Round Table India (RTI) is the largest independent, volunteer-run online repository and news portal focused on anti-caste history, writings, and poetry across religions, languages, and regions of India.

It was co-founded in 2008 by Kuffir Nalgundwar, Anu Ramdas, and Bhanu Pratap with the primary focus of creating space for Dalit-Bahujans—the working classes of India—to engage in democratic debate and produce knowledge without the mediation of Brahmin or Western-led institutions.

RTI features contributions from thousands of writers and hosts distinct content in three regional languages. This vast and diverse pool of writings serves as a resource library on anti-caste thought.

Because U.S. policies and politics influence nations around the globe, Round Table India hopes to offer its readers insights into both the rise of the MAGA movement and the larger implications of right-wing populism in the U.S. To better understand the return of Trump and the backlash against the liberal politics of racial reckoning, anti-racism, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), we recently conducted a print interview with Touré F. Reed, Professor of 20th Century U.S. and African American History at Illinois State University.

We were especially interested in Professor Reed’s historical analysis of liberal “race reductionism” and his related critiques of the racial essentialism that is at the heart of identity politics—be it progressive, liberal, or conservative. Reed has argued that liberal pundits, scholars, and policymakers have tended to treat racial disparities as exceptional to capitalism. In its best moments, liberal race reductionism has translated into modest reforms such as anti-discrimination legislation and other targeted initiatives as alternatives to a redistributive economic politics that would more effectively address the structural, material inequalities that disproportionately impact the Black American working class. In its worst moments, race reductionist frameworks have attributed disparities to poor and working-class Black Americans’ alleged cultural dysfunction, helping to pave the way for draconian law enforcement and welfare policies.

What is especially striking to us about Reed’s argument is that we see a similar pattern in India, where a liberal Brahmin upper-caste has tended to essentialize Dalit identity with the effect of neutralizing anti-caste politics. In light of these parallels, RTI believed that exposure to Professor Reed’s scholarly work would offer useful context that might help sharpen RTI’s readers’ critiques of the American liberal narratives and academic frameworks that have come to influence Indian scholars’ and activists’ analyses of caste.

Dalit-Bahujans have long viewed American society through the prism of scholarship on Black Americans.

For the past century or so, Indian anti-caste activists have drawn on a liberal rights discourse that paralleled frameworks articulated by Black American civil rights activists. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, for example, rooted the struggle against the birth-based hierarchical caste system in universal claims for human dignity and equality. Ambedkar first articulated his human rights-influenced critique of caste in a speech delivered on December 25, 1927, at the historic protest for equal water rights for Dalits at Chavadar Lake in Mahad. This is a foundational moment in the modern anti-caste movement.

The universal appeal of the anti-caste movement’s focus on the humanity of the oppressed has led Dalit-Bahujan intellectuals to gravitate toward Black Americans’ struggles against racial discrimination and their fight for equality in the United States.

Over the past decade, however, we have witnessed a dramatic shift. Western academics and Brahmin upper-caste liberals have embraced a framework that equates caste with the American race and, by extension, views the experiences of Dalits through the lens of the “Black American experience.”

This is not a unique phenomenon. G. Aloysius has authored a number of trenchant critiques of Western academics’ tendency to impose Eurocentric religious and racial categories onto diverse peoples and societies.1 The current trend of collapsing “Indian caste” into “American race” is one expression of this tendency. This particular expression of American cultural imperialism creates two related problems. First, the caste-race analogy obscures the unique complexities and history of caste. Second, the analogy aids and abets the Indian ruling class by folding caste into a transhistorical narrative that displaces from the purview of analysis the mechanisms through which caste hierarchies have been sustained.

Simply put, Brahmin-upper-caste liberals’ tendency to reduce caste to premodern cultural practices and their related emphasis on Dalit identity mystifies caste by uncoupling it from a mode of production in which Dalit-Bahujans are exploited toilers.

Readers should consider that nearly twenty percent of Brahmin-Savarna upper castes own over ninety percent of India’s wealth, while the majority of Dalit-Bahujans and other historically marginalized communities continue to labor in precarious “informal sector jobs” (domestics, street vendors, restaurant workers, day laborers, et cetera) and agricultural work. Ninety percent of workers in India work in informal arrangements without job security, benefits, or a safety net to fall back on.

How can such stark material inequalities be beside the point?

Well, since the 2010s, American scholarship on privilege, intersectionality, and anti-racism would appear to provide Indian scholars with progressive lenses through which to view inequalities at home. However, by uncoupling caste from its particular political and historical context, these frameworks insist on treating caste as intrinsic identities rather than expressions of contingent social relations. The mystification of Indian social hierarchies not only undermines potential for political mobilization against caste-based oppression and exploitation; it can have devastating effects on individuals.

In 2016, Rohith Vemula, a young Dalit PhD student at the University of Hyderabad, was driven to suicide due to institutional discrimination and systemic oppression faced by Dalit-Bahujan students in Indian higher education. Tragically, Rohith was not the first Dalit student to take his own life in these institutions. But his “institutional murder”—as it was widely described at the time—became something of a Dalit “George Floyd moment,” sparking massive protests and a first-of-its-kind national outcry against caste-based discrimination.

In the wake of this and other similar tragedies, Dalit identity became the primary focus for liberal upper-caste individuals—particularly in academia, media, and the non-profit sector.

Prior to Rohith’s tragic suicide, Indian media outlets rarely ran sympathetic accounts of Dalit victims of caste-oppression. Instead, Dalits were more likely to be vilified as “undue beneficiaries” of reservation quotas in public sector jobs and higher education—the Indian version of affirmative action policies. But at the same time Trumpism helped inspire American liberals’ “discovery” of antiblack racism, Indian media outlets, academic conferences, and popular culture suddenly became interested in platforming Dalit identity and experiences.

The tactic of singling out Dalits as the sole victims of caste society while separating them from other historically oppressed Bahujan castes has reinforced the disposition to essentialize Dalit identity while also reimagining caste in terms that approximate America’s unique quasi-binary system of racial hierarchy.2

Round Table India takes the view expressed by Kuffir Nalgundwar, who argues that the essential characteristic of the relationship between the Dalit-Bahujan and the upper castes is antagonism.3 This reality cannot be encapsulated by privilege discourse centered on essentialized identity. The caste privilege of Brahmins and other upper castes is often presented with a progressive veneer, framing caste in relative terms and placing every caste on the same playing field. The contemporary discourse on caste has the pretense of confronting inequalities in India, but this is an illusion. The reality is that American racial identity politics-informed understandings of caste can tell us nothing about how or why the majority of oppressed castes—even under the modern state—continue to face material realities characterized by stark economic inequalities rooted in the exploitation of labor.

The caste-race analogy and the related comparisons between Dalits and Black Americans appeal to elites in both India and the United States because it serves them. Symbolic gestures, reckonings with past wrongs that cannot be made right, and even freeing up a few seats for a select few identity group representatives at a shrinking table do nothing to challenge material basis of power. Such gestures and reforms do, however, diversify the ranks of the functionaries of inequality.

1. How would you describe the current situation in the U.S. to an international audience?

Not good. The Democrats and the Republicans are both committed to identity politics. The allegation of a bipartisan commitment to IDPOL will likely sound weird to some, since identity politics has become synonymous with liberal or progressive politics.

IDPOL is unquestionably pluralist; however, I think the presumptions driving this particular brand of pluralism are fairly conservative.

When you get down to it, white nationalism is a form of IDPOL. Liberals and progressives alike correctly understand white nationalism to be a conservative ideology. For contemporary liberals and progressives, white nationalism’s conservativism comes down to a couple of things: the presumption of white superiority over POCs and, of course, the desired outcome of white domination of non-whites. While these are important elements of white nationalism’s conservatism, I would suggest white nationalism is conservative not only for the above reasons but because it presumes that racial groups are intrinsically different—distinguished by discrete interests, temperaments, and dispositions.

Anti-racist or intersectionality-informed progressive and liberal visions of IDPOL obviously reject the rightness of white superiority and by extension white domination of non-whites. But these liberal frames generally insist that blacks are bound together across time and place. Constructs like “the black community” or “black culture”—both of which a lot of us use without ever reflecting on the implications—presume that blacks share a unitary and distinct experience that translates into a shared vision of the world and even a common interest. Constructs like Afrocentric Consciousness or the Black Radical tradition build on this presumption of “sameness” to advance the view that blacks’ distinct, historic positionality as an oppressed “community” has imbued blacks (perhaps especially black women) with a vision, foresight, and progressivism that insulates us from contemporaneous political and ideological influences—apart from racism—which affirmatively distinguishes us from other populations.

It always feels good to be one of the “elect” or the “chosen.” But that feeling of affirmation is not the stuff of addressing the declining middle class. It is also not the stuff of addressing racial disparities in housing, employment, education, the criminal justice system, and so on. In fact, I think it does the devil’s work insofar as IDPOL framings, be they in the hands of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, are appealing to both parties because they shift our focus on the sources of misery in life away from material power, or class, toward so-called cultural issues or even abstract concepts—like immigration, abortion rights, DEI or affirmative action, gun rights, the decline of family values, et cetera.

I know some who read this will say that I am dismissing the value of cultural or social issues by suggesting that they are distractions from the so-called real economic issues. I promise you that this is not what I am doing, if only because I appreciate the significance of the things I sketched above and more—some of which are very important to me personally.

But the point is, if you pluck these issues out from the material world that we live in by framing them as “identity” issues—and this is the work that “identity” does—then you balkanize them. In other words, you narrow the terms of debate in a way that obscures the full implications of the issues and, by extension, limit the ability to address real, serious issues. I will give you a couple of examples.

