The Race-Class Narrative and Eroding the Racist Right

A Review of Merge Left by Ian Haney López and Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl

by William Minter* and Prexy Nesbitt*

May 6, 2020

Still shell-shocked by the 2016 election and now nervously eyeing November, pundits, strategists, and ordinary voters have engaged in a protracted debate on whether Democrats should focus their energies on turning out the progressive base or instead reach out to the stereotypical “white working-class” Trump voter. Even those of us who argue that this dichotomy is misleading — that we must do both — continue to puzzle over the enduring solidity of the Trump base and question whether it can ever be eroded.

Decoded, this dichotomy parallels the perennial debate of race versus class. A particular question is why many white Trump supporters who do not benefit from far-right policies nevertheless seem to elevate their racial allegiance and resentments above their class interests (or what observers think are their class interests). This has long posed a stumbling block to multiracial, class-based organizing efforts.

Among progressives in the United States, there is growing consensus that organizers must overcome the false dilemma of race versus class. But few claim to know how to do this in practice. Two recent books provide new insights that may help organizers in sorting out what works from what is ineffective or even counterproductive.

López: Seeking a Race-Class Narrative

In Merge Left, Ian Haney López provides an evidence-based framework that takes us some way toward resolving this question. A law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, López is a leading expert on the law and construction of race. His book examines the political manipulation of coded racism in the Trump era and proposes a “race-class narrative” approach to neutralizing political racism and building cross-racial solidarity.

López has laid out the basic premises of his framework clearly in recent interviews such as this one in Vox in February and in earlier reports with Demos, previously covered in Organizing Upgrade.

Polling and focus groups allowed López to sort the voting public into three groups: 18% who are hardline supporters of far-right views, 23% who consistently support progressive views, and 59% who fall in between. He calls the latter group the “persuadables.” Unlike many analysts, however, López found that those in the middle were not “centrist,” but rather people holding contradictory views that became visible when they were presented with different messages in different contexts.

The three pillars of right-wing ideology, according to López, are views on race, class, and government. The right-wing base essentially believes that too much attention is paid to race and racial issues, and that whites are disadvantaged; that wealth comes from hard work, not unequal opportunity; and that government should get out of the way rather than enacting policies that create more opportunity for a larger share of the population and provide a safety net for those who fall.

This ideology, honed for more than half a century by powerful forces, has been consolidated by right-wing messaging and organizing in the age of Trump. It has extended its reach far beyond the small minority willing to support overt white racism. Indeed, it touches even minority Black and Latinx communities, some of whose members may also blame those left behind for their condition, respond to fears of others defined by nationality or religion, or oppose government spending for public goods.

Adults in the persuadable category, meanwhile, often hold contradictory views on race. A sizable majority agree with the notion that “focusing on race doesn’t fix anything and may even make things worse,” yet many of the same people also agree that “focusing on race is necessary to move forward toward greater equality.”

How can organizers reach the persuadables? In this context, the study’s message, tested out with multiple variants in wording, evokes race “when articulating an agenda to make life better for working people, whether white, Black or brown.”

Merge Left provides numerous illustrations, from focus groups and election campaigns, of how such messaging could be applied in practice. The bottom line, however, is that the best approach is one tailored to the community and individual being addressed. The messenger will only succeed if he or she is attentive to, and is perceived as attentive to, the specific realities of the listener. Accusing individuals of being racist is more likely to reinforce than to counter whatever racist ideology they may hold. An inclusive message communicates the realities of structural racism better than a personalized, explicit challenge.

This is true in both blue states and red states, despite the different manifestations of racism throughout the country. For Prexy, the race-class narrative resonates strongly with his personal experiences in more than 50 years of organizing, particularly in the racially divided context of his hometown, Chicago.

Prexy: Vignettes from Chicago on Race and Class

1. Chicago is very segregated, especially the West Side where I grew up. But it wasn’t always that way. I remember the “mayonnaise sandwich friend” that I had. He was a white boy from the South — Tennessee, I think. We both were third graders at Nathaniel Pope, the neighborhood elementary school.

We were in the park playing one day and I gave him part of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The next day he brought a sandwich to share with me, and he said it was a mayonnaise sandwich. I asked what was in it and he answered, “mayonnaise.”

We both ate greedily, one half each. His family moved from the block not long after. It was years later that I realized how poor, though generous, his white family had been.

2. A group of black policemen (and later policewomen) were students of my father’s at Crane Tech, a vocational school on Chicago’s West Side. They had progressive ideas and were influenced by the Black Panther Party youth whom many of them surveilled. These police were members of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL).

They had learned on the job that they weren’t there to protect lives but to protect capital. Working the streets during Chicago’s 1968 riots, they said, had taught them that the system and their supervisors cared only about protecting buildings, cars and trucks. Even the white shopkeepers were expendable. It was the banks, realty offices, and currency exchanges that mattered and needed protection.

3. In the 1970s I taught a class to white policemen at the Illinois Institute of Technology. To qualify for pay advances they had to take my course, “Sociology of the Black Man in America.” They were scared of the subject matter that I taught, especially when I quoted thoughts about policing that came from their black colleagues in the AAPL or from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, but over time they stopped popping their gum and listened to my words. It mattered to them that I could understand their jobs and was concerned about the quality of their lives. Even some of the most hostile of “Chicago’s Finest” sometimes stayed late, listening avidly to all that I said.

4. In the mid-1980s I was organizing day care centers, settlement houses, and other social service agencies for the United Auto Workers in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison. When we reached out to workers at the facilities we targeted, we would take some of our UAW members with us. During such outreach efforts, I regularly experienced serious hostility from white people (and sometimes from people of color, as well). This was especially true when I moved through the work sites alongside young white women, who like me were handing out union fliers and buttons. Fear disguised as hostility would be etched all over people’s faces, especially the faces of the men.

