Pressing Forward: Beware of the Boogeyman
BY RANN MILLER | AC JosepH Media
Beware of any politician, particularly a liberal politician, who articulates our social and economic problems as a product of class warfare, absent a proper analysis of race and how race is intertwined with class.
In other words, beware of Sen. Bernie Sanders.
He appeared on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast, where he discussed the necessity of prioritizing class-based issues over identity politics, code for race, which is to blame (in Sanders’ opinion) for the recent failures of the Democratic Party. Sanders shared the following thought, saying:
“You’re Black? You’re wonderful, you’re tremendous. You’re gay? You’re the greatest human being on Earth…You know, is every gay person brilliant and wonderful and great? No, of course not. Everybody’s a human being. So, the issue is ‘What you stand for?’ which gets you back to what we discussed earlier. Class politics, in the sense of ‘Which side are you on?’ Are you going to stand with working families? Are you going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage or not? Are you going to guarantee—fight to guarantee—healthcare to all people or not? Are you going to demand that the wealthiest people stop paying their fair share of taxes or not? Those are the issues, and no one cares what color you are, you know, what your gender is, etc., etc.”
There’s truth to what Sanders is saying.
The “right side” advocates for a living wage (and basic universal income), healthcare for all (not attached to one’s employment), and the wealthy paying more taxes (taxing their wealth as opposed to traditional income). These things are true. However, a strict class analysis to explain our current condition without including a solid analysis of race is a flawed and destructive argument, politically or otherwise.
Such a stance is intellectually ignorant, morally dishonest, and politically bankrupt.
It is intellectually ignorant because it shows a complete lack of understanding of American history as to how the White middle class, a racialized term, yet a group of voters that is the focus of liberals and conservatives alike, was manufactured off Black and Brown bodies, both domestically and internationally.
It is morally dishonest because the argument misleads voters by drawing them away from the core of the political issues in our country: anti-Black racism and whiteness as a result of racial capitalism.
It is politically bankrupt because a strictly class argument has absolutely no chance of winning in an election for liberals…because it’s the “argument” Trump voters use to justify the racism that actually had to do with their voting for Trump. They did so in 2016 and again in 2024.
Again, class and race have intertwined since the beginning of the body politic. While Sanders removes race from class issues, Black scholars have articulated otherwise.
In his book Caste, Class and Race, Oliver Cromwell Cox argued that racial injustice and class exploitation are part and parcel of capitalism. According to Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, Cox contended that economic exploitation was at the root of U.S. racial hierarchy and was responsible for structuring relations among the white ruling class, the white masses, and Black people as a racialized class of workers.
W.E.B. DuBois maintained that the conditions of African Americans were the result of both class exploitation and systemic racism. In his book Black Reconstruction, DuBois made the case that racism is the root of America’s unique working classes: the white laborer and Black laborer, arguing that the dynamic reinforced racial and class hierarchies.
Cox and DuBois are correct because their years of study and scholarship hold up. Not only that, but the argument they make is common sense. At the dawn of colonization, the mark of privilege in the New World wasn’t one’s lineage or bloodline, as in Europe. It was skin color, because only one with dark skin—an African —could be enslaved.
When European immigrants arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century, they became White and therefore were beneficiaries of what DuBois called the racial bribe: the deliberate and strategic method of the planter elite class to extend special privileges to poor Whites—particularly in the postbellum South—to drive a wedge between them and formerly enslaved Africans.
That bribe extends throughout the 20th century and into the twenty-first century. During enslavement, whites not part of the ruling class were able to make a living from enslavement where they could.
During Jim Crow, whites secured employment, housing, and schooling that were denied to Black people. By the turn of the century, African Americans were disproportionately imprisoned at the state and federal levels, and public schools served as the testing ground for disproportionate discipline.
All of these anti-Black racist public policies impact the economic outcomes of Black people, further cementing their economic exploitation in the free market and the government marketplace.
No one is claiming that race doesn’t function with class. Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) reminds us that the power of racism comes from capitalism. Again, race and class are inextricably linked together. So, to argue that you can have one without the other, in Sanders’ case, class without race, is foolish.
Any politician seeking to build a coalition of working-class people throughout the United States to win local, municipal, state, and federal elections cannot do so with a strictly class argument.
The argument must be class and race working in tandem, exposing that truth to voters and making them decide to fight white supremacy and whiteness at every turn or die.
Unfortunately, as DuBois shares in Chapter 16 of Black Reconstruction, death will likely come before liberation because no matter what you do, White people will never collectively choose everyone over themselves. They chose Donald Trump over everyone else. Elon Musk and DOGE over everyone else. They chose Project 2025 over everyone else. The anger they have is a result of Donald Trump and the Republican Party chose to include them in the destruction of the United States.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders chooses to ignore race in his analysis, which explains why his rallies will fail to translate into a viable political movement. Even if it did, he’ll go along with the establishment candidate just like he did previously. Because the job of the boogeyman is to scare you into the desired behavior.
Don’t be scared of the boogeyman.
Follow Us Today On:
Note from AC JosepH Media: If you like this story and others posted on Front Runner New Jersey.com, lend us a hand so we can keep producing articles like these for New Jersey and the world to see. Click on SUPPORT FRNJ and make a contribution that will go directly in making more stories like this available. Thank you for reading!
About Author
