post-racialism is in step with postwar liberalism’s tendency to treat racial inequities as if they exist in a world apart from the economic processes that generate them. Coates’s conceptualization of racism as the engine of history not only blinds him to this fact, but his commitment to racial ontology is every bit as conservative and counterproductive as the post-racialism he despises.

[...] if Coates merits recognition for introducing the ill effects of specific policies to a popular audience, his insistence that race is a force that operates independently from political economy leads him to the erroneous conclusion that modern liberalism’s failures are owed to a refusal to acknowledge that racism is a distinct evil that warrants its own solutions. Contrary to Coates’s characterization of US history, postwar liberalism was actually typified by a tendency to divorce race from class. Coates’s fundamental claim is, therefore, incorrect.

While it is safe to assume that most southern farm owners in the 1930s were racist, the fact that farm-owning proprietors generally opposed SSA coverage for farm laborers — black and white alike — as well as for themselves makes clear that their motives owed less to the “original sin of racism” than a desire to keep their labor costs down and retain control over the operation of their farms. To be sure, Jim Crow buttressed the system of debt peonage REED that made the sharecropping system a palatable alternative to slavery for planters. But the wholesale disfranchisement of African Americans that had undercut the Populist insurgency of the last decade of the nineteenth century facilitated the expansion of a sharecropping system that, unlike slavery, exploited both black and white farm laborers.

In the early 1960s, many civil rights leaders were clear that antidiscrimination policies alone were incapable of closing the economic divide separating blacks and whites. Though Coates claims that A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin — the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — gave up their demands for race-specific remedies to black poverty when confronted with the Johnson administration’s preference for class-oriented anti-poverty measures, Coates’s characterization actually misrepresents both sides. Simply put, the black organizers of 1963 rally identified social-democratic policies as essential to redressing racial disparities in employment, income, housing, and wealth, while the liberal white president opted for prescriptions that presumed the distinctiveness of black poverty and ignored the structural transformation of the economy. Indeed, even as Randolph declared his support for a fair employment practices act at the March on Washington, he stated plainly that antidiscrimination alone would do African Americans little good in the face of “profit-geared automation” that was destroying “the jobs of millions of workers black and white.” Randolph and Rustin thus identified public works, full-employment policies, and a minimum-wage hike as essential to
closing the racial economic gap. [...]

The correlation between economic inequality and both violent and nonviolent crime has been well documented. However, poverty and neoliberal retrenchment have contributed to mass incarceration in other ways that are often obscured by a tendency to focus on racial disparities alone. While racism certainly plays a role in sentencing disparities, according to political scientist Marie Gottschalk, a perpetrator’s class background appears to exert greater influence over incarceration rates than race. Incarceration disparities in states with comparatively poor white populations, for example, are less pronounced than in states with more affluent white populations. Likewise, racial disparities tend to be greater in states that reserve incarceration for individuals convicted of the most serious crimes, such as drug and violent offenses — the types of crimes that are more commonly committed by poor people and, by extension, blacks.16 Since African Americans are overrepresented among the poor, budget cuts to state public defenders’ offices further contribute to incarceration disparities. The decline in funding to state indigent legal services has led to a system in which 95 percent of criminal cases are settled by plea bargain. Finally, mass incarceration has functioned as a dystopian accommodation to many of the problems wrought by deindustrialization and public-sector retrenchment. Large prisons not only “house” the reserve army of unemployed and — thanks to the stigma of a felony conviction — unemployable workers, but jails and penitentiaries have become major employers, particularly in rural communities. Indeed, penal Keynesianism is the lifeblood of towns like Forrest City, AR , Susanville, CA , and Marion, IL .

[...] Obama’s election promised to harmonize political discourse on racial and economic inequality, as his presidential campaign and presidency would further legitimate underclass ideology’s project of racializing economic inequality via attribution of poverty to the dysfunctional culture of the minority poor themselves rather than political economy. [...] Obama would emphasize — albeit with quick nods to institutional racism and a soupçon of compassion — the impact of ghetto residents’ dysfunctional behavior on contemporary disparities as a pretext for stressing individual solutions to structural problems.

[...] The nations with which we have warred over the past few decades are, thus, in no position to pressure the US — indirectly or directly — to make restitution to African Americans. Because Coates’s ontological commitment to race can only permit a politics of moral pleading, the specific material and ideological issues that inform political decisions are inconsequential. The only details that matter to him are the grievance and the justness of the cause. Coates’s narrow focus on the righteousness of these cases ultimately allows him to insinuate parallels between them and the case for African American reparations in the absence of a material basis for comparison. And since reparations presumes that whites’ pathological commitment to white-skin privilege precludes political alliances — short lived or otherwise — based on mutual interest, Coates’s case for recompense has to center on special pleading.

[...] Coates’s commitment to racial ontology, however, precludes any serious attempt to either ground racism in the material world or to historicize liberal policy prescriptions beyond their failure to redress disparities. But if the endgame is to address the economic disadvantages that blacks face and, by extension, the attendant social problems that afflict lower-income black and brown communities disproportionately, it is difficult to see how the neoliberal consensus — which is antagonistic to the notion of government intervention for the public good — could engender targeted initiatives that benefit poor and working-class blacks rather than elites. Indeed, it is no coincidence that affirmative action’s focus shifted from material redress to diversity at the dawn of American neoliberalism. It is likewise no coincidence that in an era in which neoliberalism has become hegemonic, social justice has come to merge with entrepreneurialism — producing a “progressive” politics that not only casts charter schools, NGO s, and sundry internet startups as alternatives to state action, but lionizes black/brown businesspeople (including the occasional rap and R&B mogul) as the new generation of civil rights leaders.