Given the complexity of the societal role of racism in the past and today—here in the United States and elsewhere in the world—it is not surprising that a number of different theories have been advanced by academics to grapple with it. For our purposes, these four (and only in brief) will have to do: (a) Racism from a Marxist perspective; (b) Racism and Feminist Theory (Intersectionality); (c) Race and Law: The Critical Race Theory perspective; and (d) the Racial Formation Theory perspective. An immediate question that arises is which of these theories has the best explanatory/analytical power? The answer is that none of them and all of them. That is, each provides us with valuable insights into a given dimension of the subject; therefore, one would do well to consider all of them together, as each has some value in advancing our understanding of the role of race/racism in a society like this one— that is, a capitalist democracy in the twenty-first century. What is important to note is that all of them consider, at least sub-textually, the end goal to be a victory for social justice for all, where no one is subjected to marginality and oppression of any kind (be it classism, sexism, racism, disablism, etc., etc.)

Marxism

Marxism, at least in its traditional approach, does not recognize racism as a subject worthy of study in its own right; in fact, the view is that it is a distraction from what should be the focus of all concerned with social justice in capitalist societies: namely, class and class struggle. After all, Karl Marx himself was, like many intellectual contemporaries of his day, a racist, but not, it is very important to emphasize, in the sense of rejecting the humanity of people of color (as represented, for example, by the Nazi perspective), but in the sense commonly prevalent today among many white liberals: that people of color remain intellectually backward, not necessarily for biological reasons but for historical reasons, and therefore continue to need the guiding hand of whites—a view characteristic of the “Great White Father” syndrome—if they are to achieve progress in their struggles for social justice.

Not surprisingly, Marx saw European imperialism (including settler-colonialism) as a great boon for people of color in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and elsewhere. Eschewing the horrendous atrocities in which millions died, the massive exploitation, and the widespread injustice that was visited upon peoples of color across the planet by European imperialists, he saw imperialism as progressive force dragging them out of the mire of socioeconomic backwardness and the “despotic” tyranny of their rulers onto the path of socioeconomic progress and eventually liberation from all tyranny, including imperialism itself, as well as that of their traditional rulers. In terms of his overall vision, he saw all workers across the planet eventually uniting, irrespective of color or ethnicity, against that foremost tyranny that subjugates and exploits all workers: capitalism.

In recent decades, especially in United States, Marxist revisionists (labeled Neo-Marxists), have come up with an alternative view on the matter of race/racism: that it should be considered as one of the three interrelated avenues of oppression, with class and gender being the other two. Moreover, some Neo-Marxists have also come to conclude that racism can be quite compatible with the interests of some segments of the working class—specifically, that represented by (though this is not the concept they apply), the labor aristocracy. The idea of a labor aristocracy in a capitalist society may appear to be an oxymoron par excellence, but upon brief reflection this is not necessarily so. It speaks to the fact that some sections of the working class enjoy socioeconomic privileges far above the rest because of their structural location within the U.S. economy and simultaneously, for historical reasons, their white skin color (the labor market segmentation theory). Compare, for instance, the fortunes of the working class in the so-called hospitality industry with that of the working class in the aerospace or auto industries.

It is important to emphasize, however, that in one sense all stripes of Marxists are correct in asserting that in the last instance race/racism in capitalist societies is an epiphenomenon. How so? Do this thought experiment: Imagine a capitalist society where there is no race/racism (or its equivalent ethnicity/ethnicism) because the population is racially/ethnically homogeneous. Now, does that mean injustice and oppression in such a society will no longer exist? In other words, resolving the race/racism issue does not automatically eliminate injustice and oppression; it only takes care of one form of oppression. (This is where the concept of intersectionality becomes highly relevant, because it alerts one to the multifaceted nature of injustice and oppression in capitalist societies.)

Feminist Theory (Intersectionality)

Modern Feminist Theory takes a similar approach to the Neo-Marxian approach to study of race/ racism/racialism, in that it applies the concept of what it calls “intersectionality,” to the study of race/racism/racialism where its concern for gender (not class, as in the case of the Neo-Marxists) as its key organizing principle of its intellectual endeavors is tempered by the view that women of color in a capitalist and racist society are also simultaneously subjected to racism, classism, and other forms of oppression.

