Privilege and Power in the Capitalocene
This summer, we are happy to announce a special forum featuring four reflections from a selection from our director Joerg Rieger’s forthcoming book, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity. The reflections are all from our academic fellows, Jin Young Choi, Chaumotli Huq, and Charlene Sinclair.
On Saturday, July 9 at 9:30 AM CST, we’ll host a webinar featuring all of our contributors here. Register today!
Contributors: Joerg Rieger; Jin Young Choi; Chaumtoli Huq; Charlene Sinclair.
Inspiring (Im)possible Solidarity: Reshaping Relations of Race, Class, and Gender
Joerg Rieger
June 27, 2022
Discussing white supremacy, two African American women scholars have emphasized fundamental distinctions between race and class that are often overlooked. Historian Barbara Fields notes that “Not all white people have the same power and not all white people are in the same class position.” Along the same lines, African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out that “racism in the United States has never been just about abusing Black and Brown people just for the sake of doing so. It has always been a means by which the most powerful white men in the country have justified their rule, made their money, and kept the rest of us at bay.”
Following these trains of thought, a distinction needs to be made between privilege and power in the struggle for liberation. Under the conditions of white supremacist racism, all white people have privilege, whether they realize it or not. Racial privilege conveys many advantages in the dominant system; it can provide substantial benefits, and it is always systemic, which means that one can be privileged without feeling privileged. The same could be said for gender privilege.
Nevertheless, systemic privilege does not always translate into power, which is also systemic. Even though all white people benefit in some ways from white racial privilege, they do not all have the same power. An example from the world of labor exemplifies this and adds an understanding of class often missing in the analysis of power: White warehouse workers enjoy white privilege compared to BIPOC warehouse workers, but they do not have the same power—economic, political, or cultural—as white warehouse managers or white warehouse owners, let alone Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
This insight tends to come as a rude awakening to many white working people, but it is even more unsettling for white professionals, white academics, and white religious leaders who enjoy a great deal of white privilege and even some power, but whose power to truly impact the system is often embarrassingly small. This insight also tends to come as a surprise to many nonwhite communities, who—because they fail to distinguish between privilege and power—often overestimate what white people can do. The result is disappointment and frustration all around, deflating efforts to effect systemic change.
How might this impasse be addressed, and with it the damages caused by white supremacy and class exploitation? Worrying about the political and religious Right unified by racism, sexism, and nationalism has helped create some common concern. But this is not enough, not even when things take a turn for the worse as happened during the years of the Trump presidency, culminating in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes the importance of relations of labor and class when she talks about a “potential for solidarity” that has to do with the fact that “when one group of workers suffer oppression, it negatively affects all workers.” In other words, white supremacy not only hurts non-white workers, it hurts white workers as well. This brings us, according to Taylor, to a “material foundation for solidarity and unity within the working class.”
In other words, solidarity emerges in relation to the common pressures experienced by the working majority, the proverbial 99 percent who have to work for a living, which in the United States is the most diverse assemblage the world has ever seen. Without this material foundation of economic exploitation, compounded by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality, solidarity may not be an option. This is something I have explored in my own work as well, coining the notion of deep solidarity in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where a rudimentary understanding of class emerged again in the United States after long silence. In my forthcoming book, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity, I argue for solidarity based on a material distinction of power and privilege rather than on the typical moral appeals to well-meaning people.
The deep roots of solidarity in the lives of working people stand in striking contrast to a false sense of solidarity of the Right based on racism, sexism, and nationalism. While the solidarity of the Right protects the interests of the few (racism, for instance, creates a false sense of solidarity for white working people tricking them into believing that they have more in common with their white employers than with their non-white fellow workers), deep solidarity has the potential to serve the interests of the many.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor helpfully pushes the boundaries of progressive politics when she notes that the popular idea of white people becoming allies to Black people “doesn’t quite capture the degree to which Black and white workers are inextricably linked.” To be sure, this link exists whether people realize it or not, as it has to do with the structures of labor exploitation and not merely with personal experiences. In order to visualize these structures, a basic awareness of class as conflictual relationship of power (rather than a matter of stratification or difference) where the few exploit the many is required. This, in turn, deepens an awareness of oppression along the lines of race and gender, combining the various struggles for liberation.
