Rep. Hakeem Jeffries Is Black, but He Isn’t a Progressive
“Racism can’t be separated from capitalism” — Angela Davis
House Minority Leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has risen to national attention in 2023 as the new face of the Democratic Party after giving a captivating speech criticizing the bigotry and failures of the Republican Party.
Rep. Jeffries seems to be in a position to make a push as the leader of a younger more progressive Democratic Party, but I think he is neither truly progressive nor what the Democratic Party needs to fight for the everyday American.
Yes, Rep. Jeffries is more progressive than former Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and he has supported progressive measures on criminal justice reform, voting rights, and public housing. However, Rep. Jeffries, and moderate Democrats, seem to either accidentally or purposefully miss the forest for the trees when it comes to progressive politics.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Rep. Jeffries makes this statement summarizing the issue he and other moderate Democrats have with the true progressive wing of the party:
There’s a difference between progressive Democrats and hard-left democratic socialists
Black progressives do tend to tackle issues first and foremost with an understanding that systemic racism has been in the soil of America for over 400 years. Hard-left progressives tend to view the defining problem in America as one that is anchored in class.
Black progressive UCLA Professor Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw, a civil rights advocate and the creator of the term “intersectionality,” disagrees with Jeffries. Dr. Crenshaw argues that class, gender, and race are so intertwined in this country that you can’t address one without the other.
Dr. Crenshaw tells us that you can’t solve racism without solving for the built-in racist exploitation by capitalism in this country. In the same way, we can not solve issues revolving around the patriarchy until we solve how patriarchal gender norms and the exploitation of women's free labor at home is necessary for capitalism to survive.
Rep. Jeffries is correct that systemic racism is ingrained in the soil of America for over 400 years, but he fails to state why racism is so ingrained in America’s history. Racism provided an excuse to enslave and exploit an entire race to be used as a free source of labor to accumulate capital.
You can’t “tackle issues” around systematic racism without tackling capitalism. This is the core argument of a former political scientist professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Dr. Cedric Robinson, in his landmark book, Black Marxist.
Dr. Robinson, in the book, coined the term racial capitalism, which argues that capitalism isn’t just intertwined with racism, but capitalism can only function through a racial justification of the extraction of capital from marginalized groups. Dr. Robinson, like Dr. Crenshaw, agrees that you don't get capitalism without the exploitation of some marginalized community.
Without a socialist-class-based approach to the mass redistribution of wealth and opportunities that created the racial wealth gap, how do Rep. Jeffries and other moderate Democrats plan to address the racial inequalities in this country?
This is my issue with identity activists that still support capitalism. Yes, you may be able to create a couple of queer women of color CEOs, but you will never be able to create a capitalist system that doesn’t exploit the vast majority of LGBTQ people, women, and people of color.
The irony is that American racists understood that you can use socialist-based policies to generate wealth and a better quality of life for selected citizens. These racist policymakers purposefully blocked racial minorities, and specifically Black people, from reaping the benefits of these socialist-based policies.
The Homestead Act signed by President Lincoln was one of the most socialist pieces of legislation ever passed in the United States. The act gave 160 acres of federal land to any qualified homesteader who paid a cheap filing fee, built a home, planted at least 10 acres of crops, and remained on his or her claim for at least five years.
By the end of The Homestead Act in 1934, the American Government redistributed about 270 million acres worth of capital to American families for far less than market value.
About 93 million Americans today can trace their lineage to the Homestead Act. This means a 100-year-old capital redistribution policy directly created wealth for almost a third of Americans today. The Homestead Act created generational wealth by giving almost free capital to hundreds of thousands of primarily poor and working-class Americans; not by having them compete in the capitalistic market.
The problem with The Homestead Act was 1.6 million white families benefited from this act while less than 6,00 Black families did. Housing is a huge aspect of wealth in America and this discrimination illuminates the huge wealth differences that are present between Black and white families today. The authors of the Homestead Act knew that capital redistribution works to better the quality of life, and that is why they kept it away from Black Americans.
Another example of socialist policies working for select Americans is the GI Bill, which is probably the most effective and largest legislation for redistributing wealth in American history. By the time the GI Bill ended in 1956, nearly 8 million World War II veterans had received a college education or job training, and 4.3 million home loans worth $33 billion had been handed out.
The GI Bill purposely left out 1.2 million Black veterans. While white veterans used this tax-funded, socialist, redistributing bill to receive a college education, buy property in the suburbs, accumulate generational wealth — and ironically hate the same tax-funded policies that pulled them out of poverty — in the meantime, Black veterans were forced to suffer the consequences of war without any of the economic benefits.
American political scientist Ira Katznelson stated this about the impact of the discrimination against Black veterans in the GI Bill:
“no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the GI Bill
The Homestead Act and the GI Bill prove that socialist policies of mass wealth redistribution work. There’s nothing capitalistic about the federal government providing cheap housing, free education, and job training at the taxpayers' expense. Ironically, both these bills were the two biggest creations of wealth in white families and formed the middle class that we know today through this redistribution.
White families' wealth did not come from pulling themselves up by the bootstraps through the American Dream but through two of the biggest wealth redistribution policies in world history. The stain that will forever be on these two class-redefining bills is that they weren’t made for all demographics and purposefully left Americans behind.
The generational wealth that white Americans see today is a direct result of the socialist policies of the 40s and 50s. Workers had a higher share of their corporations' profits, and union strength was at its highest participation. White wealth in this country was created through cheap land, cheap education, cheaper housing, worker unions, and the consequences of slavery.
It is only a myth that white Americans have the wealth and opportunities they have today through their merits achieved under the competitiveness of capitalism. In reality, middle-class wealth was created by governmental redistribution.
So why is Rep. Jeffries asking Black Americans today to create their wealth under capitalism?
