The race-class narrative

Last Friday I wrote about a Daily Kos report in which Ian Reifowitz discussed a bit of the book Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America by Ian Haney López. That post also mentioned how Elizabeth Warren, candidate for president, has been incorporating what the book talks about.

Reifowitz has now posted a more thorough discussion of the book and asked the author a few questions.

A big question in progressive politics is how to balance discussions of race? Talk about race and racism and turn off whites? Or don’t talk about it and turn off people of color? López says the answer is to talk about the race-class narrative. Conservative politicians, certainly the nasty guy and going back to at least Ronald Reagan,

have used racially divisive language to pit white Americans against Americans of color and exploit those divisions to win power and implement policies that benefit the economic elites.

That summary is by Reifowitz. After several decades of this we’re well aware that policies that benefit the economic elites do not benefit the middle class, the working class, nor the poor.

López did the research to find out what messages test best, the same way the conservatives test their messages. He teamed up with the AFL-CIO union. They provided a way to test the messages and they very much wanted a well tested strategy for upcoming elections.

López from the interview:

We took two simultaneous approaches. First, we studied the messages that Trump and other members of the GOP exploit, copying their language so that we could test it in focus groups and polling. The aim was to figure out who was supporting the message, but also to understand the underlying structure. That is, to get below the words to figure out the storyline the right consistently promotes. Here it is, stripped of all code: 1. Fear and resent people of color. 2. Hate government because it coddles people of color and refuses to control them. 3. Trust in the marketplace.

Again, this is stripped of code. In real life, the message looks something like this: too many people are abusing welfare and committing crimes. But liberals and Democrats want to increase welfare spending and open our borders. We need to put hard-working Americans first, making sure our leaders cut taxes and get government out of the way so the economy booms for everyone.

Second, we used interviews with activists from labor as well as racial justice movements to understand how progressives are already talking about the relationship between racial justice and economic fairness. Then we explored how that messaging works in focus groups, and drew on the results to craft our own race-class messages. Finally, we tested our insurgent messages in national polling, comparing them to the right’s racial fear message, as well as to the standard Democratic responses.

And López from the book’s summary:

(1) The Right’s principal political strategy is to exploit coded racism as a divide-and-conquer weapon.

(2) The Left can unite and build by calling out intentional racial division and urging every racial group to join together to demand that government work for all of us.

(3) All working families, white families included, will be economically better off if a large voting majority believes in cross-racial solidarity and rejects messages of racial menace. This would facilitate the sorts of wave elections that can get government back on the side of working families rather than giant corporations.

(4) State violence against communities of color will not drastically diminish until people stop electing politicians who promise to punish supposedly threatening and undeserving people of color. Electing leaders loyal to a multiracial movement that emphasizes our shared humanity may provide the best chance to shift government from persecuting to helping communities of color.

Reifowitz for the close:

My hope would be that, in the long run, if we could get the message around which the race-class narrative is built to really sink in, it might serve to defang the right-wing message of racial fear by preparing people, in particular whites obviously, for what’s coming, to inoculate them against the right-wing message to the point where they know it’s not only false, but also that it plays them for the fool. That way, when voters hear the fear-mongering from someone like Trump, it will not only be unhelpful to the Republicans, but will actually engender resentment—among some voters at least—who will be fully aware of the motivation behind that kind of message. That is, I believe, López’s goal.