Having addressed an often-overlooked lack of power that affects the working majority (which includes the so-called “middle class”), we can now take another look at privilege. Many progressives may be worried that talking about solidarity leads to erasing the differentials of privilege between BIPOC and white people and therefore to letting white people off the hook. Moreover, certain ideas of solidarity might neglect profound religious practices of confession of sin and repentance for white racial and male gendered privilege, which are key in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).
To state it clearly, erasing the differences between BIPOC and white people—or between genders and sexualities—and letting people off the hook or becoming “color blind” is not how solidarity is built. Unlike solidarity on the right, deep solidarity is not promoting uniformity but actively embracing difference as a constructive element, with special attention to expanding the role that BIPOC and women are already playing (without imposing additional burdens). The role of those who enjoy white privilege (or heterosexual male privilege) needs special scrutiny, which takes us back to the distinction of privilege and power.
If privilege and power are distinct, confession and repentance are meaningless without an understanding of how repenting for unchecked privilege can translate into embracing liberative forms of power. Armed with a distinction of privilege and power, confession of sin and repentance take on deeper meaning: they can be practiced for instance where members of the white working majority break the deceptive bonds of white privilege and white supremacy by siding with the non-white working majority against the dominant power represented by the executive class. In the process, the power of solidarity is set free, and privilege can be addressed. The test will be that those whose privilege is transformed in these ways will be considered traitors who eventually cannot go home anymore.
The effectiveness of this kind of repentance is also reflected in the Jesus movement, which is not afraid to introduce divisions where false solidarity and fake peace rule (“Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Luke 12:51). The result is the creation of real solidarity and alternative power: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). The difference between the solidarity on the right (based on family and deceptive identity that benefits the few) and on the left (based on shared projects of liberation that benefit the many) could not be clearer. And this difference is profoundly theological, as the liberative God is envisioned in ways that are diametrically opposed to the dominant God.
Solidarity is not optional in the ever-growing tensions of the few against the many that mark our neoliberal capitalist reality, which not even those who mistakenly see themselves “in the middle” can escape. Deep solidarity cannot be built without deconstructing the deceptive solidarities of racism, sexism, nationalism, and conservative religion, which benefit from the confusion of privilege and power. Most importantly, deep solidarity not only appreciates differences along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion but thrives on them. What distinguishes the power of the many from the power of the few is that it is multifaceted and multidimensional.
The material foundations of solidarity—welding the many together as result of the exploitation by the few—create the conditions for the subversion of dominant power and the related transformation of privilege. Liberative power emerges when multiracial solidarity beats the privilege of monoracial monotony, multigendered solidarity can no longer be matched by monogendered monarchies, and multireligious solidarity is more inspiring than monoreligious monoculture.
Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.
The Relationality of Power
Jin Young Choi
June 27, 2022
Joerg Rieger brings “class into focus” again and argues only deep solidarity can effect systemic change. For this to happen, a necessary step is distinguishing between privilege and power. White workers have more in common with non-white workers than with powerful white men, who constitute the top 1% of the population but own the 32.3% of the nation’s wealth as of 2021. Differently put, eight men have as much wealth as about half of the world’s population.
The argument that the majority of white people, despite their white privilege, have scarcely any power may not be readily agreed upon, as people understand power in various ways. The Foucauldian concept of power as diffuse and discursive does not necessarily focus on the power concentrated among a few individuals. The power operating when “the few exploit the many” may not be grasped in everyday reality where non-white people deal with racism, sexism, and other forms of domination enacted in daily life. In addition, people believe that power has a hierarchical structure and, even among working-class people, stratification and inequalities exist.
