Why the Rich Love Antiracism

It helps them stay rich

My book, Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism, will be out officially next week on May 13. You can read the introduction below, which I hope convinces you to read the rest. (If it does, use code SSJ on Verso’s website for 20% off the book anytime during the month of May. The code won’t work on their other books, though, so don’t think you can just get the three-volume Deutscher biography of Trotsky or whatever instead.)

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Introduction

One year, after several incidents of racial violence too gruesome even for white Americans to ignore, the nation experienced a profound crisis of consciousness over its long legacy of racism. Essays on the poisonous reach of white supremacy filled publications like the Nation and the New Republic; activists launched a flurry of new organizations and initiatives dedicated to fighting racial injustice. That year at its national convention, the Democratic Party enshrined its commitment to antiracism in its official platform. The issue was so pressing, the historian Peter J. Kellogg observed, that even in a bitterly divided Congress, “there seemed to be a wide, if far from universal, consensus that something should be done about racism.” It was 1948.

Every society-wide racial reckoning, so to speak, arises from its particular political and economic moment. At the end of the 1940s, as support for civil rights was beginning to build on a national scale, the United States had just concluded fighting in World War II and both political parties were competing fiercely for black voters in a closely watched presidential election. The public reckoning on race that ensued that decade was partly a matter of political pragmatism: At their convention, the Democrats adopted an official civil rights plank for the first time in a bid to attract a decisive share of black voters. And for the liberal intelligentsia of that era, Kellogg writes, the racial reckoning also presented an opportunity to resolve a serious moral conundrum. American liberals had been increasingly horrified by the similarities they observed between the Nazi atrocities in Europe and lynchings of blacks in the supposedly advanced US. Against the backdrop of World War II, the racial reckoning of the 1940s was at once an interparty contest for political dominance and a means to rehabilitate the concept of American democracy.

Nearly eighty years later, another national reckoning on race would commence a different kind of rehabilitative project.

The nationwide protests against police violence and racial inequality that exploded following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day of 2020 inaugurated a uniquely twenty-first-century racial reckoning. Though Floyd’s death was by no means the first police killing of an unarmed black man captured on video, nor the first to spark widespread protests, that summer, a record number of people in the US—between 15 to 26 million, according to the New York Times, participated in racial justice demonstrations. Public support for Black Lives Matter reached an all-time high, and politicians across the political spectrum, including notoriously law-and-order-inclined Republicans, vehemently condemned racism and the Minneapolis officers’ brutality. “Americans from coast to coast have been grieved and horrified by the killings of African American citizens: Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Breonna Taylor in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and George Floyd in Minneapolis,” Senator Mitch McConnell said in a statement a few days after Floyd’s death. “Our nation cannot deafen itself to the anger, pain, or frustration of black Americans.” For left-wing activists, the size and scale of the protests that engulfed the streets that summer suggested that the moment was the long-awaited catalyst of a society-wide transformative movement from below—the very movement that Occupy Wall Street and two Bernie Sanders campaigns had ultimately failed to ignite. “It’s official, the Movement for Black Lives is now the largest protest movement in US history!” the progressive advocacy group Working Families Party declared in a July fundraising dispatch. “People have been showing up for Black lives by the millions and it is already changing America.”

In a sense the group was right: The protests of 2020 and their aftermath would come to represent an inflection point in an ongoing transformation of the country. It wasn’t, however, America’s working families or even most black Americans who stood to gain from the moment, urgent and righteous as it seemed that summer. Instead, it was the ruling class that would emerge not only as a major sponsor of the racial reckoning but also as its primary beneficiary.

That year the richest and most powerful institutions and individuals in the US eagerly underwrote the demand for racial justice. According to an estimate by the consulting firm McKinsey, corporations and the financial sector together poured a staggering $340 billion into racial equity measures in the wake of Floyd’s death, ranging from grants for black entrepreneurs to investments in affordable housing. Between 2020 and 2021, the philanthropic sector funded racial justice initiatives to the tune of $23 billion—or approximately $20 billion more than they had spent on such projects over the prior nine years combined—with the Ford Foundation alone pledging $3 billion. Individual funders, too, rose to the occasion: Finance heiress Susan Sandler donated $200 million to racial justice organizations while philanthropist Mackenzie Scott, fresh from a lucrative divorce from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, committed nearly $587 million. “Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror,” Scott wrote in a statement. “People troubled by recent events can make new connections between privileges they’ve enjoyed and benefits they’ve taken for granted.”

What had compelled the rich to embrace antiracism with such fervor? No doubt many, like the demonstrators who flooded the streets that summer, were horrified by the brutal killings of George Floyd and other black Americans. But the ruling-class enthusiasm for antiracism in 2020 also served a broader purpose. If the racial reckoning of 1948 had occurred during a period of relative prosperity and a lingering sense of wartime unity, the twenty-first-century version had unfolded not only at a time of extreme and worsening economic inequality but also amid a profound economic crack-up that the rich were anxious to resolve. As author Nicole Aschoff has noted, “Capital’s ability to periodically present a new set of legitimating principles that facilitate the willing participation of society accounts for its remarkable longevity despite periodic bouts of deep crisis.” Selling Social Justice tells the story of how contemporary antiracism—understood as the commitment to eliminating racial disparities from all areas of American life—became a means for the rich to re-legitimize a floundering capitalist order in the twenty-first century.

