Why the Black Elite Wants to Talk about Race instead of Class

Focusing on race makes rich black people the heroes of America’s story and costs them nothing. Focusing on class makes them part of the problem and threatens their economic privilege.

Adolph Reed provides two examples:

At Neoliberalism & Black Politics: A TBS Conversation With Adolph Reed, Part 1, he said,

‘I’ve been teaching mainly in the Ivy League for 35 years, and I’ve been watching this type coming down the conveyor belt on the assembly line. In fact, probably as early as ’83, I had a sister in my Black American thought class at Yale who was a graduating senior, it was a grad/undergrad class. I know her aunt, who is an old friend of mine, and an English professor, and I know her parents a little bit. We were talking one night, and she said something that just led me to remark without even thinking about it, “If I didn’t know better I would think that you’re saying that the whole point of the civil rights movement was [so] that people like you could come to Yale and then go to work at Morgan Stanley,” which is what she was going to do. She said, “Yes, absolutely.” Without thinking again, I said to her, “Well, I wish somebody had told Viola Liuzzo that’s what the movement was going to be about because she might have stayed home in Detroit and watched her children grow up instead of going to Selma and getting killed.”’

And at Obama: WTF? A Facebook Roundtable of the Left « Corey Robin, he said of Obama,

“I’d refrained from saying that he, as well as his various running dogs, haunt me as illustrations of the model type of Ivy League POC students I’ve been teaching for the last 30 years. That same mastery of performance of a cultivated, yet at the same time empty and pro forma intellectuality, [a] conviction that one’s career advancement literally embodies the victory of the civil rights movement, and that awe that [David] Bromwich notes of the rich and powerful.”

Recommended:

Inequality Is High Within the Black Community: Rich blacks are 1,382 times wealthier than poor blacks.

The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Upper Classes: The top decile disparities drive almost the entire racial wealth gap.

Related: Why the White Elite Wants to Talk about Race instead of Class