While Rieger addresses these aspects of power in his other writings (esp. chap 3 in Theology in the Capitalocene), here he highlights the structures of power, particularly the “economic system that has dominated so much of our histories in the past two centuries.” Then, the question is how to resist the system that continues to widen the gap between the few and the many in an inconceivable way. Capitalism is a self-generating system driven by continual expansion wherever profit or surplus value is generated. Capitalism and colonialism could go hand in hand, seeking profits by dispossessing indigenous people from their lands, exploiting the labor of enslaved people, and replacing unfree labor with indentured labor of immigrants and penal labor aided by mass incarceration, and so on. In this capitalist system, profits are maximized. Still, the profits are not distributed to those who provide labor but instead invested into stock or property markets to create more surplus value.
As capitalism has evolved, neoliberalism in the 1980s began to deregulate the economy, liberalize trade and industry, and privatize state-owned enterprises. Such neoliberal economic policies accelerated global capitalism in 1990s through the expansion of markets, the development of transnational corporations, and the intensification of economic flow through technologies. The revolution of technology such as information, communication, and transportation could have been liberating, but it has become a tool for reinforcing social relations of domination by reorganizing labor and even lifestyle. The technological change has caused mass unemployment and created the “precariat” among the working majority, who supply the labor market with “flexibility” demanding unskilled, irregular, and cheaper labor who are not able to organize unions. Women and young people have been prone to be providers of this precarious labor, and labor and poverty have been increasingly feminized under neoliberal global capitalism.
In this context, we can conceive the capitalist economic system as a structure or totality and also see how a critique of capitalism and intersectionality converge. While class is an axis that is added to the “interlocking systems of oppression” in intersectional theory, it is quickly dismissed. Additionally, emphasis on class raises concerns about class reductionism. As intersectionality’s genealogy demonstrates, its immediate context was social movements, rather than being limited to (group) identity politics. Many Black feminist critics and civil rights activists, such as Lucy Gonzales Parsons, Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and members of the Combahee River Collective from the early 20th century and onward, were radical socialists or communists. They identified capitalism as the root of the global systems of dispossession and domination. In Marxism and Intersectionality, Jewish activist-scholar Ashley Bohrer argues “slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy–all these were developed in and through capitalism, at least in their modern and contemporary forms.” Accordingly, an intersectional critique of capitalism requires the analysis of the “relationality of power.”
The relationality of power implies that the subject constructions of the oppressed and the oppressor are mutually constitutive. Rieger believes in the agency and liberating power of the working majority and thus deep solidarity as the only way of executing the power of people despite their differences. Audre Lorde emphasizes that the coalition of women of color is possible through interdependence across nondominant differences. Similarly, Rieger argues that solidarity does not necessarily erase differences among the working majority but seeks to find the material foundations for working-class solidarity across racial and other forms of differences.
In contrast, the Right’s unification based on racism, sexism, and nationalism manifested in the mobilization of White Evangelicals, especially during the Trump administration. Embracing Paul’s conflicting images of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, biblical scholar Sze-kar Wan borrows the concept of tribalism to characterize the group identity of White Evangelicals that imposes rigid, closed boundaries. Wan proposes an Asian American hermeneutics of dissent, which renders identity boundaries porous and Asian American alliance strategic. This hermeneutics takes up intragroup tension and contradiction and pursues coalition beyond the strategic alliance. Against white supremacist-nationalist authoritarian politics’ divide and conquer strategies, overcoming a group’s tribal identity and racist public transcripts like a model-minority stereotype is critical for building cross-racial and anti-capitalist coalitions.
The coalitional work of women of color feminisms has been built on understanding the relational and interdependent reality of all struggles. Asian American grassroots activists Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs were profoundly committed to civil rights and Black freedom movements. At the same time, they were involved in anti-imperialist and anti-Vietnam War protests, women’s and gay liberation movements, and labor and community organizing.
