INSPIRING (IM)POSSIBLE SOLIDARITY: RESHAPING RELATIONS OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER

Discussing white supremacy, two African American women scholars have emphasized fundamental distinctions between race and class that are often overlooked. Historian Barbara Fields notes that “Not all white people have the same power and not all white people are in the same class position.” Along the same lines, African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out that “racism in the United States has never been just about abusing Black and Brown people just for the sake of doing so. It has always been a means by which the most powerful white men in the country have justified their rule, made their money, and kept the rest of us at bay.”

Following these trains of thought, a distinction needs to be made between privilege and power in the struggle for liberation. Under the conditions of white supremacist racism, all white people have privilege, whether they realize it or not. Racial privilege conveys many advantages in the dominant system; it can provide substantial benefits, and it is always systemic, which means that one can be privileged without feeling privileged. The same could be said for gender privilege.

Nevertheless, systemic privilege does not always translate into power, which is also systemic. Even though all white people benefit in some ways from white racial privilege, they do not all have the same power. An example from the world of labor exemplifies this and adds an understanding of class often missing in the analysis of power: White warehouse workers enjoy white privilege compared to BIPOC warehouse workers, but they do not have the same power—economic, political, or cultural—as white warehouse managers or white warehouse owners, let alone Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

This insight tends to come as a rude awakening to many white working people, but it is even more unsettling for white professionals, white academics, and white religious leaders who enjoy a great deal of white privilege and even some power, but whose power to truly impact the system is often embarrassingly small. This insight also tends to come as a surprise to many nonwhite communities, who—because they fail to distinguish between privilege and power—often overestimate what white people can do. The result is disappointment and frustration all around, deflating efforts to effect systemic change.

How might this impasse be addressed, and with it the damages caused by white supremacy and class exploitation? Worrying about the political and religious Right unified by racism, sexism, and nationalism has helped create some common concern. But this is not enough, not even when things take a turn for the worse as happened during the years of the Trump presidency, culminating in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes the importance of relations of labor and class when she talks about a “potential for solidarity” that has to do with the fact that “when one group of workers suffer oppression, it negatively affects all workers.” In other words, white supremacy not only hurts non-white workers, it hurts white workers as well. This brings us, according to Taylor, to a “material foundation for solidarity and unity within the working class.”

In other words, solidarity emerges in relation to the common pressures experienced by the working majority, the proverbial 99 percent who have to work for a living, which in the United States is the most diverse assemblage the world has ever seen. Without this material foundation of economic exploitation, compounded by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality, solidarity may not be an option. This is something I have explored in my own work as well, coining the notion of deep solidarity in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where a rudimentary understanding of class emerged again in the United States after long silence. In my forthcoming book, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity, I argue for solidarity based on a material distinction of power and privilege rather than on the typical moral appeals to well-meaning people.

The deep roots of solidarity in the lives of working people stand in striking contrast to a false sense of solidarity of the Right based on racism, sexism, and nationalism. While the solidarity of the Right protects the interests of the few (racism, for instance, creates a false sense of solidarity for white working people tricking them into believing that they have more in common with their white employers than with their non-white fellow workers), deep solidarity has the potential to serve the interests of the many.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor helpfully pushes the boundaries of progressive politics when she notes that the popular idea of white people becoming allies to Black people “doesn’t quite capture the degree to which Black and white workers are inextricably linked.” To be sure, this link exists whether people realize it or not, as it has to do with the structures of labor exploitation and not merely with personal experiences. In order to visualize these structures, a basic awareness of class as conflictual relationship of power (rather than a matter of stratification or difference) where the few exploit the many is required. This, in turn, deepens an awareness of oppression along the lines of race and gender, combining the various struggles for liberation.

Having addressed an often-overlooked lack of power that affects the working majority (which includes the so-called “middle class”), we can now take another look at privilege. Many progressives may be worried that talking about solidarity leads to erasing the differentials of privilege between BIPOC and white people and therefore to letting white people off the hook. Moreover, certain ideas of solidarity might neglect profound religious practices of confession of sin and repentance for white racial and male gendered privilege, which are key in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

To state it clearly, erasing the differences between BIPOC and white people—or between genders and sexualities—and letting people off the hook or becoming “color blind” is not how solidarity is built. Unlike solidarity on the right, deep solidarity is not promoting uniformity but actively embracing difference as a constructive element, with special attention to expanding the role that BIPOC and women are already playing (without imposing additional burdens). The role of those who enjoy white privilege (or heterosexual male privilege) needs special scrutiny, which takes us back to the distinction of privilege and power.

If privilege and power are distinct, confession and repentance are meaningless without an understanding of how repenting for unchecked privilege can translate into embracing liberative forms of power. Armed with a distinction of privilege and power, confession of sin and repentance take on deeper meaning: they can be practiced for instance where members of the white working majority break the deceptive bonds of white privilege and white supremacy by siding with the non-white working majority against the dominant power represented by the executive class. In the process, the power of solidarity is set free, and privilege can be addressed. The test will be that those whose privilege is transformed in these ways will be considered traitors who eventually cannot go home anymore.

The effectiveness of this kind of repentance is also reflected in the Jesus movement, which is not afraid to introduce divisions where false solidarity and fake peace rule (“Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Luke 12:51). The result is the creation of real solidarity and alternative power: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). The difference between the solidarity on the right (based on family and deceptive identity that benefits the few) and on the left (based on shared projects of liberation that benefit the many) could not be clearer. And this difference is profoundly theological, as the liberative God is envisioned in ways that are diametrically opposed to the dominant God.

Solidarity is not optional in the ever-growing tensions of the few against the many that mark our neoliberal capitalist reality, which not even those who mistakenly see themselves “in the middle” can escape. Deep solidarity cannot be built without deconstructing the deceptive solidarities of racism, sexism, nationalism, and conservative religion, which benefit from the confusion of privilege and power. Most importantly, deep solidarity not only appreciates differences along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion but thrives on them. What distinguishes the power of the many from the power of the few is that it is multifaceted and multidimensional.

The material foundations of solidarity—welding the many together as result of the exploitation by the few—create the conditions for the subversion of dominant power and the related transformation of privilege. Liberative power emerges when multiracial solidarity beats the privilege of monoracial monotony, multigendered solidarity can no longer be matched by monogendered monarchies, and multireligious solidarity is more inspiring than monoreligious monoculture.