Race alone is not a unifying force without class analysis

Evidence

Freire also never accepted the “poststructuralism tendency to translate diverse forms of class, race, and gender based oppression to the discursive space of subject positions.” He always appreciated the theoretical complexity of multifactor analyses while never underestimating the role of class. For example, he resisted the essentialist approach of reducing all analysis to one monolithic entity of race. For instance, African functionaries who assimilate to colonial cultural values constitute a distinct class with very different ideological cultural values and aspirations than the bulk of the population. Likewise, it would be a mistake to view all African Americans as one monolithic cultural group without marked differences: United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is black, after all (and conservative). — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 22

Categorization

• XREF: The Clarence Thomas example and assimilated colonized functionaries give concrete cases of identity groups that don’t cohere — useful evidence that oppression analysis can’t collapse to a single axis. — connects to: Unitary categories like race and class fray at the edges under sustained analysis — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 354; Said subordinated class and gender analysis to race in his later theorizing; Black racial stereotypes in these samples depend entirely on social class, not race alone. — Susan T. Fiske et al., A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype…, 157 (+1 more)