Let’s take abortion rights as one example. Basically, from the Clinton era forward, abortion rights rhetoric has pivoted off of an individual woman’s right to choose what to do with her body. This is, of course, an important aspect of abortion rights, but as a women’s “identity” issue, it functions politically as an alternative to an abortion rights politics that might be wed to women’s reproductive health issues broadly: access to birth control, access to prenatal care, access to daycare, and even family planning. In other words, if we did not frame abortion rights as an “identity” issue, we could deepen the base of support for it as part of a larger narrative about public health and, of course, the huge obstacles to stability or family formation (if that is something one wants to do) created by our anemic system of public goods—our private healthcare system, underfunded public education system, et cetera. Some of those on the other side who currently see abortion as immoral could relate to the immorality of this system that makes it very difficult for even well-educated Americans to just lead healthy lives, let alone to form families. That might help win more of them over—men among them—by wedding the issue of abortion to public goods and investments.

I know some would hear that as putting women on the backburner. I do not see it that way at all. I see that as emphasizing the humanity of women—particularly women on the margins—since abortion rights has many implications. And frankly, if it were as simple as a “women’s issue,” then one-third of women would not be “pro-life” (anti-abortion) and forty percent of men would not identify as “pro-choice” (according to a recent Gallup poll).4

Affirmative action/DEI is the second example I will point to. To make sure the reader does not lose sight of this, I need to stress from the outset that, in origin, anti-discrimination policies like affirmative action were fundamentally about redressing poverty—blacks’ overrepresentation among the poor and unemployed. They were not about promoting “diversity.” That is hard to imagine, since at this point most of us use diversity and affirmative action interchangeably—shaped by both the place of diversity in higher education following SCOTUS’s Bakke verdict and “diversity’s” centrality to the corporate embrace of affirmative action by the 1990s.

I say this, though, because somehow Democratic post-election analysis in both 2016 and 2024 insists that fear of “diversity,” rather than economic anxieties, catapulted Trump to the White House. Ignoring the fact that support for Trump among non-whites grew between 2016 and 2024, I do not know how one can distill racial resentments from economic anxieties. By the 1970s, the Right had successfully equated affirmative action with quotas that displaced deserving/qualified white guys in favor of undeserving, unqualified black and brown people (whatever their sex) and women (whatever their race). As I said from the start, by the 1990s diversity and affirmative action were essentially synonymous. So, among conservatives, diversity meant quotas that disadvantaged whites in employment and avenues to employment like college and graduate schools by promoting undeserving blacks and Hispanics. Over the past several years, DEI has replaced diversity, which means DEI is now synonymous with economically disadvantaging qualified whites in favor of unqualified blacks and Hispanics.

This is all to say that fear of diversity is inextricably linked to fears of economic precarity. The marriage between racial and economic anxieties is only strengthened by a “privilege discourse” that equates whiteness with privilege (usually consisting of a checklist of advantages that might be better understood as class privilege) and blackness with underprivilege. Worse yet, since “white privilege” can just mean freedom from discrimination, this narrow vision of racial justice ironically directs blacks and other non-whites to lower their expectations for a just society by insisting that we accept what had long been the floor (freedom from discrimination) as our ceiling (a privilege).

Anyway, do anti-discrimination policies have to be synonymous with white displacement? No! As I said from the start, in origin, affirmative action was about redressing disparities rather than representing identities. Disparities have persisted despite more than half a century of affirmative action not simply because the racists have gone underground—which is far from a new concept. The big problem is anti-discrimination laws as well as Kennedy’s and Johnson’s executive orders establishing affirmative action came to be about a decade into the structural transformation of the U.S. economy from a blue-collar, unionized economy to a white-collar, high tech, service economy and just about a decade before the genesis of neoliberalism.

The relevance of this to my larger point is that opting to discuss racial disparities simply in terms of identity undermines the cause in much the same way pro-choice IDPOL does. Liberals might champion or even prioritize—as they did during the Racial Reckoning—diversity initiatives and hiring as a very narrow, IDPOL-informed case for creating some job openings for a pool of well-qualified minorities in an increasingly competitive labor market. In this context, diversity purportedly adds to the competitiveness of a firm by capitalizing on the plurality of talents and, crucially, perspectives that comprise heterogeneous markets.

As we already know, conservatives responded predictably by casting “diversity hiring” as reverse discrimination. This characterization stings especially harshly in hyper-competitive job markets.

Though I am a big fan of “diversity” and appreciate its utility, one big problem with the IDPOL case for racial justice is that it is now distinct from economic justice. For us today, back poverty or incarceration rates are not part of larger economic or political trends—deindustrialization, declining union participation, public sector retrenchment, trade policy, Federal Reserve Policy, et cetera. Since this class context is off the table, today liberals tend to insist that racial disparities are expressions of primordial white racism. The class context was also off the table from Reagan through Obama with a very different set of bad actors. But, as I will elaborate on in subsequent questions, back then, conservatives as well as Democrats/liberals insisted the problem was black people themselves—black cultural dysfunction.

In the 1960s, by contrast, the case civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph made for what would become affirmative action was wed to a case for economic justice for all working Americans. IDPOL takes this off the table.

2. Why do you think Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election?

Harris lost for a lot of reasons. I will volunteer that I do not think that Harris lost either solely or principally because of racism, sexism, or misogynoir. Just compare Harris’s share of the so-called white vote with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. It seems that forty-two percent of whites cast ballots for Harris. This means she performed slightly worse with whites than Biden, who got forty-four percent of the white vote. Though Bill Clinton and Barack Obama performed better with whites in 1996 and 2008 than Harris, Harris actually got a larger share of the white vote than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had in 1992 and 2012, respectively. Harris also performed much better with white voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, despite the fact that HRC won the popular vote by a pretty convincing margin.

The bottom line is that Harris underperformed with non-white voters. Harris did especially poorly with Hispanic men, but she underperformed with non-white women. In fact, she performed no better with black women than Biden had in 2020.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that racism and sexism played no role in some voters’ decision to reject Harris. It is a given that some white voters and maybe some non-white voters were turned off by Harris’s race, sex, or both. But this is a reality the DNC would have considered from the start, just as they had with Obama. And the fact that Harris performed as well with whites as one would expect of any Democrat since Bill Clinton should make it hard to settle on the view that racism, sexism, or misogynoir comprised the engine that drove Harris into downtown “Loserville.”

That said, I think Harris’s loss is fairly easy to explain. Biden was very unpopular. Harris refused to distance herself from him. Inflation and Gaza hurt Biden with some Democratic constituencies. Harris’s unexpected candidacy marked the third successive presidential race in which the process for choosing the Democratic candidate was dispiritingly bureaucratic. Harris had only about three months to campaign, but worse yet, for whatever reason, her four years as VP were undistinguished. And Harris is also not the greatest communicator on that stage. For what it’s worth, I have a lot of sympathy for Harris with respect to the difficulties she would have had securing a comfortable public footing because I think Biden disadvantaged her by first guaranteeing that his then-to-be determined running mate would be a woman—which made her the rightwing caricature of an affirmative action or DEI hire, which is predictably how the Right characterized her. And second, Biden didn’t really seem to give her much to do as VP.

Finally, I do not imagine the Democrats’ attachments to IDPOL helped much. As I alluded to previously, the GOP had long ago succeeded in equating the Democrats’ commitment to “diversity” or even more equitable taxation with the liberals’ alleged commitment to propping up profligate minorities at the expense of deserving and hard-working Americans. I should stress that this predates Trump by decades, even if the expressions of this view that characterize Trumpism are uniquely chilling.

I should also stress that although I used “deserving and hard-working Americans” to refer to a conservative framework that is ubiquitous in this moment, up until fairly recently “deserving” and the “hard-working” had long been unambiguous code for “white.”

Having said that, I think the parameters of the deserving and undeserving are messier today (less rigidly racial), but that in itself is not a good thing. In fact, the ranks of the self-identified deserving Americans have gotten deeper or, dare I say, more diverse, as the checklist of undeserving people has grown and also diversified.

One expression of what I am getting at here is the number of Hispanic voters, birthright and naturalized alike, who voted for President Trump partly because of his anti-immigrant stance. A lot of individuals who “immigrated legally” are antagonistic toward those who took the so-called easy, “illegal” route to live in America. In other words, we have deserving “legal” non-white Hispanic immigrants who dislike undeserving “illegal” equally non-white Hispanic immigrants.

I think one would find a version of these kinds of sentiments among black male Trump voters, some of whom, I am sure, were turned-off by the Democrats’ (Obama among them) commitment to attributing low-enthusiasm for Harris among black men to their presumed sexism. Here too, a narrative of “displacement” would have resonated with some black men. Since Hillary Clinton’s loss, the Democrats’ embrace of intersectionality combined with black women’s exceptionally strong support for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Harris has fueled admonitions of black men (straight black men, in particular) as a drag or really a reactionary force in black life. You are not going to win the votes of people you opt to insult before election day.

It seems, as well, that the place of trans identity in Democratic and liberal discourse, if not policy, may likewise have resonated with some voters as a form of “displacement”—from a variety of quarters.

Once again, though, identity politics is part of the problem. But that does not mean that we should not be invested in LGBTQ rights, or the rights of blacks and other racial minorities, or immigrant rights, and so on. These are all important and worthy projects. The problem I am pointing to, though, is how liberals and progressives have come to conceptualize these issues, which I think is counterproductive both politically but even interpersonally.

Most people have lost sight of this, but anti-discrimination policies (as opposed to anti-racism) distinguished between the public and private spheres. Anti-discrimination policies made it illegal to discriminate against protected classes (race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, religion, creed) in the public sphere. Those laws, however, did not and do not challenge one’s right to harbor racist, sexist, xenophobic, et cetera beliefs or feelings. Your views and the people you chose to associate with in your personal life were your own. Put another way, just as the state has the power to outlaw bank robbery (an act in the public sphere that has societal consequences) but no power to outlaw fantasizing about robbing a bank, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 outlawed racial, sex, ethnic, et cetera discrimination (acts or behaviors in the public sphere that have societal consequences) but not racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric attitudes.

