In a recent episode of The Jacobin Show, Toure Reed—one of my favorite scholars and comrades—highlights some of the limitations of using “structural racism” as a way to explain and address racial inequality in the United States. I highly recommend this episode and every other episode of The Jacobin Show, and that includes the critical segments from hosts Jen Pan and Ariella Thornill.
If I still used my Twitter account, I would ask for anyone’s thoughts about the concept of “racial interests.” As Reed notes in his interview, proponents of the structural racism framework tend to presume that races are groups of people who have the same material interests, and it is their “racial interests” that shapes how they interpret and respond to conflict regarding racism and racial inequality. For an example of a book that reinforces this belief, see the New York Times Bestseller White Fragility by Robin Diangelo.
While I get the appeal of claiming that racial interests exist, it’s also hard for me to accept the view that the victims of racism (or the perpetrators of racism) have the same interests because people with the same racial identification can have conflicting material interests. For example, if I worked for an African-American boss, we may have one clear similarity—that we have probably been the targets of racism at many points of our lives. However, it is also true that we have very different material interests—that I benefit from wage increases and they benefit from paying me as little as they can get away with. In a recent manuscript on COVID-19 with my comrade Deniz Uyan (who recently wrote a brilliant criticism of racialization for the Du Bois Review that can be found here), we make the same argument.
Therefore, I’m curious to know: What do you all think? Is this sound? Or are we all missing something?
Would someone (not me) try to rebut by saying, 'yes, but I offer an intersectional lens/analysis that puts class/material interest into the mix' (but that concludes that 'race' will trump 'class' on some sort of prima facie discrimination basis...?)...?