to identity, like a mental illness, is fundamentally different from correcting the injustice of class inequality. A great gulf exists between the large amount of media attention devoted to the issue and the very small number of people of color it will ultimately impact. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists in the campaign—which had precisely to do with King’s surreptitious negotiations with Johnson. The second thing worth mentioning is the report’s use of the word “disproportionately,” which does a great deal of conceptual work.

Yet clearly, white female voters didn’t think Clinton’s success in overcoming sexist obstacles to her candidature would make any difference to their own lives.The trickle down feminism of the Clinton candidacy was, in many ways, similar to that espoused by Julia Gillard during her prime ministership.

And they understand our skepticism about such movements – and more generally about “the social phenomenon broadly known as Black Lives Matter” – as a form of blindness to the ways in which the racialization we criticize can be both justified on its own terms and crucial also to the “anticapitalist politics” that they and (when they’re practicing “critical generosity” they think) we share. Ava DuVernay acknowledged that she intentionally falsified the history of the iconic voting-rights campaign in her 2014 film Selma to deny President Lyndon Johnson’s role because she “wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie. Michaels explores this more deeply in his provocative “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man” by challenging the common dictum, touted by both liberals and leftists, that race is a social construction.There are few scholars, if any, with a more penetrating analysis and critique of contemporary black politics than Adolph Reed Jr. She assumed from the outset that black political history could not be properly understood without situating it in relation to the broader currents within which it has been embedded and with which black agents have interacted at any given point. Very little if anything that’s happened under the banner of Black Lives Matter since the summer of 2020 has suggested, what Clover and Singh seem to believe, that the race line highlighted in every demonstration was really understood as a kind of class line. No Politics but Class Politics drives home the point that the current brand of identity politics, with its centering of disparities as the ultimate measure of inequality, is not only a form of class politics but also a politics that aligns with and reinforces the basic tenets of neoliberalism.

Just as with the Bookerite progenitor, developing and advancing a popular politics is not the point at all. She goes on to assert that the presence of a black Ariel “is a continuation of that tradition, and audiences who don’t get it have clearly been missing the point all along. Leaving aside the fact that more black characters than white ones have autonomous voices and personalities, the film was largely based on Shaw’s moving letters home, which were compiled in the volume Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune. Individual outcomes of inequality obscure its structural causes, and so we are encouraged to respond to those outcomes in a way that does nothing to address the underlying structures. While the race as social construction formulation appears to clearly challenge ideas of racial essentialism, it actually accepts them as its starting premise.Warren also contrasts Parker’s vision to the one that animates Gary Ross’s underappreciated 2016 film, Free State of Jones, which was also widely dismissed on its release as just another white-savior narrative. This book pushes us closer towards the uncompromising, bare-knuckled anti-capitalist movement we so desperately need. Denouncing racism and celebrating diversity have become central mainstays of progressive politics: for many on the left, social justice consists of equitable distribution of wealth, power, and esteem among racial groups. Despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. And no project of anti-discrimination – that is, no project devoted to making sure that everyone has a chance to succeed in a class society – can ever make the slightest contribution to ending class society.