The relevance here is that the public sphere threshold those laws expected us all to meet was tolerance. Acceptance, by contrast, was not the benchmark.
There are many reasons it makes far more sense to think of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and so on as categories that announce social relation or position rather than identities. One of the big problems with thinking about the above as “identities” is that doing so has translated to a fight for social justice that is about acknowledgement of the “rightness” of “what you are” (which, for what it’s worth, is always in some degree of flux and transition) rather than your right to fair treatment in the public sphere—in the workplace, in the classroom, at the shopping mall, in the housing market, et cetera.
In other words, the “identity” framework (just like anti-racism) takes off the table tolerance. Since identity frameworks equate “tolerance” with capitulation, then missionary-style proselytizing and admonitions of sinners who refuse to celebrate the identity of “the other” would seem appropriate and reasonable.

To be clear, if you are a missionary with the backing of capital ships and marines, then asserting your moral superiority via righteous fire-and-brimstone-style proselytizing and condemnations of the heathens before you is not unreasonable. As long as the capital ships are offshore and your marines’ base is within convenient screaming distance, you are not likely to lose. By contrast, if your end game is to win progressive policies in a pluralistic democracy, then tolerance is the better threshold.

Once more, one reason tolerance is the better play is that few of us want our boss or our government directly telling us how to think and feel about things—our attitudes are our own (even as they too change with time in often rarely acknowledged ways). Our forefathers and foremothers long ago accepted the power of government to regulate behaviors in the public sphere, even if the parameters of that expression of government power are not a constant. But telling us who we have to accept or celebrate in the public sphere is a bridge too far, especially since many times the win for one group is bound up with a condemnation of another—that displacement thing I mentioned previously.

This is to say, Harris may not have overreached herself. But I suspect a lot of voters were turned off by Democrats’ and liberals’ rhetorical overreach. This did not help Harris, nor does it do anything good for the rest of us.

3. The shift of working-class men away from the Democratic Party has become one of the central themes of post-election analysis. Why do you think many men are becoming disenchanted with the Democratic Party?

I alluded to this in my previous answer. As you say, many men do vote Democrat. So, I would not suggest that men have become disenchanted with the Democratic Party. But many men do not think the Democratic Party has much to offer them.

That said, one of my former dissertation advisors and mentors, Judith Stein, had observed that blue-collar voters did not so much leave the Democratic Party as the Democratic Party left them with the election of Jimmy Carter. Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were not friends to organized labor. Joe Biden, of course, was a pro-union Democrat—the first in my lifetime. And yet Biden’s support for unions did not translate into major successes for Harris.

I think there are many things happening. One—and I say this living in the Midwest in proximity to blue-collar Trump supporters—a lot of Americans are one- or two-issue voters. So, the candidate who is the champion of the one or two issues they care about is going to get their vote. The other particulars do not matter.

Two, most people do not think about the details of policies; they vote on impressions. This is a bipartisan problem. In fact, this why white liberal acquaintances of mine in the 1990s could say that while they shared my discomfort with the 1994 and 1996 crime and welfare reform acts, I should still vote for Bill Clinton rather than sit out because Bill did not really want to sign those bills into law; he just had to in order to get elected. No one who thought that politics was first and foremost about getting the policies one wants would utter that statement aloud. But a lot of us across partisan lines attach ourselves to a party or a politician who resonates with how we see ourselves—like being a Cubs fan because you identify with people from north Chicago suburbs or being a White Sox fan because you identify with working-class ethnics on Chicago’s South Side.

Three, Trump’s loutish persona is bound up with a righteousness of its own. To his supporters, Trump is speaking truth as power to power in the name of “the pissed upon” at the very same time he is giving away our future to Peter Thiel.

This is yet another expression of why I would argue that IDPOL is doing the devil’s work. If tolerance and coalition building are off the table, then how do you win the 80,000 votes across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election or the 300,000 votes (or whatever the number) by which Harris lost the swing states? I suppose a Democrat could luck up and find himself running for POTUS at the very same moment the electorate has lost confidence in the GOP both because the outgoing Republican administration was stuck with a housing and stock market crash and the Republican presidential candidate has decided to pick an unseasoned, gaffe-prone, word salad spinner for his running mate. I guess another possibility is a Democrat could run for POTUS at the very same moment the Republican incumbent is mishandling a global pandemic. On this trajectory, though, I am fearful that the next Democratic presidential victory will only happen after Trump tries to outlaw looking up at that lithium-rich asteroid on a collision course with Earth. And, of course, even if the Democrats made their way into the White House under such circumstances, they would still likely try to find a market-based solution to our asteroid problem because it would feel too much like socialism to raise taxes on rich people to finance the space laser that might save us all.

Anyway, some will say that I am ignoring or minimizing the role of racial resentments here. But I would obviously disagree with this charge. The Republicans have been race-baiting since Reagan, if not Nixon. This is what they do. What I am saying, though, is at the same time Republicans are scapegoating (race-baiting and trans-baiting) to pull into their orbit voters who derive few tangible rewards from the GOP’s tax-cutting, deregulatory agenda, the Democrats are pushing those same people into the GOP’s arms via identity politics frameworks that insist on casting working-class white men as a privileged group of toxic deplorables who are finally getting their comeuppance. Frankly, I think a version of the same thing is at play vis-à-vis black men, though it is far less advanced.

You may win a place in heaven by telling heathens they are damned to hell. But you will not win votes by telling people you do not know that they are irredeemable jerks who deserve to be punished for the sins of their fathers as well as their own.

4. Racial identity is often seen as central to understanding social and economic inequalities in the U.S., from slavery to the contemporary carceral system. In your book, Towards Freedom: A Case Against Race Reductionism, you critique this perspective. Can you explain what you mean by “race reductionism,” and what are the major pitfalls of a race-reductionist approach?

I argue that since the Cold War, American discourse on inequality has condensed into what I call race reductionism. This is a direct response to a claim that emerged in the last decade—popularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates—that Democratic domestic policies have been incapable of redressing racial disparities because liberals have consistently refused to acknowledge racism as an evil distinct from class inequality. In other words, liberals’ alleged “class reductionism” has translated into Democratic policies that have failed to address the deleterious influence of race and racism in American life.

Although it is unquestionably true that liberal social policies have failed to eliminate racial disparities, even as they have helped mitigate them, I argue that the culprit is not liberals’ alleged class reductionism. The problem is liberals’ demonstrable “race reductionism,” meaning that liberal policymakers have tended to divorce racial inequalities from capitalism. Simply put, liberal thinkers and policymakers (now across racial lines) have tended to attribute disparities to either race in the form of blacks’ alleged epigenetic cultural deficiencies or racism in the form of whites’ alleged epigenetic cultural deficiencies (racism is our “original sin” or is “a virus that infects us all”). Liberals have tended to reject, however, explanations for racial inequality that are rooted in political economy.

Since the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Democratic race reductionism has translated into policies that have included good and important things like workplace anti-discrimination laws and executive orders (Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and Executive Orders 10925 and 11246), fair housing legislation (Civil Rights Act of 1968), and job training programs like Job Corps. But race reductionism has also translated into draconian policies like President Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Act (1965) and the Clinton era 1994 crime act and 1996 welfare reform act—all of which were informed by a race reductionist or, dare I say, racist culture of poverty or underclass tropes like superpredators and welfare queens.

I know people commonly say that Johnson, Clinton, and Obama did focus on the economy and not race. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Joy Ann Reid made some version of this claim almost a decade ago. But rhetoric notwithstanding, the issue is really what those Democrats identified as the economic problems and fixes. Even though Johnson is distinct in many good and important ways from Clinton and Obama (both of whom were neoliberal Democrats), each of the three shied away from or rejected New Deal-style direct intervention in job and labor markets. Instead, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama were growth-oriented Democrats who set out to create jobs and housing indirectly by cutting taxes on businesses and upper-income earners (Johnson) or cutting costs for businesses via deregulation of industries (like Clinton did with banking, energy, and telecommunication) and/or provision of subsidies and bailouts for industries (like Obama did for the banking and auto industry—though TARP was begun by Bush II—and green energy) absent requirements that the beneficiaries pay their workers a living wage. This kind of growth politics has recently been rebranded as “abundance,” but it is all some form of trickle-down. “A rising tide raises all boats” and “trickle-down” are different metaphors for the same project.

The notion that Democratic policymakers focused on class rather than race gained a lot of traction (despite how wrong the claim is) in putatively liberal circles during and since the 2016 Democratic primaries partly because the DNC used it, successfully, to impute a patina of progressivism to its attack from the right targeting Bernie Sanders’s left calls for a return to American social democracy—or the best of New Deal Industrial Democracy.

I really need to stress that Johnson, Clinton, and Obama did not ignore race, nor did they reduce disparities to class inequality. In fact, when all is said and done, they all presumed that black poverty was exceptional to capitalism. The Johnson administration’s response to the problem of black poverty was twofold. First, it set out to counter racism via the previously mentioned civil rights acts and executive orders (which were good but inadequate measures). Second, it also tried to address the matter of race, or poor blacks’ alleged cultural defectiveness, via the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (which provided federal assistance to local law enforcement) and cultural tutelage initiatives such as Community Action Programs. This second component was somewhere between bad and not great, even if CAP was not without some merit. But no matter what, “race reductionism” permitted the Kennedy and Johnson administrations a path for sidestepping the disproportionate impact on blacks of the structural transformation of the U.S. economy.

