Rethinking Race and Class in the Age of Advanced Marginality

Abstract

This paper seeks to deconstruct the use of “class” as a conceptual category in scholarship that focuses on the intersections of race and class to: 1) identify the political projects inhered in these conceptualizations and 2) offer clarity on “class” as a location in the capitalist mode of production with specific political economic implications. Specifically, I want to answer the following questions: How do scholarly analyses of “class” reproduce an identity politics of rights and recognition? What are the implications of the deployment of class effectively as a cultural/identitarian category? How does the elision of the structural and material reality of class affect the Black population that falls outside of the “professional-managerial class”? Using the the work of Adolph Reed, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and Karl Marx as a theoretical frame, I will interrogate the work of Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor, Manning Marable, William Julius Wilson, Loïc Wacquant, and Cedric Johnson to identify the extent to which particular understandings of “class” tend to operate as cultural, as opposed to structural, categories in ways that reproduce “culture of poverty” narratives put forth by Oscar Lewis and reproduced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others throughout the 1970s. I argue that this “culturalization” of class lends to a politics that prioritizes “discrimination” over structural inequality and liberal notions of racial justice over redistribution. In other words, it is fundamental compatible with Neoliberal discourse of equity, inclusion, and individual responsibility.

Keywords: Political Economy, Class, Race