The Gospels describe Jesus as making connections with and among people as he came to serve the multitude (Mark 10:45). While the poor widow who donates her last two copper coins—her entire bios—to the temple treasury (12:41–44, see chapter 5 in Faith, Class and Labor; see also my chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Korea), the other of higher economic status “wastes” an expensive alabaster jar of ointment anointing Jesus (14:3–9). Although heterogeneous in terms of social status, these two Markan women share in colonial and patriarchal oppressions. What is also common in both women’s gestures is “extravagant expenditure.” Jesus says about the two women’s giving: “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury” (12:43); “Truly I tell you…. what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (14:9). I do not read Jesus’ sayings as prescribing women’s self-sacrifice for the cause of national or community building or as theological justification of aligning with Jesus’s self-giving on the cross. Rather, the women’s actions invoke the cultural memories of subjected women, regardless of socioeconomic status, as well as his life-giving as “a ransom for many” against imperial/colonial exploitation and violence and the temple economy. Despite Jesus’ acknowledgments, they resist being model disciples or model minorities. Still, they remain “spectacular opacities,” which women of color adopt as a tactic for coalition politics and praxis.
The neoliberal form of capitalism has been challenged, especially since the development of Chinese state capitalism, ecological crisis, and the coronavirus pandemic. However, as far as capitalism as a structure organizes power relations and commodifies race, labor, and women’s and any other disposable bodies, intersectional and coalitional work of solidarity and for liberation is imperative.
Jin Young Choi, Ph.D., is the Baptist Missionary Training School Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. Choi is the author of Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and coeditor of the volumes such as Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity: Intersectional Approaches to Constructed Identity and Early Christian Texts (Lexington Books, 2020) and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (Pickwick Publications, 2020).
Ummah and Ruhaniyat*: What Islam Offers to Build Global Working Class Solidarity
Chaumtoli Huq
June 27, 2022
Growing up, poverty in the United States was compared to poverty in Bangladesh, my country of birth. This was particularly true for Harlem, where I now live, or Mississippi, where I co-taught an immersion course with trailblazing legal activist Jaribu Hill of Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights. A Los Angeles Times article headlined, “Men’s Death Rate Higher in Harlem than in Bangladesh,” while pundits asked if poverty was worse in Mississippi or Bangladesh.
Imprinted early in my mind was that Black death and death of people in the Global South were tragically linked. This narrative has become a source of research curiosity and poverty voyeurism such that more recently New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof looked towards Bangladesh for United States’ poverty alleviation, which I critiqued for being a neoliberal economic development model. On the other hand, this narrative cultivated in me a sense that if our deaths were intertwined, perhaps, so too are our liberation, and that our respective economic conditions were the anchoring structures that created this poverty.
As I deepened my own activism and study, I understood race, gender, indigeneity, and coloniality as being other key components constitutive of the material conditions of working class communities across the globe. What socio-economic conditions might connect the tea worker in Bangladesh to a food processing worker in Mississippi to the Amazon warehouse worker or taxi driver in New York also prompted me to think about how a grassroots, global working class movement can be built. In many ways, my decades long work both on behalf of workers in the United States and workers in Bangladesh have been focused on this goal of building a grassroots, global working class movement, which I have come to believe is the pathway for any major social transformation.
Sharing information about each other’s struggles and taking action is a first step towards building these global/local connections. An example of this occurred when longshoreman workers protested the arrival of clothing made for Walmart in Charleston, South Carolina’s ports to show solidarity with garment workers who died in 2012 Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh. Through their protest they connected the garment workers struggle in Bangladesh with workers’ fight to form a union in Walmart stores in the US South. Kalpona Akter, garment worker labor leader of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity commented on this protest: "In acting in solidarity you are showing the potential of this power to work across the world and confirming that we are all in this fight together."
