Antiracism = Anticapitalism? An Argument for Multiple Analytical Perspectives

Whenever we analyze the world, we’re bound to privilege some channels of analysis over others. We can be purposeful in choosing to view the world through a particular lens, thereby discovering valuable insights into how society might be understood. Recently, theorists have done this to great effect by putting racism at the heart of the American story. The 1619 Project and the positioning of racism as central to the country’s past and present has illuminated the full extent of the horrors perpetrated against people of color, showing racism to be far more than an “unfortunate aside” to some noble American tale.

Problems arise when people assume the lens they’ve applied to the world for the sake of seeking new insights actually represents the world in its objective state, and think all matters in society can be adjudicated in accordance with the insights this lens has provided. 

Take, for example, Ibram X. Kendi’s case for “anticapitalism” in How to Be an Antiracist. He argues that racism and capitalism are inextricably linked, and so we ought to oppose capitalism in order to dismantle racism. You can see how one would come to that conclusion if they were to apply one lens — that which focuses on racism’s presence at the heart of the American story — to understand the world. The problem is that, in order to reach more supple conclusions, we must force ourselves to simultaneously consider how the world appears through other lenses. When considering the issue of capitalism, we should consider how the world looks when viewed through the lens of global poverty. When we do so, we see that the spread of markets has coincided with a remarkable decline in the rate of global poverty. With this insight in mind, dismantling capitalism seems like a very bad idea. 

(* It’s worth noting that Kendi employs a rather unique definition of “capitalism.” He rejects the notion of capitalism as “markets and market rules and competition,” instead defining the term as “the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin.” This is quite the bit of intellectual chicanery, forming an argument against something by redefining it as self-evidently abominable. Even if he means his “anticapitalism” to focus on exploitation, his use of the term suggests an opposition to capitalism as traditionally construed — that is, an economic system relying on markets to determine prices and wages.)

So, what’s our way forward? It seems an “objective” understanding of human society is impossible to come by. No matter how much distance we take from our object, when the object is something as complicated as the entire world, we simply have to privilege some sets of factors over others. It makes sense, then, to purposefully apply a lens to our observations without drawing all our conclusions from that single perspective. We can use various lenses, various perspectives, to gather a sizable collection of insights. These insights, sometimes obnoxiously contradictory or incoherent, will then comprise the closest thing to “objective reality” we’ve got. It’s from this amorphous blob of convoluted insights that we‘re forced to decide what ought to be done.

We live in a world where racism is linked with capitalism, and capitalism is linked with higher standards of living. The response to such a conundrum requires less wholesale eradication and more surgical extricating. It’s a messy business that requires the insights provided by new perspectives, with the latest takes on racism central among them.