The Race-Class Narrative Project and The Challenge for Progressive Organizers
"It becomes very important that people deeply internalize a new way of seeing racism and social division."
In April of 2020, I interviewed Ian Haney López, a UC Berkeley law professor who studies the use of “strategic racism” within electoral politics. A few years before, Haney López served as a lead researcher within something called The Race-Class Narrative Project. Through thousands of interviews, the project proved the effectiveness of political messaging that names the use of racism as a divide-and-conquer tool of economic elites and clarifies that our greatest hope for change lies in solidarity across lines of racial difference. As Haney López said, this proved to be the “single most powerful political message available today,” more persuasive to both white people and people of color than class-only messaging, race-only messaging, or right-wing racial scapegoating itself.
Here is a messaging toolkit designed by leaders of the project when it was first carried out. In the years since, these tools have been implemented in multiple organizing efforts throughout the country. Some of the project leaders have even supported organizations in Palestine and Israel to develop similar tactics for building Palestinian-Jewish coalitions to challenge the occupation and strive for equal rights.
I myself recently shared the following example of a race-class message while on Ashanti Branch’s Taking off the Mask podcast:
“There is this class of corporate politicians that is trying to take away your healthcare and take away your social security and suppress your wages and suppress your unions, and all the while they’re telling you that the cause of your problems is Black protestors, is undocumented immigrants, is Muslims. We need to see who our real enemy is here and we need to come together to create the society that all of us need.”
Last month, I re-listened to the 50-minute conversation I had with Ian Haney López back in 2020 and was struck by the closing segment. In it, he spoke about the need for organizers not to simply see this “Race-Class Narrative” as a set of talking points, but to internalize this analysis on a deeply personal level.
He emphasized that each of us—no matter who we are, no matter our ethnic background, citizenship status, religion, or class location within the 99%—must fundamentally grasp the reality that our individual well-being, our family’s well-being, our children’s and grandchildren’s well-beings, can only be achieved by coming together across strategically manufactured lines of division. Haney López told me that without this, we won’t be able to find the emotional strength, the persistence, and the deep inspiration required to do the hard yet essential work of bridging divides and building collective power.
So, for the rest of this newsletter, I’m simply including this final segment of the interview which you can listen to or read below. I hope it is as meaningful to you as it was for me.
David Dean: I just have one more question for you right now that relates to moving this work into social movement and political organizations. I’ve seen at least aspects of this analysis mentioned by Sunrise Movement, some by SURJ, People’s Action, and a few months ago, it was even mentioned in the Bernie Sanders campaign podcast.
Could you talk about your process of disseminating all of this, where it’s being used, how that’s gone and where you see that going?
Ian Haney López: Yeah, so the Race-Class Narrative Project, that was done a couple years ago through a pretty broad collaboration, that was very important on sort of a proof-of-concept level. What the Race-Class Narrative Project showed was that a message that said, “We’re being intentionally divided, lets purposefully come together across race lines and take care of all of us,” that message not only could succeed. That message turned out to be the single most powerful political message available today. Not just compared to the right, but compared to the left as well. So it was a hugely important research project at a proof-of-concept level.
I think the next step is to say, why does it work? And to really promote this foundational understanding of what has happened to us, and why each of our political movements–again whether it’s racial justice, or immigration justice, or environmental justice, or economic justice–each of our movements needs to prioritize building social solidarity. The reason that’s fundamental is because building solidarity across these lines of division is tremendously difficult work. We will only do it, we will only be uncomfortable, we will only be self-critical, we will only compromise, if we understand that it is strictly necessary to do so.
That’s where we need to move people, toward understanding that they’re not doing this because it’s convenient, they’re not doing this because it’s ethical, they’re not doing this because it’s ideal, they’re doing this because it’s strictly necessary. They’re doing the hard work of building social solidarity across all sorts of divisions because it’s strictly necessary.
I want to contrast that with the dominant progressive model. The dominant progressive model is that we’re a coalition of different interest groups, that we’re all trying to do our own thing, and that we’re all generally progressive, but we have our own priorities, we have our own constituencies, and we should come together as a coalition because if we could elect progressives maybe we could each get what we want. In that model, that’s a coalition of convenience. It’s convenient for us to work with these other groups because if we scratch their back, they’ll scratch our back.
But the moment the coalition becomes challenging, convenience isn’t enough of a reason to do that work. The minute somebody says, “Hey, you need to do some hard work and think about how privilege is working in the environmental movement because otherwise it’s going to be hard to build coalitions with racial justice folks,” environmentalists say, “Why are you dragging me off on your issue? Stop dividing us.” Just to take an example.
DD: Yes, I’ve worked for organizations like that—I’ve had that exact moment happen before.
IHL: Yep. Right? And the reason is because that's where most of us are. It’s so important to understand, that’s where most of us are. I mean, everybody knows we should have a multiracial coalition. Most people just assume we should have a multiracial coalition because it’s going to be convenient. When they hear, “Hey race-class can get us there,” they’re all like, “Cool, I’ll just say the magic words. This is going to get us there.”