Labor advocates would agree with Akter’s statement on worker power, but harder is the question of how do we build this solidarity, which Joerg Rieger calls “deep solidarity,” or that working class led organization DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) has referred to as “transformational solidarity.” Generalized calls for solidarity often do not generate the action needed to bring about change. DRUM describes four levels of solidarity: symbolic, transactional, embodied and transformational. At any given moment, we may engage in one or more of these levels of solidarity. Symbolic is signaling solidarity through statements or public actions. Cynically, it is often referred to as a form of virtue signaling. Transactional solidarity is based on some exchange between organizations or based on some mutual common self-interest. This is short-lived because it binds people and movements based on present interests versus larger shared principles. It could lead to the development of deeper relationships between people and communities if the collaboration continues. Embodied solidarity is when individuals act on their values, such as blocking deportations or other forms of direct actions. Embodied solidarity actions are key to building a politic that is values based but is very individual focused and often fails to spotlight structural inequalities.
Transformative solidarity is “when masses of oppressed communities choose to forego something that would benefit them, and do not take it because it comes at the expense of other oppressed communities.” Transformational solidarity is collective, values-based, and seeks to build long term power for oppressed communities. It takes a lot of political education and organizing work to build up to a level of consciousness required of transformational solidarity. Other levels of solidarity, such signing on to statements, joining campaigns, can help us develop levels of consciousness and are essential. All of these forms of solidarity require work, political education, organizing and strategy, and clarity of vision. But what are we moving towards? What are our shared principles that animate, catalyze us to move towards changing systems of inequality?
With a globally diverse workforce, differentiated by race, gender, class, nationalism, histories, what is the throughline to meaningfully connect workers across the United States and globe? Understanding power—interpersonal, institutional, and structural, and identifying one’s location along those axis—can help us to better understand the conditions of workers and allow us to better understand each other. Still, even with an intersectional analysis and the most sophisticated strategies, something remains missing in our movements.
Here, I suggest that Islam’s concept of ummah and ruhaniyat, spiritualness or soulfulness are instructive. Ummah means community, it is envisioned as a global one, irrespective of race, class, and ethnicities, where all members are equal (For an excellent discussion on Islam and its commitment to social justice and economic equality see Shadaab Rahemtulla’s Qur’an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam). Perhaps, Malcolm X described it best, in a letter from Mecca on hajj:
There were tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. They were of all colours, from the blue-eyed blondes to black skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white.
While most apparent from this quote is racial diversity, of equal importance is class diversity, which is reflected by the fact that people of all socio-economic background engage in the same rituals. What unified this transnational, class, and racial solidarity for Malcolm X was a common faith. What might this solidarity look like if it was translated towards a common cause of workers’ rights and broader social justice and liberation?
In invoking this concept of a ummah, I am by no means romanticizing the challenges of building a multi-racial ummah, which Jamilah Karim documents in her ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslim women in her book American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah (2009). Ummah offers us an aspirational blueprint for liberation, embracing our differences and uniting us with a common faith. Prophet Muhammad’s last sermon reinforces this message of a united global community promoting justice, opposing racism, accumulation of capital, and gender equality.
Allah has forbidden you to take usury, therefore all interest obligation shall henceforth be waived. Your capital is yours to keep .You will neither inflict nor suffer any inequality.
All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety (taqwa) and good action.
Principles within the faith connect members of the community, even if they may inhabit different social identities, but it is religious practices like zakat (compulsory alms) that cultivate a discipline to counteract the privileges among community members. These religious practices, which can easily be practiced in secular terms, counterbalance privileges that may exist among community members to prevent anyone to dominate. In this regard Islam is praxis oriented, putting ideas into action. This is a topic beyond the scope of this piece, but many of the obligatory alms under Islam are required of those who have surplus wealth to counteract gross wealth disparity. In modern day speak, zakat may be called the Muslim version of Tax the Rich.
