Ransby: The white left needs to embrace black leadership

Powerful statement from this African-American studies professor highlighting that social justice cannot be reduced to identity politics and thereby denigrated. Just a small excerpt on that focus follows. Please read the entire article for some real wokeness.

"The white left needs to understand that this is what class struggle in the 21st century looks like. To deny that and reduce the protests to an 'identitarian' impulse is self-defeating to any serious left project for systemic change. Black poor and working-class people experience capitalism and white supremacy as intertwined: Police violence, targeted mass incarceration, and social and economic abandonment are linked. The left loses strength and credibility if it pretends that there is a colorblind class experience."

"Yet a sector of the white left remains in stubborn denial about the centrality of Black struggle and Black leadership to any successful and sustainable movement for radical change. There are two versions of this argument. One clings to the notion that so-called identity politics are divisive and that the left should focus on economic platforms that can unite the entire working class. The second is an updated version that argues that systemic racism did exist but with the end of de jure racism that all changed. Supporters of these arguments lump together all Black political voices as identitarian if they foreground the fight against racism. They ignore the Black left voices that have argued against narrow identity politics, bourgeois Black nationalism, mainstream integrationism, and class-biased representational politics. From the Combahee River Collective to the Black Radical Congress to many of today’s organizers, Black leftists, especially Black left feminists, have never pushed a classless race analysis, or a raceless or genderless class analysis."