Two recent releases, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement by sociologist Hajar Yazdiha and After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle by political scientist Cedric Johnson, assess the nature of contemporary racial inequality in the United States and recent efforts to combat it (each emphasizing the current Black Lives Matter movement as a means to that end) while also identifying what they view as the primary roadblocks to eliminating inequality. Although it is clear that both authors maintain a steadfast intellectual commitment to ameliorating racial inequality and the policies that uphold those inequalities, they each bring to bear contrasting conceptual and theoretical frameworks in their diagnoses of their root causes today—differences that underscore the difficulty in cultivating the political solidarity (and power) needed to dismantle the very inequalities each rightfully laments.
James Baldwin famously stated, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The causes of racial inequality are complex, overdetermined, and, in many respects, difficult if not entirely impossible to identify. Across numerous domains—education, policing, housing, the workplace, and so forth—“race” continues to be predictive of unequal material outcomes; in other words, racial disparities are commonplace, despite the passage of myriad laws that sought to create a more racially egalitarian society. For Yazdiha, the reason for the persistence of racial inequality is our inability to reckon with the violent, oppressive history of “race” in the United States because of the perpetuation of a sanitized “collective memory” about the nation’s past. This sanitized memory downplays the United States’ settler-colonial and racist nation-building project (whose effects, Yazdiha argues, still reverberates throughout American politics today) while simultaneously embracing a framing of the United States as a “color-blind” post-racial society. Until we face our racist sins, Yazdiha contends, racial equality will remain little more than a pipe dream.
Thus, for Yazdiha, the road to racial equality begins with a critical assessment of this faulty collective memory, which leads many Americans—particularly white Americans—to believe that any efforts to address racial inequality are, at best, an affront to the nation’s purported egalitarian, color-blind ideals and, at worst, a form of so-called reverse racism, bettering the social position of racial minorities and other marginalized populations at the expense of white Americans. As Yazdiha convincingly argues, trying to construct an egalitarian political movement atop these egregious myths ultimately opens the door for reactionary forces to both dismiss these radical movements as threatening to the existing social order while also allowing them to position themselves as the true arbiters of the American ethos, which they claim means treating everyone precisely the same, regardless of previous injustices.
Yazdiha begins her analysis with the designation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a federal holiday—which was signed into law by conservative president Ronald Reagan in 1983—to demonstrate the Right’s co-optation of the public’s collective memory, distorting in the process the true nature of racial inequality while treating it as a blemish on the nation’s otherwise sterling record. Over the past four decades, Yazdiha argues, many political movements, such as those around LGBTQ rights, the prevalence of Islamophobia, and immigration reform, have relied on the collective memory of the civil rights movement and the fight for racial equality in staking their ideological positions. The ability to shape collective memory, however, is not shared evenly, with those who control what Yazdiha identifies as “systems of power” (which, she argues, comprises state institutions, media conglomerates, and the “white elite class”) acting as gatekeepers in its crafting. But although she concedes that those individuals who control those systems of power play an outsized role in shaping collective memory, we are, to her, all culpable for the failure to advance a proper collective memory of the country’s grossly unjust history and, as a result, persistent racial inequality.
Whereas Yazdiha’s diagnosis of racial inequality identifies discourse as the primary (if not the sole) conduit for change, Johnson emphatically underscores capitalism as the chief reason why racial equality remains so elusive. Writing during and in the wake of the 2020 protests, Johnson takes up the issue of police brutality to illustrate how and why persistent rampant racial inequality is ultimately a matter of political economy. The injustices wrought by despicable policing practices—and, indeed, most social and political injustices in the United States, according to Johnson—are rooted in a capitalist economy that prioritizes the rights of propertied classes, particularly those of wealthy propertied classes; fortifies those rights through all sorts of legal and economic manipulations that rob the public sector of the resources needed to create a more equitable society for all; and attempts to extinguish any threats to this arrangement.