Drawing from Islam—but taking this idea of the ummah outside of the theological context—can help to build a workers’ rights ummah, a global community of workers who may differ in race, ethnicity, class, but united in a common purpose of justice. Ummah also counters the individualism prevalent in capitalism. The clash of civilization attributed to Islam and the “West” is aptly described as a clash with capitalism, given many of Islamic practices can be described as socialist in nature. Islam instructs Muslims to stand for justice, even if it means to go against one’s kin. This is because when the Prophet Muhammad saw Medina society, he observed factionalism, ethnic insularity, and gross disparity in wealth. “Standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allāh, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives.” (4:135). This Qur’anic call for justice, to foreswear individual familial, ethnics interests, provides a powerful frame to build working class unity across the globe.
Ummah is not so far removed from Martin Luther King Jr.’s notion of a beloved community. In his speech, The Birth of a New Nation, which he delivered after returning from observing the independence of Ghana and mentions Indian independence, King reminds us of the global nature of our beloved community and some lessons we can draw from Ghana.
[T]he oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it. … Freedom is never given to anybody. For the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there, and he never voluntarily gives it up. And that is where the strong resistance comes. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance.
MLK’s speech echoes the need for action and transformational solidarity to achieve freedom. It is not voluntarily given.
Even still, with the shared values and practices put in place, how can we conceivably connect across such wide differences in culture, values? Racism, sexism, and other forms of separation seem to continually tear at our possibilities for common cause revealing the fragility of our ummah. Here, I introduce the idea of ruhaniyat, which means spiritualness, soulfulness, an intangible yet palpably felt sense of connectedness to each other, our oneness with the divine creator. It is the glue that binds the ummah. Ruhaniyat may be understood as the humanness of human rights, the inalienability of our right to be, but that is expressed in relational terms in contrast to the individualism of the Western conception of human rights. Writer, ecologist Farhad Mazhar explains ruhaniyat, “ruhaniyat manifests genuinely when we fight for justice, for the collective life and prepare ourselves to sacrifice for the common good of humanity. So Ruhaniyat is the caring of the self to become selfless and serving the common humanity is the supreme idea of Islam.”
Another way I can communicate ruhaniyat is through music, for e.g., the influence of Islam on Blues music. When I first heard Blues music, I felt an overwhelming sense of familiarity, that this was something I had heard before or recognized. I shrugged it off thinking how could music from the U.S. South, a place I did not live, resonate when it was so far from either my urban immigrant cultural upbringing or Bangladesh. Years later, reading Sylvain Diouf’s work on Islam and Blues, it made sense to me: because enslaved Africans were brought from West Africa, which was majority Muslim, their music would invariably influence the music of the U.S. South. Carried in the spirituality of the music of the Mississippi Delta were the sounds that traversed the Sufi mystical music of South Asia. Our spiritual solidarity, interconnectedness, produced this beautiful genre of music. While retaining its distinct cultures and traditions, there was this invisible spirit of solidarity that reminded us of our collective humanness, our ruh, our spirit, and our ruhaniyat, our spiritual interconnectedness. Perhaps this is what Malcolm felt and observed as he described in his letter from Mecca. But that spirt was bio-spiritual – audible, palpable, tangible, impacting our daily lives through the creation of a beautiful genre of music and other manifestations. In other words, the materiality offered by ruhaniyat is one that is imbibed with a spiritual solidarity, not one that sees the spirit and materiality as distinct. King’s articulation that all labor has dignity similarly views the spiritual and material as one.
Nourished by ruh, given form in an ummah, cultivating practices of transformative solidarity, how do we move towards our collective liberation?
