Radicalizing The Whites

An Article for New Lines Magazine

Fred Hampton, chair of the Black Panther Party’s Illinois chapter, did not know he was about to die but he knew things were getting dangerous. In the months leading up to his 1969 murder at the hands of Chicago police, he often found himself surrounded by white street toughs who had migrated from the Jim Crow South, unemployed and unemployable, with slick-backed hair and denim jackets emblazoned with the Confederate flag. But these men, who called themselves the Young Patriots, were not there to menace Hampton. They were there to provide security.

This is the opening paragraph of my latest article for New Lines Magazine. It’s called “How Democrats can Win Back the White Working Class.” The article is about this, but also about something that I think is wrong with the left — not just the libs, but the left-of-center as a whole. We have abandoned class struggle in favor of an unsuccessful and divisive approach to racial justice. Not only has this approach failed to solve systemic racism, it has kept the left divided and weak for decades. If we want any chance at achieving power and making lives better, that approach must change.

Fred Hampton believed that racial and economic justice are the same fight. So did MLK JR. It’s no coincidence that both these men were killed shortly after they began to explicitly push this way of thinking. The FBI then used tactics of racial division to break up the movements they started. Those divides continue today, perpetuated not only by the right and by the establishment but also by well-meaning leftists who inadvertently advocate for a liberal solution to systemic racism. I won’t recap the article here, but if this sounds interesting — and if you want to know who the hell those Confederate-flag wearing street toughs were — you should read the article. I’m very, very happy with it.

I believe in things like universal healthcare, an overhaul of the entire justice system, and a 100% wealth tax on everything past $1,000,000,000 because I think they make life better for every single person in society, not just the oppressed. But the way a lot of racial justice initiatives are structured pits white people against Black people in a way that’s unnecessary and also completely dysfunctional. The choices are as follows: voluntarily give up your privilege and selflessly fight for racial justice, or hold onto your privilege and fight to keep it. This dichotomy allows for white saviors or white oppressors, but not interactions on an equal footing: the actual solution to this profoundly stupid categorization method for humans our ancestors made up.

We cannot fight to fix the past — the past is dead, buried, and nothing we could do today could even begin to erase the legacy of enslavement in this country (to use just one example). Enough of this longing for absolution; it does not exist, we will never have it. No one alive made the world the way it is, we are all in this together, we need to stop fighting to fix the wrongs of the past and start fighting to build a better future, together, all of us.

How do we do that? I talk about it a bit in the article, but we need to work today to level the playing field for generations not yet born. The first thing we need to do: federally funded primary and secondary schools. As things stand now, wealthy areas get well-kept schools with resources, small class sizes, and qualified teachers, while poor areas cannot afford any of these things. We’re trying to address this with affirmative action and doing away with SAT scores in college applications: symptoms of the problems, not the cause of it. Fix the schools. Fix the damn carceral system that rips Black families apart at appalling rates, fix drug policy, fix all the things that keep blighted areas blighted. Things don’t have to be like this! This inequality is unnecessary, it’s artificial, we have the resources to change it.

A huge thank you to Mike Giglio over at New Lines for pointing me in the direction of the Rainbow Coalition, something I’d never heard of but which was something I’d been looking for without knowing it, for years. My schedule these last few months has been packed, it was frankly irresponsible to take this project on, I did not have time for it and was catastrophically late every step of the way with it and I’m so glad that I got to write it, so happy that it exists. It’s really different from the things I’ve done before. It’s a leap I’ve wanted to make for a long time. It’s finished. It’s done. It’s here.