While I take a break from guest interviews for the summer, enjoy these three commentaries: one new and two previously available in my 2017 Patreon archives.

In the first (and new) piece, I respond to common critiques of “identity politics,” and explain why those criticisms are wrongheaded on multiple levels. First, they are selective: only condemning a political focus on marginalized groups (people of color, women and LGBTQ folks, for instance) while ignoring the way that a focus on the “white working class,” conservative Christians, or bringing back manufacturing jobs mostly for men, are also about prioritizing certain identities. Second, to the extent most of us have not only dominant identities from which we benefit, but also identities that confer disadvantages—for instance, white folks who are poor—a politics that examines how identity impacts us is of benefit to all. Ultimately the problem is not identity-based politics, but identity-based oppression.

In the second piece, I examine the difference between a critique of whiteness (as a social force) and white people as individuals. Too often a critique of the first is seen as an attack on the second. But whiteness was created as a way to sucker most so-called white people into casting our lot with the wealthy, rather than recognizing the interests we share with working class people of color. To the extent whiteness has served as a trick to divide and conquer working folks, criticizing whiteness is not only something we should do for the sake of people of color, but also something we should do for the benefit of most so-called whites.

In the third and final piece, I explore how our tendency to venerate the wealthy—and give them credit for all good things that flow to the rest of us, like jobs—not only rests on a faulty understanding of economics, but also relies upon two important American forces, which make a politics of class solidarity harder here that in many other societies. The first of these is the myth of meritocracy, which leads even those who are struggling to believe they’ll be rich someday if they just work hard enough, and the second is the role of white supremacy, and specifically what W.E.B. DuBois called the “psychological wage of whiteness.” By providing relative advantage for white workers over people of color, America’s racialized version of capitalism keeps many working class whites in line, loyal to the wealthy, even as they would be better off joining with people of color to fight for a more just system.