Margari Aziza Hill, scholar and co-founder of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, urges us to envision a politics for collective liberation in her piece What Stands for Liberation. Her call for liberation while rooted in Islam speaks to the broader social justice community. She shares that Black Muslims’ direct experience with domestic racism, national security state, Islamophobia, and imperial foreign policies can inform such a politics. In other words, the specificity of one’s experiences can be the basis to come together around a shared vision for liberation. She calls for an Islamic liberation theology not unlike other Islamic scholars, “to speak to the most enduring problems today, poverty, racism, and violence,” one that, “reflects our souls as a people and our role in repairing a broken world.” Hill’s call for liberation exemplified ummah and ruhaniyat perfectly. It is at once concrete, speaking to the material condition of our lives, and aspirational, to reflect the divine soul of people. Being attuned to the lives of the marginalized is supported by Quran. “We wanted to confer favor upon those who were oppressed in the land and make them leaders and make them inheritors.” (28:5) While firmly informed by the material conditions of working class people, Hill speaks to a liberation that frees our soul as people, the alienation caused by capitalism.
Islam offers us a powerful alternative departure point for imagining what material conditions are needed for liberation that promises a deeper solidarity of spirit, of our humanness. “Justice is a fundamental component of the Qur’anic call, commanding humankind to strive towards creating a lasting, egalitarian social order,” writes scholar Rahemetulla. Sadly, Islamophobia in our society impedes our ability to draw from such a life-saving well. Our global ummah will not be built by ignoring our differences, our privileges, but to acknowledge them squarely, and to develop practices to dismantle privileges held by some in our community, so that we may move towards our interconnected soulfulness, our liberatory human and workers’ rights.
*Thankful to my father and ecologist Farhad Mazhar for introducing me to this concept of ruhaniyat. Additional thanks to Sarah Khalid and Chastity McFadden for their comments to this piece.
Chaumtoli Huq is an Associate Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law and the founder/Editor of an innovative law and media non-profit focused on law and social justice called Law@theMargins. Huq’s recent scholarship include: Charting Global Economic Inequalities and Emancipatory Human Rights Responses from the Ground Up on tea workers in Bangladesh, Women’s Empowerment in the Bangladesh Garment Industry, Opportunities and Limitations of the Accord: Need for a Worker Organizing Model in an edited volume titled, Labor, Global Supply Chains and the Garment Industry in South Asia; author of, The War on Terror on Muslim Women and Girls: Forging Transformative Solidarities (Scholar and Feminist Online). You can follow her on twitter @profhuq and follow Law@theMargins work at @lawatmargins
Fraud and Force
Charlene Sinclair
June 27, 2022
I began my career as an economic justice community organizer within the Saul Alinsky tradition of community organizing. Alinsky-styled organizing pushes organizers and community leaders to “cut an issue.” In other words, to find a clear, narrow, tactical pathway to solve or move closer to an agreed-upon solution to the problem they are attempting to address. Alinsky organizers and the leaders they cultivate are encouraged to quickly move from a structural assessment to the personification of the obstruction – the identification of a person that is causing harm and in whose hands the solution to the problem rests. Rather than doing the deep work of understanding the role of capitalism in structuring their experience of oppression or exploitation, the group is formed on shared anger at the impact of the problem and through a commitment to resolve the impact experienced. This reductionist approach often forestalls a deep structural Left analysis of class, let alone capitalism.
Additionally, Alinsky’s approach argues that the utilization of an analysis of race and or gender creates a wedge between people and thus does not enable the development of the large-scale people power needed to resist the exploitation of large corporations or within workplaces.
This siloing has not only made it difficult to build the collective power needed to fight forces of oppression and exploitation but also contributed to a false juxtaposition (and at times antagonism) between identitarian struggles for recognition and struggles against capitalist exploitation. Joerg Rieger’s work to bring class into a deeper, strategic conversation with race and gender along with his call for work on deep solidarity is a much-needed intervention. One that may be furthered through a critical engagement of the historical utilization of enslaved Black people as a means of production.
I appreciate Rieger’s attempt to foreground class and help readers understand that class should not be disentangled from race and gender. Yet his argument could be both deepened and expanded with an engagement with the work of recent historians who have used slavery racial capitalism as a framework to look at the role of Blackness and enslavement in the development of the financial as well as productive system that propelled the US into an industrial leader. This developing area of study breaks away from the identitarian model of racial analysis that Rieger eschews and moves us closer to an analysis of the economy that might position us to have a deeper analysis of class and enable the deep solidarity into which Rieger calls us.
