Kyriakides, C. (2016) Class and Race. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. 1–4. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Black radical theory and practice: Gender, race, and class
Socialism and Democracy, 2003
This essay is an analysis of Black feminist interventions into the Black radicalisms of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The focus is on certain strands of Black radicalism, especially the Black revolutionary nationalism which emerged in the United States in the mid-1960s through mid-l970s and a new Black radical formation of the early 21st century, The Black Radical Congress. The idea is to break open the race/class dialectic embedded in traditional Black radical theory and practice by utilizing a gender critique. Black radicalism is defined here as those philosophies and practices which articulate deep level social transformations in the lives of Black people, requiring the dismantling of systems of oppression. Nonetheless , this is not an easy space from which to argue for a gender, race, and class analysis, since from the outset, concern with "the race" and with white supremacy and capitalist economic exploitation has been the driving force behind Black radical theory and practice. My position is that "the race" and class must be understood in the context of complicated gender, race, and class scripts. Given such complexity, I focus here on: 1) Black revolutionary nationalism as an emancipatory strategy heavily articulated in the late l960s to mid-1970s, and how Black women interrogated this stance for its failure to include a critique of patriarchy; 2) the impact of some Black feminist interventions into Black radical theory and practice during the past three decades, and how these interventions have opened up our understanding of race and class; and 3) the emergence of the Black Radical Congress and the initial impact of radical Black feminism on its principles of unityand organizational practice, with implications for 21st Black freedom struggles in Africa America.* We must be very clear that the problems of people of African descent have never been simply the expression of racial practices. The complicated race/class/gender histories reflect the permutations and deep interconnections of these processes. These are complex social relations involving multiple sites of oppression, occurring in conjunctive, disjunctive, and contradictory ways to generate a system of race, color, gender, sexual, and class oppression (Brewer, 1993). It is within this conceptual frame of multiplicity that the continuation of Black exclusion, economic exploitation, and state violence must be understood. And the gender dimension is key. At the center of the global economy are women whose labor is used to further enrich a small economic elite but who also do the socially reproductive work of the world-cleaning, cooking, caring-unpaid labor and super exploitation that goes unnamed and unchecked. In its public expression, the female incorporation into the logic of transnational capital too often means the disruption of traditional women's informal economic sectors. As these are destroyed so are the interstices of communal life-communities with some degree of economic autonomy and social cohesion. So, too, is destroyed the spiritual and cultural glue of many black communities, the possibility for whole communities of African descent to survive and thrive. For Black men, this global division of labor frequently means deep economic marginalization, or being locked into the illegal economy the prison-industrial complex, where they make up half or more of the population. Significantly, patriarchal relations infuse the global economy. That is, it is male dominated. A small elite of male capitalists own most of the wealth of the planet. Mies (l986) calls this patriarchal capitalism. This is a racialist, capitalist, patriarchal dynamic. Moreover, these political economic and state realities are infused with cultural and ideological meanings. The discourses of inferiority, unworthiness, criminality are used to justify and rationalize deep levels of exploitation and inequality. These ideological and material processes are now being remade in the context of
American Philosophical Quarterly, 2023
The dispute about the role of class in understanding the life situations of people of color has tended to be overpolarized, between a class reductionism and an “it's only race” position. Class processes shape racial groups’ life situations. Race and class are also distinct axes of injustice; but class injustice informs racial injustice. Some aspects of racial injustice can be expressed only in concepts associated with class (e.g., material deprivation, inferior education). But other aspects of racial injustice or other harms, such as racial discrimination or stigma, are not reducible to class concepts and cannot be fully addressed through class-focused policies. Overall, any attempt to fully secure racial justice for a racial group will require a combination of race-focused and class-focused policies. Anti-racist outlooks often neglect or downplay either the normative or the explanatory significance of class, or both—for example, by overlooking or downplaying the dignitary harms...
Intersectionality, Identity, and the rIddle of class
In this essay I discuss a specific notion that has become particularly influential in framing the discussion of identity and identity politics: intersectionality. I show that the original formulation of that notion was crucially intertwined with debates on class and class politics. After shedding light on the "prehistory" of intersectionality in black feminism, I discuss the original formulations of the concept in the works of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins. A focus on the notion of "oppression" as well as on the tensions between "irreducibility" and "simultaneity" of systems of oppression in intersectional writings leads me to examine some of the pitfalls of identity politics today. An attempt to rethink the notion of class in the light of intersectionality closes the essay.
Theories of Radical Political Economy is an Independent Research Project, designed by Professor Floyd W. Hayes III and myself, in order to further elucidate the similarities and complexities of capitalism and racism through the scope of Critical Race Theory and alternative economic theory. This paper is written as a more intense examination of my previous paper, “The Economics of Racial Discrimination: A Brief Overview of the System of Racist Economics in “Post-Racial” America”, to explicate further research and developed theories on poverty, marginality, and their impact on the topic of “race”. In our study, Professor Hayes and I have drawn from various authors in political theory and political economy in the hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of how these topics relate to the many forms of invidious discrimination that non-whites face in the United States and abroad. Using Neo-Marxian analysis, we have focused primarily on the different socioeconomic trends that non-whites have been locked in to
Theses on Class Struggle and Identity Politics
Racism, sexism and other forms of oppression and discrimination predate capitalism. These forms of oppression have been incorporated, in various ways, into capitalist social relations and ideology. Racism and sexism, however, are not constitutive of capitalism. Despite the real subsumption of labour and alienation of social life in post-Fordist global capitalism, there is no racial capitalism and no patriarchal capitalism. Likewise, there is no black Marxism or socialist feminism. There is capitalism and there is opposition to capitalism. 2. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism makes use of anti-racism, anti-patriarchy and other forms of anti-oppression. Just as capitalism and racism can be two sides of the same coin, so can capitalism and anti-racism. Actually existing patriarchy and racism is used by the ruling capitalist elite to divide and control the masses. In contrast to theories of anti-racism and antipatriarchy, class analysis does not view class differences as the root of capitalist exploitation. Class society is the product of capitalist social relations and the capitalist mode of production. Class is therefore central to class analysis but not exclusive. The contemporary emphasis on identity, like culture, is a measure of the extent to which it is both useful and irrelevant to the circulation of capital. People who are serious about ending oppression are serious about ending class exploitation.