That Battle with Billionaires Has to Conquer Whiteness First
The white alliance makes the billionaire class, and progressives ought to talk about both
Bernie Sanders wants to solve economic problems without talking about their factors. He says billionaires should not exist, but he won’t say how billionaires exist. Sanders can’t solve economic problems if he’s silent about whiteness.
In whiteness, the billionaire class has a coconspirator. Looking at history, the scholar Joel Olson wrote, “the American racial order is a cross-class alliance between the dominant class and one section of the working class. This alliance confers privileges to its members, in exchange for which they guarantee the social stability necessary for the accumulation of capital.”
As Olson shows, the white alliance is a “peculiar collusion.” W.E.B. Du Bois said it pays “a public and psychological wage” to whites. It’s a payoff that allows white elites the freedom to be too big to fail.
That white alliance labors daily for its wage, and it’ll wage war for its wage. Everyone knows the white alliance was effective in Trump’s election. Recall that Ta-Nehisi Coates said, “Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker.”
