Building Solidarity: Class Politics or Identity Politics?
A conversation with anti-racist activist and author Tim Wise.
[This is a transcribed excerpt from the upcoming episode of Writer’s Voice with Francesca Rheannon, a weekly radio show & podcast featuring in-depth conversations with writers of all genres. We will air our interview with Tim Wise about his new book, Dispatches From The Race War. In this excerpt from that conversation, Wise says that the way to build solidarity between white and Black working class people runs through “all of the above”: class, race, and gender — and the shared interest deriving from those identities. The excerpt has been lightly edited for easier reading.]
“Whiteness and the expectations that come from whiteness are now responsible for killing white people.” — Tim Wise
FRANCESCA RHEANNON: There is often a point of contention and controversy on the Left: the relationship between caste and class in this country because, as you point out toward the end of Dispatches From The Race War — and Heather McGee has written a whole book on it — racism is bad for everybody. Well, maybe it’s not bad for the ruling class because they’re doing just fine: divide and conquer has meant the lowest rates of unionism and the largest amount of inequality of any country on Earth.
But it’s not as simple as to say, “Well, we have to focus on class because that’s the fundamental reason why we have racism.” Nor is it enough to say “we just have to focus on identity and racism,” because as you point out, if we’re going to build solidarity, there’s a whole lot of people out there: we need to bring everybody to the same place. So the question is: how do we build solidarity?
TIM WISE: I think the biggest mistake that the traditional class-focused Left, or what we could call the Neo-Marxist Left, the white Marxist Left, is the assumption that, if we can just point out people’s economic interest, and raise that class consciousness, suddenly white working people will naturally gravitate to a more progressive politics. There is literally nothing in the history of this country to suggest that that will work for a significant period of time.
The reason is precisely this notion of caste that Isabel Wilkerson and her new book by that name points out so clearly: what we really have is a society that is given to people called White, a symbolic reference point, a category, an A-team membership, that trumps — no pun intended — class status because it gives us a sense of psychological superiority, and even a sense of relative material well being. W.E.B. Du Bois called this the “psychological wage of whiteness” that allowed even struggling white people to say, “Well I might not have much but at least I’m not Black.”
And the problem for the class-focused Left, which thinks all we’ve got to do is talk about class and that will solve the problem (in my last book, Under The Affluence, I talk a lot about that and the top 1/10th and 1/10th of 1% — all that good stuff that Occupy talked about and all this stuff Bernie talks about etc; I agree with that analysis entirely), is that what they miss is, the more effective they are at showing, let’s say, working class and lower middle class white folks how vicious the class system is, the assumption is that recognition will lead to class solidarity with Black and Brown folks.
But the other possibility — and I think it’s a greater possibility — is that if I’m that working class white guy, I hear that and I go “well damn, that’s a game I’ll never win. Like, the revolution ain’t coming and that’s a lot of work. Like, they’re so powerful. Screw it, I’m just going to cut a side deal over here.” And when I say I’m going to cut a side deal, I’m going to forget class solidarity, I’m going to go over here and hoard my resources as a white person, as a man, as a heterosexual, as a Christian. Like, I’m going to cleave to the identities where I’m winning, rather than trying to get with others around an identity where we’re losing. And especially in this culture, where we place a high priority on winning, right? We’re a culture that likes to identify with the winning team, not the losing team.
And so, as a result, that’s why every time a college wins the Final Four NCAA basketball tournament, the applications at that school go through the roof the next year and not just from people who want to play ball — the team only has 12 guys, or 12 women, if it’s women’s college basketball — but it’s people that aren’t even athletes, like “Oh, now I want to go to that school.” So we like to identify with winners. And if I’m telling you that you’re a working class person getting your ass kicked in the class system, I’m basically calling you a loser and asking you to identify on the basis of your loserness. No thank you, not in this country! I’m going to go over here where I’m kicking somebody else’s ass.
And so, the reason we have to talk about race and gender and sexuality and all those things in the same breath as class is that you can’t do an end run around these areas. So I think the way that we stitch together solidarity, rather than trying to say “let’s use class to get solidarity,” is “no, let me talk to white people about how white people right now are suffering, and not just as workers. We can make that Neo Marxist argument and it’s true, but look, we’ve got white folks right now who are suffering from an opioid epidemic in small town white America, not just as workers, but as white people in small towns, as the people that they are. They are suffering because for the last 40 years we treated drugs like a crime problem and a moral problem rather than a health problem because it was those people — Black and Brown — who were being locked up. And so we didn’t invest in rehab and we didn’t invest in treatment, and as a result now little nephew Timmy John over here has got a fentanyl addiction and little Janey over here has got a heroin addiction.
So, we don’t have to just talk about people as workers, we can talk about them as the white folks in these small towns, who they are. We can talk about the fact that there are white families right now in this in this COVID-19 epidemic, who are burying their grandparents or burying their diabetic spouses or worried about the health of their immunosuppressed child. And the reason is because as soon as, on April 7 of this year, the New York Times andThe Washington Post ran front page stories about how COVID was disproportionately killing Black people, that very night Tucker Carlson goes on Fox News and changes direction. He had been saying how serious this thing was until that headline. That night he goes on television and says, “Well, maybe this isn’t such a big deal after all.” And three days later Donald Trump starts talking about we’ve got to open everything back up again, we can’t stay locked down, we’ve got to get the economy moving. That’s not a coincidence. As soon as it was shown who the disproportionate victims were, we threw caution to the wind.
Well, that hasn’t just affected Black folks, has it? That hasn’t just affected Brown folks. That’s killed some 100,00 white people as well. So we don’t have to just talk about how, as a worker, you’re being hurt. No, as whoever you are, however you identify yourself living in small town central PA, living in Nebraska, living in South Dakota, living wherever the hell it is you live as the white person you view yourself as, this is not healthy for you.
And I think that that approach, where we talk about the interest convergence between the needs of Black and Brown folks and the needs of white folks, not by going to a different identity, like class, but staying right where we are, “You think this is good for you? I’m telling you it’s not good for you in those white spaces that you occupy currently.” And it’s this uptick in white suicide, uptick in white opioid epidemic overdoses, uptick in white cirrhosis of the liver and heavy drinking — all of this stuff that’s been called “deaths of despair” among the white working class, non-college educated folks — the reason that’s happening to those groups of people at a disproportionate rate is because they were told, thanks to whiteness, that that stuff would never happen. That the jobs would never disappear. That as long as they worked hard, there would be a job for them. That their kids would be better off than they were.
Black folks knew that was a myth. Brown folks knew that that was a myth. White folks were able to believe it and, because we swallowed that line, now we are ill prepared for globalization, we are ill prepared for the loss of jobs. We are ill prepared for unaffordable health care that was supposed to be what happened to those other people, not us. So in effect, whiteness and the expectations that come from whiteness are now responsible for killing white people. I think if we would stay right there, we don’t have to dance around the issue. We can stay right there and potentially build solidarity.