Leftists who look at class or capitalism tend to use a very deep economistic framework and dismiss race and gender as an identity that fractures community rather than as a process that is critical to the creation and sustenance of capitalism and a means of production in and of itself. However, theorists that anchor their analysis within the frame of slavery racial capitalism understand enslavement to be an economic as well as a social institution with long-lasting financial implications and aspirations before, during, and well after the actual sale of a human body. For example, in his book The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism 1815–1960, Calvin Schermerhorn problematizes the mythology of an American exceptionalism often illustrated by stories of individual hard work and ingenuity isolated from historical entanglements and struggles. By peeling back in detail the market processes developed for the commerce of bodies and the subsequent fortunes made from commercial enterprise of slave trading, Schermerhorn shows that “captives and indigenous people paid a high price for the development of that democratization of an American pursuit of happiness. Each coffle of enslaved Americans who arrived for sale in the cotton complex intensified a political strategy of white supremacy and nonwhite servitude which shaped the structure of the political economy of the Old Southwest.”
Unfortunately, many on the Left engage race as merely a construction that is utilized to separate white people from Black people and fracture class unity. This, however, short shrifts the import and depth of analysis that comes to light when we carefully analyze the ways in which the Black human body has been racialized and deployed as an integral part of the means of production. Without this depth of analysis, even the most well-intentioned thinkers slide into an assessment of race and racialization as no more than an identitarian politic demanding recognition rather than as being deeply inscribed in processes of production.
To combat this inclination toward the analysis of race as an identity to be addressed through personal and interpersonal commitments toward antiracist behavior, I’ve begun to use the late Manning Marable's How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America to engage the political economy of race in my work as an organizer. Unlike Ian Haney Lopez’s work articulated in his texts Dog Whistle Politics and Merge Left, Marable uses a Gramscian analysis to explicitly engage questions of capitalism and power and the role of ideology and state violence in building, advancing, and sustaining a capitalist agenda.
From Gramsci, Marable recognizes that our understanding of the world is deeply constructed and reinscribed through institutions we trust – family, media, educational and religious institutions, and so on. Marable continues that although often fraudulent, these constructions are designed to look legitimate, rational, and reasonable while in reality they are illegitimate, irrational, and unreasonable. Marable also implores us to understand that it is not only the fraudulent worldview that maintains capitalist advance but also the utilization of the full force of the state through legislation and the policing of our very bodies that is brought to bear to get us back in line should we question the world as it is.
Given Marable’s articulation of capitalism being constructed and upheld by fraudulent narratives and the full deployment of state violence and terror, intersectionality as a frame may not be enough. Rather, I would argue, a robust discourse that refutes the reinforcement of the very idea of capitalism, alongside the idea that race is no more than an identity that needs to be dealt with interpersonally requires the dismantling of the fraudulent claim the Blackness and enslavement is simply a social construct as opposed to a critical means of capitalist economic production. It would also require us to engage seriously in an analysis of the role of the state in fomenting and advancing violence and terror in the interest of capital. I believe that it is only through these efforts that a deep long-lasting solidarity can be born.
Dr. Charlene Sinclair is the founding director of the Center for Race, Religion, and Economic Democracy (C-RRED) and the Chief of Staff of Race Forward. Previously, she served as program director for Engaging the Powers at Union Theological Seminary and campaign director for the Center for Community Change. A community organizer for over 20 years, Charlene has helped national and local organizations develop grassroots organizing and political strategies. One of her main areas of interest is dismantling mass incarceration by uniting faith conviction and spirituality in social activism. She serves as a lay minister at the Church on the Hill AME Zion Community. Charlene received her PhD in social ethics from Union Theological Seminary in New York City.