But as they heard my colleagues and I explain the better wages and health plans that we received as UAW unionized workers, their faces and body language relaxed, and they moved away from seeing my white union sisters as sluts and whores and me as “lynchable.”

Metzl: The cost of right-wing policies

Like Prexy’s “mayonnaise friend,” many whites, even today, are poor. And many, like the white patrolmen he taught, are steeped in a racist institutional culture. The same is true in red states and in rural areas around the country, but the ways in which racism and far-right policies are entrenched differ enormously by place in ways that are essential for organizers to understand.

Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness explores the state-level contexts in which white supporters of hard-right politicians themselves suffer the consequences of those politicians’ policies. A sociologist and psychiatrist at Vanderbilt Medical School in Nashville, Metzl highlights the effects of right-wing policies in Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas.

Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who first reported on rising mortality rates among white non-Hispanic Americans in a journal article in 2015, have just released their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. The book is valuable for its data and for its conclusion that the pharmaceutical and health care industries bear the primary responsibility.

Metzl’s study, while sounding a parallel political theme, is both more readable and more incisive in its political analysis. Along with statistical data, Metzl provides fascinating detail from focus groups and interviews in three deep red states.

He explores the debates around three sets of right-wing policies: lenient gun laws in Missouri, the refusal to expand Medicaid in Tennessee, and the assault on education and other public services in Kansas. He traces the deadly consequences of these policies, particularly for whites who continue to support the politicians responsible. And he draws out the implicit racial fear that leads some whites to accept such consequences in service of their ideology.

The issue most directly linked to white racial fear was gun violence. Yet Metzl shows that after weakening of gun controls in 2007, rates of suicides by firearm among non-Hispanic white males grew rapidly from under 15 per 100,000 in 2008 to more than 20 per 100,000 in 2015. Over the same period, the rates for non-white males remained at or a little over 5 per 100,000. Interviewing relatives and friends of those who died, including activists who work to prevent more suicides, Metzl found a strong ambivalence and reluctance to blame guns, which remain central to white rural identity.

In Tennessee, which unlike neighboring Kentucky failed to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, Metzl interviewed whites who would clearly have benefited from Medicaid expansion. Many in his focus groups echoed the ideology of taking responsibility for one’s health, raised concerns about cost, and expressed disdain for the “undeserving” others who, they believed, would have been the principal beneficiaries of Medicaid expansion.

In Kansas, which previously prided itself on its strong public education system, Metzl found pushback against right-wing Governor Sam Brownback’s experiment in cutting taxes and defunding public schools, transportation, and other public services. Brownback resigned before the end of his second term with one of highest disapproval ratings among all American governors. And in 2018, Republican candidate Kris Kobach was defeated by his Democratic rival Laura Kelly.

Metzl’s interviews in Kansas showed the often-contradictory views held by white conservatives, like the voter who was glad to get rid of Kobach but still declared himself a strong supporter of President Trump.

As the toll from covid-19 provides an x-ray of inequalities by race, class, and place, it is also revealing in real time the deadly effect of right-wing Republican policies. As the impact continues to mount in red states as well as blue, the toll will still be unequal by race and class. But whites who have supported the right-wing agenda will not be spared by the virus.

The contrast between governors and mayors who act to protect their population and those who do not will be inescapable. Despite efforts to divert the blame to foreigners and minorities, the virus will continue to expose the failures of the anti-government message and enhance the case for inclusive government responsibility. Metzl´s book is a compelling reminder of the state and local terrains for these battles.

Multifaceted Strategies

Any serious social change strategy, whether electoral or non-electoral, must be multifaceted. This is a lesson that the two of us absorbed from the leaders of Frelimo, the liberation front in Mozambique, with whom we first worked in the 1960s and 1970s. After independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambique endured a brutal internal war fueled by its white-minority neighbors and global far-right forces. Throughout these years, Frelimo leaders knew they had to both mobilize their supporters and neutralize, or even win over, those in the enemy camp who could be changed.

So it is, a half century later, in our own country. Clearly, it will not be easy to erode adherence to the coded racism that underlies current right-wing ideology. But the global covid-19 pandemic has made class and racial inequalities in the society more starkly visible, including to some who chose not to see them before. The lopsided risk profile of the epidemic — with disproportionate death rates among black, brown, and white people working in high-exposure service and manufacturing jobs — creates a potential, however fragile, for solidarity across racial lines. But communicating such a message to those who resist it will require messengers who can present an inclusive approach while at the same time not pandering to racial fear.

Note: Links to books in this review are to the new nonprofit http://bookshop.org, which provides support to local independent bookstores, as well as providing an affiliate option for others who want to promote books without reinforcing Amazon’s monopoly power. Disclosure: AfricaFocus Bulletin is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

• Prexy Nesbitt is a Presidential Fellow in Peace Studies at Chapman University. He has spent more than five decades as an educator, activist, and speaker on Africa, foreign policy, and racism, including leading educational tours over more than 40 years to Southern Africa and Latin America. From 1979–1983, he worked worldwide as the Program Director of the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism. His many teaching positions included 33 years at Chicago’s Columbia College.
• William Minter is the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin. He has been a writer, researcher, and activist since the mid-1960s, concentrating on African and global issues. He taught in Tanzania and Mozambique at the secondary school of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) in 1966–68 and 1974–76. He has worked with Africa News Service (now allafrica.com), with the Washington Office on Africa, and with other Africa-related groups.