When a Black Mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a Black woman to suppress a black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle. A further entailment of Parker’s view of his achievement is that history, for him, must remain narrow—a conduit for inspiration or therapy, for bequeathing legacies, or for purveying information or misinformation to the present—and not much more.

Warren readily concedes that Parker, though clearly knowing of them, had no obligation to broaden his narrative to include such entailments.

share their response to Joshua Clover and Nikhil Pal Singh's " Revelation's Edge", regarding No Politics but Class Politics. The essays that follow trace the ideological underpinnings of this steady retreat from contextualizing racial inequality within the broader political economy. Or, as Michaels puts it, “it tells everybody made rich by capitalism what they want to hear—that the only poverty they need to worry about is the poverty that’s an effect of racism.

They just happen to be completely compatible with the politics of the ruling class, who will concede to no longer discriminate against workers so long as they can continue exploiting them.Because people without wealth are denied jobs all the time, we just happen to describe this as competition.

She never accepted analytical categories that attributed political agency to abstractions like “the black community,” “white supremacy,” or even “capitalism,” and always grounded her arguments in the issues, concerns and understandings of the groups and tendencies she studied.

Conservatives who try to blame black crime on race and liberals who try to blame it on racism are both missing the point. Noticeably absent from this list is “wealth,” which, if you are committed to thinking of class as an identity, should be a problem. Their contribution is to try to gin it up into something more glamorous, hence, for example, the George Floyd Uprising, or more precisely, the effort to find in that uprising something they can’t really show was there.

In that case, the perfect is the enemy of the good: a little bit of progress is better than nothing.In the cultural sphere, a skirmish developed over the Disney remake of The Little Mermaid that was released in May 2023. But as we have seen, against all the stereotypes, on many issues workers’ consciousness runs ahead of other classes in society even at times of relative social peace. On the contrary, the nature of wage labour provides a basis for the expression of a very different politics. It’s also not really discrimination when an employer gives a job to someone whose wealthy family has provided them with a better education than you. This insight becomes important when considering the “race and class” rhetoric that is popular among many on the Left.