The Post-1965 Trajectory of Race, Class, and Urban Politics in the United States Reconsidered

Abstract

Comments by Larry Bennett, Cynthia Horan, Cedric Johnson, and Timothy Weaver prompted me to reflect on and connect my work on race ideology, the underclass idea, class dynamics in American politics, and the evolution of urban governance and the terms of black political incorporation since the 1990s. Race is best understood as a particular instance of a class of ideologies that work to justify existing hierarchies by reading them into nature. Understanding race in that way helps to see the notion of an urban underclass as also an ideology that seeks to naturalize hierarchy by attributing it to a population defined by durable cultural and behavioral defects, which make it impervious to social intervention. Proliferation of underclass ideology has rationalized retreat from social provision and underwritten a punitive turn in social policy. It has also articulated with the class dynamics driving black politics to generate a basis for an urban neoliberalism steered by an increasingly interracial or biracial governing class committed to diversity and market-driven social policy. New Orleans provides a useful case examination of these dynamics, both through reconsideration of the character of racial transition in local politics in the 1970s and 1980s and through analysis of the forces shaping the post-Katrina political regime. New Orleans’s political development, pre- and post-Katrina, exposes the inadequacy, indeed the class character, of a critical politics based on antiracism as a frame of reference for pursuit of egalitarian interests. More hopeful signs lie in emergence of a strong labor voice in the city.