Unfortunately, the Johnson administration was the high point, since neoliberal Democrats Clinton and Obama both identified race—black cultural defectiveness—as a big problem. As I said, previously, during the Clinton years, this translated into draconian welfare and criminal justice policies. I think Obama is somewhat complicated, since his Justice Department had prioritized enforcing anti-discrimination law. Even so, Obama’s post-racial rhetoric pushed blacks to focus on what they could do to improve “their own communities” rather than sitting around complaining about racism.

So, once more, what you have here is race reductionism rather than class reductionism.

I know that I am often characterized as a class reductionist, so let me take a moment to address that charge. If a class reductionist is someone who thinks racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, et cetera are inconsequential or irrelevant to the lives of real-life human beings, then I am in no way a “class reductionist.” Chapter 4 of Toward Freedom is, in part, an explicit critique of President Obama’s post-racialism, which—for reasons I sketched previously—I would characterize as color-blindness by another name. Better yet, I have not only witnessed racial discrimination, but I have experienced it to a degree that once compelled me to file a formal race discrimination complaint at a job.

This should make clear that I am in no way denying the realities and consequences of extant discrimination. I do, however, argue that the race-racism binary I have described, race reductionism, has worked to the detriment of poor and working-class black Americans, along with everyone else who works for a living. Race reductionism has undermined us all by compelling us to attribute inequalities to the failings of groups or individuals as an alternative to addressing the structural economic sources of inequalities that do, indeed, impact blacks disproportionately but not exclusively.

That said, when all is said and done, I make just a few simple claims. One, racism is real and necessitates anti-discrimination programs (I am a leftist, not a conservative). Two, affirmative action and other anti-discrimination programs are important and have been quite impactful. Among other things, I would not have grown up in the black homeowners’ community in Atlanta, Georgia, were it not for the fact that Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 opened labor and housing markets to my college-educated black mother and black father. However, and this is the important part, the ability of anti-discrimination policies to eliminate poverty/disparities was predictably (already clear in the 1960s) undercut by deindustrialization and the shift in the U.S. economy from unionized manufacturing work (black Americans were overrepresented among unionized manufacturing workers and even in the non-elite building trades) to white-collar, high-tech, and service work. Absent those good blue-collar jobs (automated out of existence but also eventually offshored), Title VII and Title VIII of the CRAs of 1964 and 1968 were going to have a limited impact. Three, if what we want to do is address the material inequalities that do, indeed, impact blacks disproportionately, we have to return to the kind of politics that successfully grew the white middle class of lore—a politics in which the government intervened directly in economic affairs, creating jobs, funding public higher education, supporting unions to help working people earn a living wage and shape management decisions, et cetera. And four, because African Americans are only a little more than thirteen percent of the U.S. population, and we are overrepresented among but do not account for the majority of the people at the bottom, the only path forward is political coalitions of the sort advanced by civil rights activists of yesteryear.

If it is still not clear, I have never suggested that we focus on class instead of racial discrimination. Chief among the reasons I have not suggested that we focus on class instead of race is that I do not know how to distill class from race or any other facet of social life that human beings encounter in a capitalist society. I am arguing, however, if race is the only lens with which we have to make sense of inequalities because we take class hierarchies as the natural order of things, then what we are going get is affirmative policies that mainly benefit the black and brown Professional Managerial Class (myself among them), draconian law enforcement and welfare policies that disproportionately impact poor and working-class black and brown people, and a hell of a lot of race-baiting (now bipartisan) intended to offload onto other powerless people the structural economic roots of inequalities that effect all so-called identity groups (straight white men among them), even if they impact black and brown people disproportionately. If we want to improve the lives of poor and working-class black and brown people and to push back against fascism (it is clearly too late to stave it off), then we have to address the structural economic sources of inequality.

I do not quite get how what I laid out above sounds like a deflection from addressing racial inequalities or even sounds conservative to some, but I know it does. I do get, though, that anything that might be branded as “anti-racism” is going to sound progressive, since racism is necessarily illiberal and, thus, a fundamentally conservative construct. Still, I do not think it is accurate to describe as progressive an anti-racist project that rejects the downward redistribution of wealth in favor of promoting black entrepreneurship as a vehicle for growing the ranks of black millionaires and billionaires (a.k.a. growing “black wealth”). I would say the same about an anti-racist project that is fundamentally about increasing black/brown representation at an ever-shrinking table. This is a pluralistic reimagining of trickle-down as a racial justice project that presumes that black Americans have as much in common with bees or the Xenomorphs from the Aliens franchise as they do with other human beings. Simply put, ensuring that thirteen percent of billionaires and millionaires are black would not do anything for me or any other black person who is not the child or spouse of said black millionaires and billionaires.

5. You have argued that universal policies—such as those that emerged from the 1930s New Deal—benefited Black people despite certain exclusions. Can you trace the history of universal policies and make the case for why we should advocate for them today?

Let me begin by addressing the peculiar popular contention that blacks received no benefits from the New Deal. This is just untrue. The essence of the claim was popularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates and then gained traction during and since the 2016 Democratic primaries. Though inaccurate, the contention was appealing then for two reasons. First, the claim functioned, once more, as a rhetorical tool with which to attack Bernie Sanders from the right via a superficially progressive racial justice discourse. Second, the moralism that usually drives this claim legitimates an ahistorical assessment of the New Deal that, consciously or not, insists on viewing New Deal politics through the anti-racist sensibilities and expectations of 2024. Of course, if one were interested in making sense of race and the New Deal or even the origin of black civil rights, then the more appropriate point of reference would be 1924, not 2024.

I know some will reflexively take my second point above as a deflection. But here is what is truly frustrating. I first learned about the racial discrimination that marred New Deal direct relief and work relief programs as well as the problems with the Social Security Act and mortgage policy when I was an undergraduate with a major in American Studies—basically U.S. history and social science. The thing that matters, though, is that I graduated from college in 1992. If I learned about the New Deal’s racial limitations way back then, then it should be obvious that historians of the U.S. have not ignored discrimination during the New Deal.

What is no less true, however, is that many historians, myself among them, who were looking to make sense of the Civil Rights Movement and its origins have identified the New Deal as foundational to the black American Civil Rights Movement. It is not just that the kinds of black protest activities that took place in the northern states during the so-called depression decade looked similar to the protests that would take place in the southern states during the 1950s and 1960s. The real issue is a confluence of developments that both shaped and were shaped by the New Deal would transform American democracy, making it feasible, legally but also culturally, for citizens to demand that their government intervene in both public and private affairs for the public good. The origin of this turn absolutely pivoted from New Dealers’ desire to create a sustainable model of capitalism that was also more compatible with republican notions of freedom and democracy than could be possible in a laissez-faire economy. But even as our origin story was about making capitalism “more fair,” the courts and Franklin Roosevelt himself (pressured by black activists and even some labor leaders) would use the power of the federal government to curb racial discrimination in the workplace even before the conclusion of World War II.

That said, two things can be true at the same time. Black Americans most certainly benefited from New Deal programs. In fact, they were often over-represented among relief recipients, particularly in the North. It is also true, however, that blacks faced discrimination in the administration of New Deal relief programs, especially in the South. So, while African Americans were overrepresented among relief recipients in the aggregate, they were often underrepresented in relation to their need, their very high rates of unemployment and poverty.

The benefits blacks received through the New Deal, along with the growing black civil rights and labor alliance, resulted in the so-called black vote flipping from more than seventy percent Republican in the presidential election of 1932 to more than seventy percent Democrat in 1936. This is when black Americans began voting Democrat in national elections—almost twenty-five years before the election of John F. Kennedy.

I am stressing this because blacks migrated to the Democratic Party in 1936 precisely because they benefited from the New Deal.

That said, even though blacks benefited from the New Deal welfare state, the big problem with the universal programs associated with the New Deal and postwar welfare states is that they were not actually universal.

The absence of anti-discrimination provisions from the National Labor Relations Act (which made it easier for workers to unionize), let’s say, meant that unions could discriminate—and many did. Of course, it is also true that blacks comprised a large share of industrial union members in part because the leadership in industrial unions understood the utility of interracial solidarity. FHA and VA mortgage policies were expressly discriminatory, proscribing mortgages to populations that might drive down property values—among them blacks and other “racial undesirables.” Early on, the Social Security Act also excluded workers not by race but by occupation. Because farm workers and domestics were among the dozen or so occupations excluded from coverage, about sixty-five percent of black workers were ineligible for SSA benefits in the program’s early years.

There are a couple of things worth considering, though. One, the courts began moving against discriminatory unions during World War II, informed by “legal realism” and, of course, the more expansive view of public or state actors. At the same time, the Roosevelt administration looked to curb discrimination in unions via the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was created by Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, which black activists would pressure him to strengthen via Executive Order 9346. Two, discriminatory FHA mortgage policies were an expression of the New Deal’s commitment to righting a listing capitalist economy, which is to say the particular provisions that denied blacks and other non-whites government-backed mortgages were drafted by the real estate industry. For all intents and purposes, the FHA turned best business practices into law. That absolutely made a bad situation worse, but that is what we get when policymakers defer to capital. It is not an expression of the inherent limitations of universal programs. Third, the SSA exemptions for domestic and agricultural workers were likely not motivated exclusively or even principally by racism, even as racism was unquestionably an important element of the story. The reality is that more than seventy percent of the domestic and agricultural workers exempted from SSA coverage were white, while blacks—who were about ten percent of the total U.S. population—comprised more than twenty percent of such exempted workers. Here, too, what was going on was that business was getting its way. Agribusiness lobbied successfully to exclude not just fieldhands but also farm owners themselves from SSA coverage. Agribusiness did not want to pay the tax, nor did they want government meddling in their affairs. At the same time, federal policymakers understood that extending social security coverage into industries that lacked personnel bureaucracies would be an administrative nightmare. So, the farm lobby succeeded in delaying the inclusion of farm workers and farm owners for just fifteen and nineteen years, respectively.

