Racial configurations both mask and mitigate class exploitation in unknowable ways

Evidence

The obvious response, if the question is taken on face value, is that class formation and exploitation would now be barer and balder, perhaps less mitigated, more intense on its own terms but precisely for that reason less sociologically defensible and defended. If that were so one could imagine that class conditions without the modalities and arrangements of racial configurations conceivably would have conjured more explicit, vigorous, sustained, and ultimately successful counters. But conceivably because balder and bolder and so more questionable and questioned, they also might have been tempered in ways making such class distinctions more palatable because less expressly and extremely exploitative, divisive, and exercised. The deeper point here however is that it is impossible in the final analysis to tell which way it would have gone had race not so marked modern state and social formation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 127

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Race, class, and nationality condition how objects are revealed to me.; Formal equality in exchange masks how the class relation is constituted — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1363; 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 (+1 more)

Related

• Racial difference can be constructed as antagonism within a single exploited class (similarity 0.82)
• Race, class, and nationality condition how objects are revealed to me. (similarity 0.81)
• Race is the lived medium through which class relations are experienced (similarity 0.80)
• Class-versus-race debate falsely forced a single privileged explanatory category. (similarity 0.79)
• Formal white classification does not confer comparable social whiteness. (similarity 0.79)
• Historical race relations operate as active structural principles, not residues (similarity 0.79)
• Economic and sociological paradigms of race define themselves through mutual correction (similarity 0.79)
• State form only loosely correlates with style of racial rule (similarity 0.79)
• Race operates as an active structuring principle of present society, not a residue. (similarity 0.79)
• State racial classification shapes social status, opportunity, rights, and identity. (similarity 0.79)
• Formal equality in exchange masks how the class relation is constituted (similarity 0.79)
• Economic paradigms explain racial and ethnic divisions as effects of economic structures (similarity 0.79)
• Race-only analysis omits the class positioning shared with poor whites (similarity 0.79)
• Racial divisions remain socially powerful even when their conceptual foundations are false (similarity 0.78)
• Shared exploitation does not preclude racial antagonisms within a class (similarity 0.78)