On "Subjects of the Inner City"

Chapt 8 in REL, “Subjects of the Inner City”

David Fleming, going against W J. Wilson’s thesis in The Declining Significance of Race (1978), argues, on the basis of the example of Chicago, the most segregated city in the world, that it’s race, not class, which has the most significance, and not just for this situation, but all over the country (world?). Race trumps class, according to David Fleming.

What’s his evidence? He cites a negative example of racist whites who use class as a way of avoid or even deny the racial question by insisting that it’s not race; if a “negro” doctor wants to move in next door, fine, but keep out the trash, low income types from across the racial divide. Fleming claims that this shows that racist whites use class to disguise their racism.

But don’t those whites have a point?

Aren’t they telling the truth when they say that they don’t want to live next to poor people, no matter what the color?

I think that it has been thoroughly demonstrated, at least in the Marxist tradition, that class is the cause, yes, cause, of racism.  Before racism, i.e., before western contract with people of color, and certainly before the slave trade, before the scramble for Africa of the 1890’s, before western colonialism and subsequent economic imperialism, before that, there existed “racism” in the sense that the exact same hatreds towards and subhuman categorizations against, say, the Irish, as lazy, shiftless, promiscuous, criminal degenerates, known as the Irish, prevailed.

Slavery was of course especially pernicious in branding slaves as inferior and therefore deserving of their fate, aided and abetted by all the institutions which benefited from the massive profits, reinvested in industrial-ization, until a civil war had to be fought to put an end to a hideously immoral super-exploitation of hapless human beings, who just happened to be black. But then came Jim Crow and Apartheid (segregation).

Fleming seems to want more of the reforms necessary to wage a war, to use the language of such broad plans, against segregation, legally, financially, morally -- make it a national priority; it’s the only thing that will help.

Let’s all work for a racially integrated society, completely integrated; then, this other problem, concerning public housing will, if not go away, at least be ameliorated, even though, we will have to admit, this Anti-segregationist Marshal Plan, would further divide the working class, along racial lines, whites resenting this new affirmative action, as they always have, perhaps even inciting racism in some.

Another objection to the more-affirmative-action-in-low-income-housing is that liberalism is bankrupt. There’s literally no money for such projects or even the recognition of the need for them, In the present political climate, there is no way such funds would be released in this way (more than 10 years after this article was written). Not gonna happen. An Obama second term will be equally useless in this regard. Money is there, maybe, but its expenditure would require a radical reprioritization of national tax revenue. 

   

Fleming is also able to downplay the significance of class by reducing it to income, in the fashion of bourgeois sociology. But class is about who owns the economy versus the rest of us, who work for them, directly or indirectly, indirectly by such as David Fleming, who performs the service of attacking Wilson and hypostatizing the concept of racism as possessing more explanatory power than class, limiting our definition of the problem to a reformist solution only, requiring only more 60s-style liberalism.

No, racism is perpetuated by a capitalist economy with its winners and losers; it thrives on the divisions it opens up between workers (alongside other divisions on the basis of nationality, gender, and of course money).

I am reminded of Marx and Engels' observation (Manifesto, 1848) that there comes a time when capitalism fails and the capitalist class has to take care of workers (subsidized housing, food stamps, etc) instead of being taken care of by them. For Marx and Engels, this was evidence of the unfitness of the capitalist to rule; they cannot even manage successfully their own system.