That said, civil rights organizers/leaders in the 1930s and 1940s and left civil rights leaders in the 1960s (Martin Luther King among them) advocated not just for anti-discrimination policies. They insisted on the necessity of a robust welfare state that guaranteed the right to a job at a living wage, affordable housing, quality education, et cetera.

Unfortunately, the Cold War would push the bounds of the feasible further to the right. As a result, civil rights politics were, in some ways, a little less ambitious in the 1950s, which is to say the fight against the unambiguously antidemocratic Jim Crow laws (de jure segregation) took center stage. And though this was an incredibly important project, the struggle to put down Jim Crow was not about altering the basis of capitalist power. In fact, the fight against de jure segregation was ultimately folded into the U.S.’s Cold War narrative in the era of decolonization, insofar as the federal government’s Cold War era opposition to formal segregation at the state level helped demonstrate the greatness of liberal capitalism. So, policymakers—influenced by the Cold War and informed by social scientists—came to cast Jim Crow as a problem of race relations, not capitalist exploitation. In reality, of course, it was both.

But even as the early 1960s would witness a return of progressive political possibilities, the Cold War’s impact on liberalism remained clear. When confronted with civil rights and labor demands for New Deal-style universal programs—like a domestic Marshall Plan which would include public works for the unemployed—the Kennedy and Johnson administrations took the more conservative path of cutting taxes on upper-income earners to stimulate growth, expanding social services, funding job training, and implementing anti-discrimination laws.

Three out of four probably sound pretty progressive. But the problem is this: the high rates of unemployment and poverty that blacks were experiencing in the 1960s were owed to a combination of extant discrimination, legacy costs of discriminatory practices/laws like redlining (which left blacks hemmed-up in deindustrializing cities), and, crucially, the structural transformation of the U.S. economy from manufacturing to high-tech and service.

Cutting taxes to stimulate growth could not address the fact that the well-paying, unionized, low-skilled jobs that boosted low-income whites from slums to the suburbs between 1945 and 1970 were being automated out of existence. From this vantage point, expanding social services—like unemployment assistance for single mothers or subsidies for food—was useful; however, this approach could only mitigate rather than end poverty because it addressed some of the effects of deindustrialization-driven precarity rather than the cause. Job training for jobs that may or may not exist is similarly problematic.

Finally, anti-discrimination laws would absolutely open opportunities to well-qualified non-whites (whatever their sex) and women (whatever their race), but the scope of such legislation was limited by a simple reality. To be the victim of discrimination, one must first be qualified. If you are talking about a post-industrial economy—which the U.S. was already on the road to at the high point of the Civil Rights Movement—the individuals who are most likely to be qualified for white-collar work are those who have the good fortune of coming from economically stable households. So, the people most likely to benefit from targeted anti-discrimination policies, absent a ton of other public investments, tend to be relatively well-off black and brown people and women.

The tragedy of the Civil Rights Movement is that anti-discrimination measures became law just as low-skilled workers’ pathways to the middle class were narrowing.

If progressives want to address the problem of black unemployment and poverty, the only way to do that is through universal programs intended to address the growing precarity in late capitalism directly. Investments in public goods—a right to quality tuition-free pre-K to college education, real national healthcare, a job at a living wage, and so on—would be essential to any effort to redress disparities in employment, housing, education, and even mass incarceration. Such policies would have to be universal partly because you cannot generate political will to address such problems only for black Americans. We are just thirteen percent of the total U.S. population. Moreover, blacks are not even the largest “minority” group in the U.S. at this point.

This is the most perplexing thing about reparations. Pointing to racial discrimination in the New Deal, some advocates of reparations have asserted that blacks can never benefit fully from universal programs because America is just too racist. These people likewise contend that Reaganism and Trumpism only affirm the rightness of this claim, since Reaganism and Trumpism make plain that whites are so racist they would happily vote to eliminate the very welfare programs they benefit from just to ensure that blacks do not receive a disproportionately large share of state largess.

To my thinking, this is a better case against, rather than for, reparations. If whites are, in fact, so committed to anti-blackness that they would destroy a system they benefit from just to keep blacks from receiving relatively more of the very same benefits, then no one should expect whites to support black reparations—an unambiguous wealth transfer from whites to African Americans. Frankly, I do not expect tens of millions of whites or any other so-called racial group to be motivated by altruism. And yet those of us who insist that the path to racial justice necessitates a universal approach to nurture white buy-in are the ones who are purportedly naïve about white people.

To reiterate, I am not suggesting for a moment that universal programs absent anti-discrimination policies would eliminate disparities. In fact, I have consistently insisted on the enduring necessity of anti-discrimination policies, which is frankly one reason I held my nose and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I knew what a Trump presidency would mean for the Supreme Court and, by extension, the future of affirmative action and other anti-discrimination initiatives. My point is simply that anti-discrimination laws and initiatives absent a political program that seeks to directly address the economic sources of inequality that impact all Americans cannot end black precarity. The limitations of a singular focus on anti-discrimination policies as the fix have less to do with implicit bias (even as my own life experience tells me this is one factor) than structural economic issues that necessitate universal rather than targeted remedies.

Universal programs are only necessary, though, if the goal is to redress high rates of poverty, unemployment, welfare recipiency, and incarceration among black people. These are issues that I would really like to address. By contrast, if the goal is just to end the so-called racial wealth gap, we could do that mostly by growing the ranks of black millionaires and billionaires. After all, most of the racial wealth gap is between the richest ten percent of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. If you operate with a category called “racial wealth,” then what happens is that all those white billionaires skew upward the total amount of wealth “white people” possess. If blacks accounted for thirteen percent of American billionaires—instead of about one hundredth of one percent—then the so-called racial wealth gap would be largely eliminated. People should reflect on the implications, though, and consider whether this is the vision of social or racial justice they really want. From my vantage point, diversifying the ranks of the nation’s fabulous oligarchs is not justice—racial or otherwise.

6. For a global audience, how should we understand Black-led movements in the U.S.?

This is a uniquely thought-provoking question because I tend not to think in constructs like “black-led movements.” The meaning of “black-led” and “movements” matters so much for a question like this.

I will begin by saying something that should be obvious to all. The great political movements like abolitionism and the Civil Rights Movement would not have happened if black Americans had not organized social, civic, and political groups advancing the cause of antislavery and black equality. The issue is that had Free People of Color accepted slavery and discrimination as the natural order of things, there would be no compelling case that slavery denied fundamentally equal human beings their so-called natural rights. Likewise, if blacks had simply accepted the imposition of second-class citizenship in the post-emancipation era, then there would be no basis for dismantling Jim Crow and advancing black civil rights.

As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Blacks had to first demand equality if they hoped to achieve it.

But the fact of the matter is that the demand, by itself, is not enough.

Most of us born after the 1960s tend to see the Civil Rights Movement as a mix of televised demands articulated by presentable if not stylish black men and women, punctuated by random acts of dignified defiance. In the popular imagination, all these public declarations of resistance are bathed in the purifying waters of righteous moralism in part because too many of us see this political movement as a “speaking truth to power” project that afforded activists opportunities to “make their voices heard.” The problem with the collective memory, though, is that the realities were far more complicated.

Obviously, the crucial work of organizing and what went into that would not have been televised. What is also lost on most of us, though, is that civil rights leaders tailored their public demands for equal accommodations, voting rights, workplace anti-discrimination legislation, fair housing legislation, and so on to their particular contexts—national, international, and local. And this is the point to stress because the scope of civil rights or racial justice, or whatever you want to call it, is contingent.

Simply put, the sensibilities that inform black American politics at any given point in time are not uniquely black; rather, they reflect the unique zeitgeist of each moment.

As I have already alluded to, what black Americans might conceive of as the struggle for equality looks very different during the New Deal and World War II, or during the Keynesian Consensus and the Cold War under Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and even Nixon, or under neoliberalism from Reagan through Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. What I am getting at is that the parameters of the conceivable and the achievable are very different across these moments.

Because black Americans are captives of time just like every other human being, we are shaped by the same cultural and political sensibilities that shape our white compatriots in each distinct era.

This is why many blacks during the New Deal and World War II, bearing the imprint of New Deal industrial democracy, believed racial and class exploitation were inextricably linked. This conception translated to the view that “black American liberation” (to be anachronistic) might only come with the liberation of the American working-class.

As one should expect, black political sensibilities and ambitions post-Reagan reflect the Neoliberal Consensus. This is why many Americans today, across racial lines, imagine one can separate race from class—conceiving race and class as discrete identities that intersect, which means that one can somehow distill racial or gender issues from each other or from class. Like black American leftists of yesteryear, I tend to think of race, class, and gender not as identities but as categories that announce social relations. The historic work performed by race and gender in the U.S. is that they reify hierarchies that are organic to material power or capitalism. I should stress that I am not suggesting (nor have I ever) that a working-class political agenda would obviate the need for anti-discrimination policies. I am just making two narrow points here. First, gender and race have long been among the “naturalized” conceptual frames through which Americans view class inequalities, and this disposition is less the product of organic group affinities than the result of political prodding and nurturing. Second, since gender and race have long functioned to treat capitalist inequalities as products of nature or God, gender, race, and class are infused and thus not distillable as separate identities.

The notion that races represent distinct identities may not sound conservative to a lot of people reading this, but the commitment to seeing race as identity is itself an expression of the larger point that I am making—that racism and sexism do not insulate black Americans from the prevailing cultural and political winds, including the conservative ones, of their moment.

To amplify this point, I am going to remind readers that following the brutal murder of George Floyd—during a global pandemic coinciding with an election year in which the Democratic Party was trying to beat back broad support for “Medicare for All”—“support black business” became one of the dominant slogans and aims of racial justice. Activists and meme posters were not the only advocates for this vision. Corporate media, streaming services, and online retailers likewise endorsed this project. This particular vision of racial justice—influenced by the popularity of reparations—was an expression of liberals’, but also foundations’ and corporate America’s, acceptance of the view that closing the “racial wealth gap” should be the principal goal of racial justice.

