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.
WHEN BLACK PROGRESSIVES DIDN’T SEPARATE RACE FROM CLASS
In the 1980s, president Ronald Reagan launched a racialized assault on the American welfare state. A Goldwater Republican, Reagan was philosophically opposed to the public interest model of government that had informed the New Deal and postwar liberalism. Though Reagan’s hostility to entitlements helped deny him the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, four years later he understood that the breadth of support for entitlements—welfare programs whose eligibility requirements transcend class—precluded a direct assault on programs like Social Security’s old age retirement benefits and Medicare. Instead, Reagan set his sights on hobbling meanstested programs—welfare programs whose beneficiaries are poor and disproportionately black and brown.
Reagan repealed President Nixon’s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and cut funding to programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance.1 Reagan, who had been an outspoken critic of antidiscrimination legislation since the 1960s, also tried a number of schemes intended to undermine affirmative action. Despite his best efforts, Reagan failed to either narrow the scope of affirmative action compliance guidelines for government contractors or to end Nixon-era “goals and timetables.” He was, however, able to curtail enforcement of antidiscrimination policy by both cutting funding to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and appointing Clarence Thomas, a well-known black critic of affirmative action, as its director.2
Reagan’s assault on the American welfare state extended well beyond means-tested programs and antidiscrimination policies, as the nation’s first neoliberal president slashed both income tax and corporate tax, deregulated the banking, energy, telecommunication and transportation industries, and undercut consumer protections as well as labor and environmental laws by either underfunding the relevant federal agencies or by cynically appointing antagonists to direct them. Still, there is no denying that Reagan used a language steeped in racial resentment to attack the welfare state through its soft underbelly, means-tested programs and antidiscrimination policy.
Indeed, Reagan and his followers’ contention that permissive liberal social policies of the 1960s had spawned legions of parasitic black “welfare queens”