That’s not going to work. That’s not going to be enough. To actually build an enduring multiracial progressive coalition is going to require a tremendous amount of work. The Right has been pouring literally billions of dollars and massive amounts of time and organizing into shattering social solidarity. We’re not going to rebuild it just because we say we should all get along. We’re going to have to pour the equivalent in our resources into building social solidarity, and it’s going to be hard, and we need to know why we’re doing this.
So it becomes very important as sort of a next step for People’s Action, for SURJ, for the labor movement, it becomes very important as a next step that people deeply internalize, and I’m going to say that again for emphasis, that people deeply internalize a new way of seeing racism and social division: as weapons of the rich, rather than as simple fractures in our society. I don’t mean to deny the fractures, the fractures are there, but see them as weapons of the rich, rather than as natural fractures that are just there. These are funded, these are promoted, these function to help the greedy rich, the reactionary rich.
That’s I think the critical move that will allow people to internalize the need for a race-class approach, and that will also allow them to take ownership over it. Because once they understand the analysis, they can see how it applies. They can develop their own stories about what they need to do to build that coalition. Because for this idea to become truly powerful, lots of different folks, lots of different organizations, lots of different communities need to own it themselves, need to take it on themselves. Not view it as a set of magic words. Not view it as a comms strategy. But actually view it as a strategy for movement building, a strategy for organizing our society — for re-organizing our society. The way we build the society our highest ideals articulate.
DD: Wow. I love that idea of deep internalization because I work with a lot of white anti-racist activists in supporting that internalization and it does seem like in order to be able to go out and create converts you have to first not be motivated, for your own engagement, by guilt or even altruism or charity, but it has to be this deeply internalized understanding that your own well-being depends on this. Or else you can’t get converts.
IHL: Right. Right. Because they don’t believe you. I was on the phone with somebody yesterday who is an organizer from the UK. He was talking about promoting what he was calling “a solidarity morality.” I said, you know the reality for most people’s lives right now, through the combination of COVID 19 and economic calamity, many people are on the brink of disaster. They are not open to a message about what’s the moral thing to do in the face of disaster. They are saying to themselves, “How do I get health care for my family? How do I provide food? How do I hold on to what shelter I have? How do I take care of the people I love?” We have to answer on that level.
The morality of it is important. It’s an additional impetus. People will not just be energized to act, but they’ll be proud to act; they’ll be excited to act in solidarity because of the moral dimensions. But the fundamental motivation has to be the pragmatic one. You're doing this; you're building social solidarity; you're working hard to set aside divisions, stereotypes, and the bullshit you've internalized; you're going to do that hard work–to get health care for your kids, to make sure you have food and shelter, and to build a community that actually thrives and that you would want your children and their children to inherit. And, it’s the right thing to do. It speaks to our highest ideals.
But the core emphasis has to be—you know, from "solidarity morality," I said, why don’t we call it "solidarity survival?
You may be interested in the following two course offerings from me:
Radical Genealogy: Research Skills for Liberatory Ancestral Recovery: On July 14th and 21st, I’m leading Radical Genealogy, a training offers people of European descent genealogical research tools for connecting their individual family histories to the broader histories of racism, colonialism, capitalism, traditional culture, and political resistance that shaped our ancestors’ lives. Together, as descendants of those who were stripped of their inherited traditions and socialized to become “white,” we will explore how to use genealogical study to develop a renewed and rooted sense of self that can power our efforts for collective liberation. Learn more and register here.
Foundations of Radical White Anti-Racism Reclaiming a lost legacy of solidarity and class struggle: This course is meant to help those of us who are white let go of the counterproductive, mainstream models of activism we've been given. In their place, participants will be called to form a rooted connection to a hidden yet unbroken legacy of multiracial social movements based in the transformative principle of solidarity. While live sessions of this offering ended earlier this month, you can still register to get access to all session recordings and study materials. Learn more and register here.
I love the RCN work, and have a ton of respect for the political chops of Anat and the analysis of Ian. And: I'm concerned that it's ultimately moving us in the wrong direction. That is, built into the RCN is "othering" and the identification of an enemy. So while there's no question it can be effective in short-term or even medium term campaigns and electoral politics, I fear that it's not actually getting us closer to what we ultimately need to do... which is build a world that works for everyone. That invites those who currently oppose us to join us.
I fear the class-based strategy is too simplistic of a frame, and allows us to lay the blame at the feet of corporate elites (who, to be clear, are certainly a massive part of the problem). But does anyone really think a return to 1960s pre-neoliberalism will actually get us where we need to go? Even if corporates were more egalitarian, or followed the German or Norwegian model... the far-right is thriving there too.
I'd love to see two shifts/evolutions to the RCN work: one, to bring in gender more prominently, since that is the common feature uniting the far-right globally (it's an overwhelmingly male phenomenon, and a very traditionally-gendered phenomenon among women), and to anchor the narrative in belonging rather than blaming an enemy, or taking the easy way out of trying to build solidarity along class lines (and ignoring the more complicated reality that many of the richest people in America are actually progressives who share these values and are struggling to figure out how to navigate a system that they recognize is corrupt even as it benefits them).
Curious how you think about this.