As I said in response to a previous question, a vision of racial justice centered on growing black wealth by supporting black owned businesses is an intraracial trickle-down project. Why would we think that trickle-down is progressive when it is applied to black Americans? This is a “kinder, gentler” vision of Reaganism that, at best, treats the diversification of America’s oligarchy as racial justice. It is also worth stressing that this view only makes sense if one presumes that there is something called “the black interest,” encapsulated in “black identity,” that exists apart from class interests. Since the racial reckoning, I have asked nearly every white person I know—no joke—if they have been personally enriched by Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or the other 700+ white billionaires in America. I hope this does not surprise you, but with the exception of one big stockholder, every white person I have asked has told me that the existence of white billionaires has not enriched them personally. And yet, the more than forty million blacks in the United States are supposed to be enriched by supporting black businesses with the ultimate goal of growing the ranks of black millionaires and billionaires. This will definitely help the black millionaires and billionaires, but it will not do anything for the rest of us—just like our white compatriots.

I need to connect this to why frameworks like “black-led movements” are not usually the first conceptual lens I reach for. Years before the murder of George Floyd, Patrice Cullors and BLM had identified support for black business as a way to address the so-called racial wealth gap. Does BLM’s advocacy for this project make “support black business” a black-led movement rather than a corporate-backed movement? Does the fact that “support black business” had the stamp of approval from the three queer black women who founded BLM (a group that was on the right side of criminal justice reform) offset the implications of corporate America’s and centrist Democrats’ embrace of entrepreneurialism as an alternative to living wage policies? I am not suggesting that the leaders of BLM did not purport to want more black millionaires/billionaires and living wage policies. They did. As I see it, though, these are two antipodal goals. However, if one were interested in nurturing a brand, let’s say, it would have been obvious from the start which of the two would resonate with corporate America and the mainstream of the Democratic Party. I mean, how did the Democrats respond to the Sanders campaign?

If you believe that black Americans have been insulated from all proximate cultural and political influences except for those that can be characterized as “racism” and “sexism,” then you are going to see corporate and Democratic support for black entrepreneurial uplift as evidence of cooptation of a black-led movement. This is a view that I obviously reject. Instead, I see black Americans as human beings who are captives of time like everyone else, which leads me to the conclusion that black activists’ equation of entrepreneurialism with racial justice is evidence of neoliberalism’s sway over black American politics and culture.

Being alive to the humanity of black Americans in the way I sketch above helps all of us understand why the sensibilities that dominate black politics today are very different—and not necessarily better—than those that dominated black politics in the 1930s and 1940s. The goal posts are unquestionably different today, but this is not because “we” have been advancing forward on the same playing field since 1935. No, we are actually playing on a very different playing field today—one that is much better in some ways but worse in others.

I say all this because I think constructs like “black-led movements,” the “black freedom movement,” or the “black radical tradition” often strip black life and politics of complexity and, of course, contingency by imagining that our positionality as oppressed people insulates black Americans—like no other human beings, ever—from all proximate cultural, economic, and political influences except for racism and sexism.

The bottom line, though, is that the political gains black Americans have made have always been the product of contingent, utilitarian, cross-racial political coalitions or agreements. This is among the reasons the scope of blacks’ conceptions of both inequality and equality, how blacks conceive the obstacles confronting them, what black Americans perceive to be social justice, along with the terrain on which the fight for a just society can and will be fought, are different depending on when and where you are talking about. And then, of course, there is the matter of ideological and political differences among black Americans within each period.

There is no doubt as to the historic importance of groups like the NAACP, the National Urban League, the National Negro Congress, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, CORE, SCLC, SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and so on. These and other organizations absolutely shaped the Civil Rights Movement’s scope, strategies, and goals. Organizers educated and mobilized the masses to pursue particular policy ends. And this is leadership, right? Still, activists’ organizing campaigns and goals took place within parameters that were invariably beyond the control of black political leaders—be it the Crisis of the 1850s, the collapse of the second two-party system, secession, the Great Depression and the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, or the Neoliberal Consensus.

I guess what I am getting at is if one is looking to black Americans to lead this or any other nation out of the darkness into the light, one is attached to a messianic vision that is both dehumanizing and doomed to fail.

7. Is there a transhistorical Black movement that can be traced from anti-slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, to Black Power, and to Black Lives Matter?

The short answer is no. I think I covered the main points in my previous answer. So, I will just say the following.

It should be a given that black Americans disliked slavery and Jim Crow. It should be a given that black Americans dislike being discriminated against in the public sphere—in the labor market, in housing markets, at school, on the streets, in their cars, in shopping centers, et cetera. We can say, then, that across time, black Americans objected to and resisted myriad forms of exploitation and racial discrimination in myriad ways. The problem is that the forms of exploitation and discrimination are not the same. The mechanisms that made people slaves were not the same as those that made people sharecroppers under Jim Crow, which were different from the mechanisms that disadvantaged black American workers, renters, and homeowners in northern ghettoes during the first half of the twentieth century, which were different from the mechanisms that contribute to blacks’ overrepresentation among the poor, the unemployed, welfare recipients, and inmates today. I am sure readers will intuit that the fight against each of these injustices would also have to look different. But I need to stress that the role played by race in each of the above forms of discrimination was different as well. This reality draws attention to the need for a more complex understanding of these injustices and what the fight against them looked like and needs to look like today.

Here is an easy example of what I am talking about. In recent years, we have seen a push to link mass incarceration to slavery. Ava DuVernay’s documentary, 13^th, helped popularize the basic premise, but legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow whetted the appetite for these claims. A simple demographic reality, however, hints at the profound difference between slavery and mass incarceration. Whereas one hundred percent of antebellum chattel slaves were black, blacks comprise only about one-third of the inmate population today. Slavery was undeniably a system of racial domination. To be a chattel slave in the nineteenth century, one had to be of African descent, with the status of one’s mother sealing the deal. But slavery was first and foremost a system of economic exploitation. Slaves were not collectables, like living Pokémon cards or something. They were a captive workforce, which is to say they were laborers without rights. The point of slavery was to generate profit or wealth for slaveholders. It took some time and a lot of necessity for slaveholders, as well as the governments and intellectuals who loved them, to develop the explanation for why slaves were exceptions to liberalism. That explanation is, of course, race. However, it took no time for slaveholders to see the utility of a captive labor force in tobacco, sugar, cotton, or rice production.

By contrast, the point of mass incarceration is neither to dominate blacks nor to establish a captive labor force. As I indicated above, if racial domination were the goal, then the prison system is incarcerating far too many non-blacks. Likewise, in contrast to slavery, prison labor is not very important to the economy of the South or any other region in the United States. Yes, most inmates are compelled to work; however, most incarcerated workers are maintaining the prisons to defray the costs of incarceration and perhaps to add a layer of humiliation to inmates’ punishments. And while the employment for corrections officers and prison support staff can stimulate local economies, what political scientist Marie Gottschalk calls penal Keynesianism, only a tiny fraction of the inmate population is working to generate a profit, which is what chattel slaves did.

The prison system does serve a larger macroeconomic function, of course, but its function is very different from chattel slavery. As my friend Cedric Johnson has argued, the economic function of prisons is to warehouse surplus labor—the unemployed and underemployed. Race, at least as Americans would define it, is obviously not the mechanism for inclusion in this system. Technically, the mechanism is conviction of a crime, but the backdrop for crime, in most instances, is poverty.

What does this have to do with the problem of the notion of a transhistorical black freedom movement? Once more, the notion presumes that blacks across time and place are confronting the same struggle—racism or racial oppression—which translates into a shared political movement.

Given the race reductionist discourse around mass incarceration today, what I am going to say next will be hard for people today to believe, but in the 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority of black Americans and their black elected officials supported tough-on-crime policies. Surveys between the late 1980s and early 1990s found that something like eighty percent of blacks reported that punishments for criminals were not harsh enough. This tracked right along with whites. For reasons I will elaborate on shortly, lower-income blacks were more likely than upper-income blacks to claim support for tough-on-crime policies. It should not be surprising, then, that about two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the 1994 crime act.5

It was evident in real-time that the Clinton-era crime act was going to put more black men in prison. If nothing else, the language elected officials used when talking about criminals was highly racialized. At the time, both Republicans and Democrats regularly engaged in fearmongering about the immediate and long-term threats to civil society posed by superpredators and crack babies—frames that clearly connoted black people. Because hegemony transcends racial categories, even black Americans often talked about criminals and welfare recipients in racialized ways—echoing the then-bipartisan consensus about criminals.

But why did most black Americans support tough-on-crime policies? Well, the most straightforward reason is that blacks were overrepresented among both perpetrators and victims of violent crime and property theft. If I recall correctly, in 1990, blacks committed close to fifty percent of all murders in the U.S., while comprising just thirteen percent of the total population. To understand why blacks would have endorsed tough-on-crime policies, one must consider that African Americans were more than ninety percent of those killed by black murderers. The black property theft rates were also many times higher than white rates, and of course, since most crimes are opportunistic, most of the victims of black muggers, burglars, et cetera were themselves black.6

Was race driving this problem? No, poverty was. The high crime rates were especially devastating to black lower-income communities. Lower-income blacks were more likely to be victims of crime. And this is precisely why lower-income blacks were more likely than upper-income blacks to endorse tough-on-crime policies. Moreover, as studies by scholars like James Forman Jr. have demonstrated, the vast majority of black inmates in this period were poor, usually possessing little more than some semblance of a high school education—much like their white and Hispanic counterparts.

