Chinese communism reframed racial hierarchies as evolutionary stages

Evidence

The Wilson administration somehow conflated the Red Summer with the postwar Red Scare, blaming anticapitalists for the carnage instead of violent White racists. On September 27, 1919, 128 alienated White socialists, inspired by the recent Russian Revolution, gathered in Chicago to form the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). “The racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other,” the CPUSA’s program declared, sounding eerily like the founding racial program of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1903. Since then, SPA leaders, such as the party’s five-time presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, had tended to say that there was “no negro question outside of the labor question.” Like their SPA predecessors, CPUSA officials would also go on to raise capitalist exploitation over racial discrimination, instead of leveling and challenging them both at once. In their incomplete reading of the world’s political economy, racism emerged out of capitalism, and therefore the problem of capitalism came before the problem of racism. The Communists theorized that if they killed capitalism, racism would die, too—not knowing that capitalism and racism had both emerged during the same long fifteenth century, and that since then, they had been mutually fortifying each other while developing separately. The Communist of the CPUSA admonished Blacks (and Whites) during the Red Summer to “realize their misery is not due to race antagonism, but the CLASS ANTAGONISM” between big business and labor. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 822 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: China’s founding nationalist ideology grounded national identity in biological race; Chinese elites fused race and culture to make biology primary; Racial discourse spanned the full political spectrum from fascist to communist in China (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Communists subordinated racial discrimination to class struggle as their theory of causation #complicates (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 822