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A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics

A must read.

“The text’s principal argument is that inequalities in most areas of American life, from traffic patterns to the delivery of health care, are an outcome of ‘historic and systemic racism’.

The book is organized around four themes: 

1) a retelling of the story of race, demonstrating how it emerged as an elite discourse to justify restricting equality and liberty to the few; 

2) an exploration of how mass resistance, particularly against slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow, expanded the ideas of liberty and equality in order to make them truly universal; 

3) an examination of the relationship between racial inequality and class inequality, with special attention to how a narrow focus on racial inequality obscures how class exploitation works to produce and reproduce racial inequality; 

and 4) how identity politics is a form of class politics that operates with equal perniciousness on the Right and the Left.

Malik points out that identitarians on the Right and the Left share a common hostility to the working class and ‘radical forms of universalism’.”

The class politics of Race



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