I want to be very clear about the point that I am making. Black Americans generally supported tough-on-crime policies despite knowing that such legislation would increase the number of blacks in the prison system because, at that time, few Americans of any race cared about the fate of convicted criminals. What is every bit as important to understanding this story, though, is that Clinton Democrats, taking their cues from Reagan Republicans, were crystal clear that they would offer no fixes to poverty—the ultimate source of most crime in this country. What New Democrats would do, however, is address a tragic symptom of poverty—violent crime and property theft—through draconian law enforcement policies.

Because, as I said in a previous answer, black Americans are people who are captives of time like everybody else, most of us understandably took the only path available to safe and stable communities, which, at that time, was tough-on-crime legislation.

I had previously mentioned that blacks even came to accept a racialized language of crime. What I was referring to is that by the late 1980s, most black Americans came to view crime and poverty through the lens of “underclass ideology” (though not by name), which was the dominant class-free racialized language to explain disparities. Constructs like superpredators, welfare queens, and crack babies were expressions of underclass ideology.

Although class appears in the compound word, underclass ideology explained material inequalities in expressly culturalist rather than economic terms. Within this frame, black poverty could be traced to a dysfunctional culture (that many believed had taken on a life of its own, impervious to external influence) characterized by violence, substance abuse, promiscuity, welfare dependency, disregard for education, and so on. The legacy costs of redlining, deindustrialization’s impact on the employment structure, the decline in the American union movement, and neoliberal public sector retrenchment were largely irrelevant to underclass-informed explanations of contemporary black crime and poverty. In fact, in the hands of Republicans and Clinton Democrats, the underclass framework helped justify both tough-on-crime policies and cuts to the public sector, which only exacerbated the effects of poverty.

As this class-free, expressly culturalist but fundamentally racialist frame became the only acceptable language available to explain disparities, African Americans embraced it, too. You can see this in black mass culture like the hood films of the 1990s; you can see the influence of underclass ideology in Obama’s speeches on race; and frankly, you can see the underclass frame narrowly applied to black men in bell hooks’s horrendous We Real Cool.

Even constructs like “black-on-black crime” or the “epidemic of black male violence”—both of which were commonly used by African Americans at the time—were also expressions of underclass ideology’s sway over black thought. Despite the fact that most crimes take place within racial groups, I have never heard anyone talk about “white-on-white crime” because no one—other than black nationalists, maybe—ever holds up white criminals as evidence of “white cultural pathologies.” And while one might argue that the crime disparities justify the conceptual contrast I point to above, the crime disparities largely track along with disparities in poverty—a fact obscured by this kind of racialist framing that treats “the black experience” as exceptional to capitalism. As I said previously, poverty is the strongest tie that binds inmates across racial lines. Of course, the fact that the U.S. Justice Department records inmates’ race but not their class background helps ensure this problem, while forcing researchers to use education as a proxy for class.

I want to add some personal texture to what I am laying out to help readers understand where I am coming from. I was a young man during the Clinton years. In fact, I entered the doctoral program in History at Columbia during Clinton’s first term. My dissertation, which was the basis for my first book, was a backdoor critique of underclass ideology. So, I was an outlier then, too. But what made me an outlier, then as well as now, is that I viewed the material inequalities that do indeed impact blacks disproportionately, but not exclusively, through a class lens rather than through the race-racism binary that I have termed “race reductionism.” Racism is real and consequential, so the effects of racism inform my analysis. But because class has been absent from liberals’ analytical tool chest for decades, white liberals and even many blacks and other non-whites who may or may not identify as liberals tend to explain the inequalities that cannot be explained by racism in terms of race—blacks’ alleged epigenetic cultural failings. As I said before, blacks are captives of time like everyone else.

So, what does all of this have to do with the notion of a transhistorical black freedom movement?

Well, Free People of Color in the Early Republic and in Antebellum America had a vested interest in ending slavery. As long as slavery remained legal anywhere in the nation, FPC were vulnerable. They or their loved ones could be and sometimes were kidnapped and sold into bondage. Racism was wed to slavery. After all, blacks’ alleged inherent inferiority, their subhumanity, was how slaveholders squared chattel slavery with liberalism. So, FPC correctly understood their fate to be linked with slaves. Slaves and Free People of Color fought slavery in complementary ways. Slaves ran away, sometimes with the assistance of Free People of Color. FPC formed and were active in abolitionist societies. Nearly 200,000 slaves and Free People of Color would also join the Union Army during the Civil War to do their part to end slavery.

All of this would appear to reveal a trans-class, black interest, right? I’m convinced. But does the solidarity of FPCs and slaves in the Early Republic and antebellum period reveal a transhistorical rather than contingent black interest?

Well, if you think of incarceration as the new Jim Crow or the continuation of slavery by another name, as is now common, then most black Americans in the 1980s and really through the early 2000s would be betraying their so-called racial group interest by endorsing policies that put more blacks, men in particular, in prison. In other words, they would be betraying their ancestors’ fight against bondage.

If you think about the different issues that informed black life in 1990 rather than 1790, then suggesting the above would be absurd. But how else can one interpret blacks’ support for the tough-on-crime policies if the interpretive lens we are to apply to black life insists on a transhistorical freedom movement? It seems to me you either must forget about the above, as most of us have, or focus instead on the small number of blacks who were “on the right side of history” at the time. For what it’s worth, I actually sat out the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections and cast a protest ballot in 2000 because I could not cosign Bill Clinton’s racialized war on poor people, which included New Democrats’ racist tough-on-crime rhetoric and policies. Of course, I was not channeling the spirit of the ancestors. I was in a privileged position, insofar as I only lived in a high-crime neighborhood for just one year of my twenties. So, my class position afforded me the privilege of standing on principle.

But, once more, I was an outlier. The righteous “black interest” from the late-1980s through Obama basically included tough-on-crime policies and, believe it or not, welfare reform. By contrast, the righteous “black interest” since Trump’s 2016 presidential victory has included police reform and reparations—a hypothetical welfare program from which only blacks can benefit, at least if reparations are anything but a catchall for targeted policies, at this point. These are nearly dead opposite expressions of the alleged “black interest,” which should beg the question: if there is a transhistorical “black interest,” which one of these two very different visions is it?

The contrast above jumps out at me because these two antipodal visions for doing right by black people are separated by just a decade, not a century. Again, you can go to Netflix, Prime Video, or YouTube and see expressions of Reaganism’s unambiguously reactionary sway over black thought about poverty, welfare, crime, and punishment from the 1990s through Obama in movies like Boyz in the Hood or Precious, Oprah’s discussions of black poverty on her talk show, standup by black comedians, or, once more, President Obama’s speeches on race. This does not require a deep dive, though it does require an understanding of the specific political context.

This very recent shift in black political sensibilities—from the focus on race (blacks’ alleged epigenetic cultural deficiencies) to racism (whites’ alleged epigenetic cultural deficiencies)—should lead to one reasonable conclusion: there is no such thing as a transhistorical or universal “black interest.” Unfortunately, those who insist that there is tend to ignore the often vast differences in perspectives among blacks about the sources of and fixes for real inequalities via exceptionalist narratives like “the black radical tradition.”

8. What do you think about using the Indian caste system as a framework to explain racial inequality in the United States, as Isabel Wilkerson does in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents? Can you also trace the historical trajectory of caste discourse in the U.S.?

This is a tough question for me since, like most Americans, I know very little about caste. I do think, though, that Americans’ collective ignorance of caste hints at both the appeal of and the problems revealed by caste’s return to American discourse on racial inequality.

Caste is an analogy. As an analogy, however, it is very unsatisfying. The way analogies normally work is that one deploys them to explain a concept or an item that is alien to one’s audience by comparing it (analogizing it) with a similar concept or item with which one’s audience is already familiar. For Americans, the caste-race analogy does the exact opposite. What I mean is that all American adults have, at minimum, an intuitive understanding of race. However, very few American adults have any understanding of caste, intuitive or otherwise. So, what I am saying is that “caste” seeks to explain a concept that Americans do, at least, kind of know by comparing it with a concept Americans are, generally speaking, utterly clueless about.

For those unfamiliar with American history, Isabel Wilkerson has helped resurrect the caste-race analogy. Caste was first ushered into the era of the modern social sciences by sociologist/anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, whose influential 1936 article, “Caste and Class,” would shape liberal discourse on race and inequality from World War II through the start of the Cold War.

Since caste had faded from collective memory, the first thing one should ask about its current sway is why, after all these years, caste as a vehicle for making sense of race came back into the popular conscience around 2020. I would suggest that caste’s current appeal is informed in no small part by the combination of Bernie Sanders’s left-leaning political insurgency’s challenge to Democrats’ decades-long commitment to Reaganism-lite and, of course, how liberals and the Democrats want us to interpret the election and re-election of Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024.

To help make sense of the above claim, it is useful to reflect on black sociologist Oliver Cox’s critique of caste’s analytical appeal in the 1940s. Cox argued that caste was a vision of “race relations,” meaning that it viewed the power dynamics in the Jim Crow South and America at large through groupist and culturalist conflict that was essentially uncoupled from capitalist exploitation.

Since this is for an international audience, I should say that among the striking or telling things about the southern Jim Crow regimes is that they did not just divest black Americans of citizenship rights. They also impacted southern whites. Jim Crow regimes stripped a lot of whites of the right to vote—poor whites, specifically. Chief among the aims of Jim Crow was to quash and then salt the earth that gave rise to the complicated but nonetheless interracial populist political insurgency, which had threatened the hegemony of the South’s planter and nascent industrial classes. Here, it is important to understand that the abolition of slavery did not end southern elites’ demand for a captive workforce. But to establish and maintain a labor force basically without rights in the post-emancipation South in a way that was vaguely compatible with the 13^th Amendment, southern elites had to disenfranchise nearly all blacks and as many as half of southern whites, depending on the state.

