Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump in The Majority Report Podcast Goodreads Group

May 23, 2020 Faaiz rated it really liked it

Shelves: capitalism, non-fiction, political, academic, leftist, interesting, race, class

This is quite an interesting book. Haider's writing is concise and engaging. In this book, Haider argues against the adoption of liberal identity politics as a means of liberation which obfuscates the real social and materialist relations of power. It argues against the ideology of race and the essentialism of race and other individuating identities as impediments to liberating and emancipatory movements and as agents that create divisiveness between the working class across the different splint This is quite an interesting book. Haider's writing is concise and engaging. In this book, Haider argues against the adoption of liberal identity politics as a means of liberation which obfuscates the real social and materialist relations of power. It argues against the ideology of race and the essentialism of race and other individuating identities as impediments to liberating and emancipatory movements and as agents that create divisiveness between the working class across the different splintering identities. He goes on to overview and specify the conditions that gave rise to the "White" race and how it was constructed as means of class division and control, how the concept of Whiteness was extended to other groups of people privileging them and in turn turning them complicit in the subjugation of Black people.

I'm not entirely convinced by the sentiment proposed by Haider in the quote below...

Although the black and white poor find themselves, objectively, in the same position, thy inhabit a world ideologically so structured that each can be made to provide the other with its negative reference group, the "manifest cause" of each other's ill-fortune.

...not because I think he is wrong per se but because I didn't see an exhaustive level of engagement with some of what the intersectionality proponents purport to be "unique challenges" faced by poor Blacks due to their situation in the subordinate race and class categories. I think taking a historical and materialist approach to the construction of race as a means of class control is hugely important in understanding the origins of class divisions and struggle. However, that alone does little to shed light on the significant barriers to the formation and sustained development of a working class coalition that encompasses people of vastly different lived experiences today. This book does not provide a "so where do we go from here" sort of an answer (or even working theories, suggestions, or educated guesses, etc) to the pervasiveness of race and increasingly other identities as well. He goes to end the book advocating for greater universality but the concept posed seems pretty vague, nonspecific, and abstract. Overall, definitely an interesting read which was also informative for me for getting an overview of the anti-essentialist understanding of race that I didn't have much exposure to before. ...more

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