In Johnson’s estimation, the exclusive focus on racial disparities—average (or even median) differences in wealth, educational attainment, or deaths at the hands of the police between white and black “racial groups”—both misses the ways in which capital renders all poor and working people disposable no matter their racial status and undermines attempts to build cross-racial solidarity that, he argues, is predicated on emphasizing commonality rather than difference. In crafting a race-first narrative, Johnson contends, Black Lives Matter (BLM) fails to grapple with the truly systemic nature of racism, which derives its power from a capitalist political economy that requires exploitation to reproduce itself and generates social inequality as a matter of course.
The solutions espoused by BLM, Johnson contends, underscore the misrecognition of the root causes of racial inequality. Since many associated with the movement typically eschew universalist programs as either color-blind or “class reductionist,” all that it can reasonably expect to achieve are tokenistic advances like diversity and inclusion efforts or further studies aimed at the feasibility of reparations, the latter of which he views as both quixotic and opportunistic. In essence, Johnson believes that the only way to materially improve the lives of Black people in America, whether that be in the realm of policing and mass incarceration or elsewhere, is to change the conditions that produce racial oppression in the first place, of which capitalism is the primary culprit.
Juxtaposing these texts highlights the authors’ contrasting political sensibilities. Although Johnson is explicit in his adherence to Marxism as a mode of analysis (which views capitalism as not simply an economic system but an “institutionalized social order,” to borrow the words of philosopher Nancy Fraser), Yazdiha’s work is shaped—as she goes to great lengths to show—by mainstream sociology, which is decidedly not Marxist. As such, she is, by her own admission, less focused on the particularities of specific historical events and instead identifies generalizability as her primary task as a sociologist. The differences produced by this approach are striking. Johnson engages in a deep examination of movement politics, focusing on places like Chicago and Baltimore where BLM has a relatively strong presence, whereas Yazdiha is less concerned about the nuances of this or that historical episode; for her, how we think about what happened is more important than what actually happened, insofar as collective memory is concerned.
Both authors close with a perfunctory discussion of some political solutions to the issues outlined throughout their respective texts. Although the reader might find some of the solutions unsatisfying, it is worth remembering that the task of social science is not necessarily to be prescriptive but instead to offer a lucid analysis of current social conditions and their manifold causes. To that end, the solutions they offer speak to why the texts are most valuable when put in conversation, rather than focusing simply on how they diverge theoretically and analytically.
Although Yazdiha concedes that she does not have faith that a better-educated populace will lead to a more accurate account of US history—evidenced by the fact that many members of what she terms the “white elite class” are highly educated while being retrograde politically—she nevertheless remains committed to the view that it is ignorance that undergirds reactionary politics. People may not necessarily do better when they know better, she admits, but they most certainly will not do better if they do not know better. If Yazdiha’s diagnosis of the issue is correct, racial inequality and our collective memory, then, can only be improved by changing attitudes, a position that hews closely to the social psychological understanding of racism.
Johnson, in contrast, proposes explicitly materialist solutions to racial inequality: labor organizing to curtail corporate power, mobilizing around the notion of the public (rather than private) good, and electing leaders who are committed to both ideas and can help concretize those positions through policy implementation. Only by disrupting capital, he argues, can racial disparities be mitigated.
In many respects, both are correct. Given that the status quo remains so taken for granted, and we live in a deeply depoliticized society, culture unfortunately is the primary vehicle by which politics is made legible for most people. Moreover, the prevalence of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields refer to as “racecraft” (Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, 2012)—the reflexive acceptance of “race” as a natural rather than ideological phenomenon—means that universal programs, regardless of their merits, will be easily dismissed as failing to deal with racial inequality effectively. Be that as it may, the fact remains that culture does not arise spontaneously but is instead an outgrowth of a given society’s predominant mode of production and reproduction; in a word, economics. Consequently, if we are to fashion a politics that can truly get at the core of racial inequality, we must understand the mutually constitutive nature of economics and culture. The Struggle for the People’s King and After Black Lives Matter are well suited for the task.