To be compatible with the 15^th Amendment (which granted black men the right to vote), disenfranchisement could not be formally racial. It required seemingly race-neutral mechanisms like literacy tests, grandfather clauses, property requirements, et cetera. This would necessarily impact poor whites. However, poor whites were not merely collateral damage in a war on African Americans. The scope of the people southern elites now needed to disenfranchise had to include poor whites, since they, along with southern blacks, were politically mobilized, unwilling victims of sharecropping and the crop lien system (a credit system that indebted landless farmers to plantation owners). The interracial nature of post-emancipation class exploitation is why de jure segregation (Jim Crow) was necessary to keep blacks and whites separate—to shame whites who fraternized, potentially politically, with blacks and to threaten with incarceration, violence, or murder blacks who associated with whites or just bucked the system in any other way.

Simply put, to secure the rightless labor southern agribusiness required to maintain profitability post-emancipation, the South’s ruling class had to separate and disenfranchise the system’s losers—blacks and poor whites.

As Cox argued, the “modern caste school of race relations” reimagined the dynamics driving southern life—and race in the U.S. more broadly—in a way that placed tribalism at the center while making economic exploitation a secondary or even peripheral concern. Cox, obviously, saw the economic issues as the primary impetus, with race functioning as an essential political component to stabilizing a regime centered on material exploitation. The “untouchable” status of blacks thus spilled over onto poor whites not by happenstance but as part of a larger project to establish a now somewhat interracial captive workforce.

In Cox’s day, caste gained traction during a moment in which the American working class was as well-organized and politically militant as it would ever be. Thanks in no small part to the Communist Party’s Popular Front, the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (the largest industrial union in America) commitment to organizing black workers, the broad (if unintended) implications of the National Labor Relations Act, President Roosevelt’s wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee, and the U.S.’s anti-Nazi propaganda, the working-class movement of the day posed budding and important challenges to racism.

As I said previously, black Americans in this time period and many of their white allies tended to view racial discrimination through the lens of class exploitation. Racism, within this frame, was a tool for employers and landlords to exploit all working people, irrespective of race, not just through dividing and conquering in labor disputes or strikes. Employers and landlords paid so-called racial inferiors (which then included a lot of people who we consider white today) lower wages for comparable work and charged them more for worse housing. Since racial tiering of this sort was then legal, the practices were unambiguous—often published for all to see, however they might interpret them. The winners in this system were not white people, per se. Indeed, racially tiered labor and housing markets cut into the earnings of white workers and homeowners insofar as the presence of alleged racial inferiors who commanded lower wages than whites for comparable work drove down whites’ wages just as the presence of so-called racial inferiors near or in “white neighborhoods” depressed white homeowners’ property values. This was the stuff of mutual interest for the farsighted, just as it was a basis for racial animus for the myopic.

None of this is to suggest that the union movement of the 1930s and 1940s was free of racism. Of course, it was marred by racism. How could it not have been, given the times? But leadership pushed workers to think in terms of class solidarity and to tolerate and respect people from backgrounds different from their own—be they northern European, Polish, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Mexican, or black. These sensibilities would inform the CIO’s Operation Dixie (1946), which was the union’s failed effort to organize workers in the South.

Once more, in Cox’s view, the caste school of race relations diminished the foundational role of political economy in establishing both race and racial animus. Cold War politics compounded the tendency that Cox criticized, since any suggestion that racism or racial discrimination were tied to capitalist exploitation smacked of Communism and was career suicide. So, as historian Leah Gordon has argued, social science research on race in America turned sharply away from Cox’s vision toward race relations frames that rooted tribalism in cultural and group psychology.

This is all to say that a version of what made caste attractive in Cox’s day is responsible for caste’s return today. The past ten years have revealed serious fissures and cracks in the Neoliberal Consensus. People across partisan lines are disillusioned with it partly because trickle-down failed to trickle very far. In many ways, Trumpism is the predictable, crassest expression of Reaganism. The racial language and scapegoating that one gets from Trump is basically unvarnished Reagan. Trump is also fulfilling Reagan’s dream of dismantling the Welfare State—a project that was beyond Reagan’s grasp thanks in part to the fact that neoliberalism had yet to become a consensus.

As I alluded to from the start, the bipartisan commitment to neoliberalism today is essential to understanding the resurgent appeal of the caste metaphor. Unfortunately, the Democrats have been complicit in myriad ways in the rise of Trumpism. NAFTA, signed into law by Bill Clinton, helped hollow out the once reliably Democratic Midwestern states. Clinton also signed into law the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (repealing the New Deal era Glass-Steagall Act), which helped set the stage for the subprime mortgage crisis. Obama’s Heritage Foundation-inspired Affordable Care Act threatened by design to bankrupt union healthcare funds. Worse yet, the nation’s first neoliberal black president opted to take a conservative approach to both mortgage relief and economic recovery, while stumping for more free trade legislation during the 2016 presidential race. Then there was Hillary Clinton, who ran a subpar campaign but also carried all of her husband’s baggage with her into Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Midwest while being further hobbled by decades of often irrational personal hatred of her.

That said, liberals and the Democrats’ dogmatic, wealthy-donors-paid-for commitment to Reaganism-lite expressed in all of the things I sketched above and more has compelled them to explain Trumpism in primordialist, tribalist language rather than the predictable outcome of a neoliberal order that offered socialism to rich people and social Darwinism to the rest of us. The building frustrations and rage, driven in part by the decades-long decline of the American middle class, had to go somewhere.

The Sanders insurgency was an expression of this disillusionment and anger that promised, at the very least, a more equitable form of capitalism akin to the New Deal. But the DNC largely rejected Sanders’s calls for a return to the public good model of governance that birthed the American middle class of lore and laid the foundation for the modern Civil Rights Movement. Instead, liberals and Democrats remained committed to an identity-based vision of a just society, wedded to an identity-based understanding of the roots of injustice.

As the Democrats see it, Trumpism is incontrovertible evidence of whites’ primordial commitment to white-skin privilege. Within this paradigm, racial identities may have been conjured hundreds of years ago by laws, practices, and ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, but at some point, these culturally constructed categories allegedly “took on a life of their own,” eventually becoming group “identities” via some fuzzy epigenetic-like process. If, of course, socially constructed groups metamorphosed into distinct, innate “identities” (as implied by notions of racial authenticity), then tribalist resentments become no less organic to who we are. This is why, for anti-racists like Robin DiAngelo, racism is the “original sin” that requires “decent white people” to spend most of their waking hours fighting the urge to assert their superiority over non-whites.

The racecraft I describe above has permitted Democrats and liberal thinkers to view Trumpism through the lens of primordialism. This is the insistence that fear of diversity, rather than economic resentments, catapulted Trump to the White House twice. If one has been paying attention to the past fifty years of American domestic politics, it is difficult to imagine how it is possible to divorce “fear of diversity” from “economic anxieties.” As I said previously, conservatives have long equated affirmative action, diversity, and DEI (all synonymous in the popular conscience) with quotas that displace allegedly deserving whites and now Asians in favor of allegedly undeserving, incompetent blacks and Hispanics. A version of the same issue applies to immigration, where American workers in residential construction, agriculture, and hospitality have to compete with highly exploitable undocumented and documented workers, even as liberals insist that “immigrants are only taking the jobs that Americans do not want” while adding to the richness and diversity of American culture. Similarly, talk of “the global economy” might be the stuff of cosmopolitanism for a stratum of elite, white-collar polyglots, but to American factory workers, it is the language of offshoring, foreclosures, divorce, and substance abuse.

The above is the context in which the caste metaphor is currently attractive.

I am by no means suggesting that caste is primordial. No systems are eternal or unchanging. But precisely because caste is a hierarchical system that is, crucially, alien to Americans because it is not indigenous to the United States, the willingness to turn to Indian caste to explain American race is an expression of a desire to attribute tribalist hierarchies to the nature of human psychology rather than contingent social relations rooted in political economy. Within this paradigm, the parameters of racial in-groups and out-groups are not the products of a dialectical feedback loop of shifting political threats and alliances that are forged by the fluid processes of capital accumulation. Instead, caste helps to buttress the view that clustering around “like” and against “unlike” is just human nature.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton attributed her use of the superpredator trope in the 1990s to her and other whites’ unrecognized implicit bias. As part of her “the devil made me racist” pitch, she said that “racism has been in our DNA going back probably millennia.” Since the U.S. was not even 250 years old then, the “our” in her formulation had to be referring to humans rather than Americans. Today, I could easily imagine HRC concluding this same formulation with “just look at what they have been doing in India for the last 3,000 years.”

Viewing caste through the lens of primordialism would be ahistorical, if not mystical. But if people were genuinely interested in understanding the historical underpinnings of race in the United States, they would not look to a hierarchical system developed on the other side of the planet to make sense of an ideology, race, that sought to square American slavery and genocidal conquest with liberalism. Nor would they turn to India’s caste system to find the roots of contemporary disparities in housing, employment, poverty, incarceration, and education in the U.S.

I am not suggesting that comparative analysis can tell us nothing about the systems and ideologies that are being compared. Still, if race is, in fact, socially constructed—the product of specific laws, practices, and customs—then the exploration of the vague points of similarity between Indian caste and American race cannot offer clearer insights about the work each framework performs in its respective land than what we might glean from detailed analyses of the particular contexts giving rise respectively to caste and race.

As a scholar of African American history, this is where I think Cox’s criticisms of the work performed by the caste analogy are worth reflecting on. I also cannot help but wonder about the implications for Indians of the push to collapse caste and race into one. Obviously, I do not believe this project augurs anything positive for black Americans. Your readers will have to determine whether it portends anything good for Dalits and other oppressed peoples in India.