For most of America’s past, it was racism—that is, the belief that distinct races exist and that some are superior to others—that had functioned as a practical and effective tool for economic and political elites to entrench their position at the top of a socioeconomic hierarchy. The myth of black racial inferiority, for instance, had served as an ideological justification for the use of slave labor in the antebellum South and then as a means for the planter class to reassert its dominance by disenfranchising newly emancipated blacks after Reconstruction. Employers throughout the better part of the next century likewise stoked racial prejudice to undercut or preempt working-class alliances by, for example, crafting ornate eugenicist taxonomies to sort workers of different ethnicities into different occupations or dangling the promise of jobs before unemployed blacks in order to use them as strikebreakers during labor disputes with unionized white workforces.

This history is now so shameful—and the civil rights movement that emerged to challenge racial inequality so venerated—that it has tended to overshadow another type of affinity that the rich have held for race. While plenty of reactionaries throughout the twentieth century continued to find ways to wield racist ideas and discriminatory practices to consolidate their wealth and power, by the end of World War II, overt white supremacy, Kellogg notes, “was no longer a publicly acceptable doctrine in the North.” Over the next decades, an increasing number of economic and political elites would distinguish themselves by promoting antiracism. In 1964, the same year that segregationist George Wallace ran for president, the mayor of Atlanta and the CEO of Coca-Cola hosted an integrated dinner honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and used their combined influence to persuade conservative white business leaders in the city to attend the event. By the end of the ’60s, the Ford Foundation had begun awarding its largest grants to civil rights groups like the NAACP and the National Urban League.

Shrewd politicians soon found more ways to invoke antiracism to their advantage. Though Richard Nixon had notoriously campaigned on the so-called Southern strategy—deploying coded, racially charged appeals to attract white Southern voters to the Republican Party—once in office, he threw his support behind affirmative action. In 1969, his administration initiated the Philadelphia Plan, an unprecedented program requiring federal contractors to hire black workers according to strict timelines. As historian Judith Stein has written, Nixon’s primary concern was driving down inflation, which his administration attributed to rising construction costs. They viewed forcing the integration of the predominantly white construction industry as a means of expanding the labor pool and pushing down high construction wages while simultaneously undermining the powerful building trades unions. The president, Stein writes, also “appreciated the possibilities of dividing civil rights groups and labor” at a time when the economy was in flux and employment was down, thereby fracturing the Democratic base.

But if Nixon’s support for affirmative action had been mostly a matter of political expedience, today the ruling-class penchant for antiracism has expanded into an aggressive ideological campaign to mystify and maintain the present economic order. The winners of the current regime—big business, wealthy philanthropists, and affluent professionals, among others— have advocated antiracism in total earnestness because the type of reorganization of society that such an ideology entails ultimately poses very little threat to their power or status. Contemporary capitalism, to put it another way, can happily accommodate and even endorse antiracism while also necessitating the continued exploitation of the vast majority of people on earth.

This is why, in 2020, corporate America immediately threw its considerable weight behind the pursuit of racial equity. These efforts were not, as some have suggested, merely a cynical “co-optation” of the protests but rather part of a much larger effort on the part of big business to secure its continued political dominance and circumvent government regulation. Likewise, employers that summer rushed to adopt a battery of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures not only as window dressing but more fundamentally as a way of surveilling and disciplining their workforces while also staving off union organizing. Meanwhile, Democratic Party leaders and liberal professionals in white-collar and creative fields doubled down on the notion of race as the country’s most significant and enduring dividing line and pushed a host of controversial ideas and regressive policies under the guise of ameliorating disparities, with the effect of displacing the question of class and exacerbating a decades-long working-class exodus from the party. And the right responded to the outpouring by launching its own sustained broadside against “wokeness” and “critical race theory,” fueling a highly charged partisan culture war that has served only as a toxic distraction from the continued economic pressure on all workers.

Today it’s not particularly difficult to understand the moral appeal of antiracism, which remains, at its very best, a belief system that asserts the full humanity and inherent worth of every person regardless of the racial identity ascribed to them and soundly rejects notions of biological racial difference that have been used to justify violence against certain groups or otherwise consign these groups to second-class citizenship. But the righteousness of the cause in the abstract has clouded the fact that, in practice, antiracism in the twenty-first century increasingly serves to stabilize the economic status quo and obfuscate class inequality, which is, ironically, not unlike the work that racism performed a century earlier. Despite its promise to conjure a more egalitarian world, antiracism has instead come to be a powerful legitimating ideology of a deeply unequal economic order.

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The whole thing officially goes on sale next Tuesday, May 13. If you want to preorder it now or buy it at any point during May, use code SSJ on Verso’s site for 20% off.