It’s easy for rightwing populists and their journalistic supporters to portray trickle-down campaigns for social justice as elitist and snobby and irrelevant to ordinary people.

They ignored that Clinton was a quintessential corporate Democrat, a multimillionaire who took huge fees from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms, and, yes, she was a unabashed foreign policy hawk, who boasted of her friendship with Henry Kissinger, who, some have suggested, should be prosecuted for war crimes. No Politics but Class Politics gathers together Reed and Michaels’s recent essays on inequality, along with a newly commissioned interview with the authors and an illuminating foreword by Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger. No less than Negroes are they denied adequate income, decent housing, quality education, sufficient health care and security. All this makes crystal clear why proponents of race-reductionist politics are so unmoved by criticism based on effectiveness for generating a popular politics or for winning egalitarian reforms at all.Adam Theron-Lee Rensch is the author of the Field Notes book No Home for You Here: A Memoir of Class and Culture (London: Reaktion/Brooklyn Rail, 2020). Today, progressives regularly devote themselves to identifying high-profile representatives of the oppressed (whether in politics and pop culture, or in sport and in arts) and championing their achievements, in the expectation that diversity will trickle down to ordinary people.

And while there are undoubtedly widely shared experiences that emerge from poverty, it’s unclear why anyone would want to celebrate these as an identity. I’ve long suspected that, to a certain strain of race-conscious or antiracist discourse, historical exploration in popular culture was less important than the propagation of tales of inspiration and uplift. Both positions treated white poverty as a function of identity, which meant both were compatible with doing nothing to make the lives of those people in poverty any better. Rather, it is to expose the broader hypocrisy and commitment to essentialism that these discourses on identity are based upon.Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. It is a politics geared toward bending ears of and currying favor from elements of the ruling class and their gatekeeping minions. It’s importantly true that racism and sexism have played the central role in selecting the victims of American inequality, but it’s also true and just as important that they have not played the same role in creating the inequality itself. This raises critical questions about the role of the Black elite in the continuing freedom struggle – and about what side are they on.