The Liberal Uses Of Race
Racism is about many things, but it isn’t about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race, they aren’t speaking in the genetic sense; what they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another.
The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden.
Class warfare was not really about the poor, it was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn’t healing that they have in mind.
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