The actual lived experiences of women of color for centuries, and up to the present, in the U.S. (and elsewhere, of course) has always been, and often continues to be, subject to a multiplicity of oppressions—and often simultaneously. (Consider for a moment, a woman of color who is poor, who is gay, who has a physical disability, and who faces gender discrimination at work.) However, it took a woman of color, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a professor of law, to give a name to this multidimensional experiences of oppression, via a landmark article in the late 1980s: intersectionality. [1]

Her theory of intersectionality, it is important to point out, was an effort at addressing the racism of many white Second Wave feminists who had tended to wantonly neglect in their work the experiences of women of color. [2] White women very often refused to see that not all oppression facing women could be put down only to patriarchy, but rather that a substantial population of women also faced, at one and the same time, other equally powerful forms of oppression—such as that represented by classism and racism. After all, in so far as racism was and is concerned, white women also stand implicated (this was true in the past, and it is true today).

As Professor Crenshaw stated:

Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. (p. 140, source: see note below.)

It is important to emphasize that Professor Crenshaw’s critique of white feminism did not rest only with its failure to comprehend the intersectionality of oppression, but she also pointed out an important methodological flaw in the extant white feminist theory: the inability of its architects to come up with an original methodology not influenced by a white male viewpoint. As she explained: 

The value of feminist theory to Black women is diminished because it evolves from a white racial context that is seldom acknowledged. Not only are women of color in fact overlooked, but their exclusion is reinforced when white women speak for and as women. The authoritative universal voice--usually white male subjectivity masquerading as non-racial, non-gendered objectivity--is merely transferred to those who, but for gender, share many of the same cultural, economic and social characteristics. (p. 154, source: see note below.)

(Text continues below, however, you must study the images too.)

Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory, as the name suggests, is the application of critical theory (the idea that the fundamental basis of all critiques of social injustice must be rooted, above all else, in the critique of ideologies of oppression) to the study of race. This approach first gained currency in legal studies beginning in the 1980s when a sizable number of legal scholars who were people of color had achieved a sufficient mass in numbers in law schools to come together and challenge existing thinking by white scholars on the relationship between law and race. They were driven by the need to determine why the struggle for civil rights that the civil rights movement had produced had made little headway in eradicating institutional racism in United States.

Their conclusion was that law was also to blame in the persistence of institutional racism; moreover, critical race theorists called upon traditional scholars in the area of critical legal studies who studied race and civil rights to abandon their “color-blind” racism (in other words, they were accused of being institutional racists) and look afresh at how law could advance the continuing struggle for social justice—especially from the perspectives of race, class, and gender.

Although there are many variations in how Critical Race Theory is defined, as one would expect with any theory about social justice (and most especially one dealing with race) a common approach taken was that articulated by Professor Laura E. Gómez, faculty director of UCLA's Critical Race Studies Program, in response to the announcement by the ignoranti in the Trump Administration announcing that Critical Race Theory was “antiAmerican propaganda.” She stated:

Critical race theory both borrows from and departs from the liberals and the leftists in the legal academy. While the field is diverse, with many conversations and disagreements within it, critical race scholars rejected the nihilism that characterized the leftist critics who argued that equal rights served to legitimate ongoing subordination. Instead, critical race theory embraced the transformative vision of the long civil rights movement, replete with partial victories won through painful, protracted struggle, including the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution after the Civil War and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the 1960s.

Like the liberals, we recognize that those laws made a difference in the lives of those subordinated on the basis of race and national origin and represented the fruits of resistance to white domination. At the same time, we are more critical than the liberals about the limits of law to create institutional change. American history teaches us that white supremacy has a way of shape-shifting in response to law reforms, even when they are well-meaning. (SOURCE)

Racial Formation Theory

Racial Formation is a term first coined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their book Racial Formation in the United States (first published in 1986, but now in its third edition) and it’s a play on the Marxian concept of social formation, and therefore, as can be deduced, suggests the historically-determined permeation of the factor of unequal “race relations” at all levels of society, and intersects with, but does not displace, such other dimensions of the social structure as class and gender. For Omi and Winant, in a country such as the United States, race as an avenue of oppression can take a life of its own separate from such other dimensions of oppression as class and gender. That is, given that race is a socially constructed category (and not, as we have seen, a biological category), its social construction has been in the service of specific “racial projects,” depending upon a given historical time period, up to the present. Under these circumstances, “race” is an unstable ever changing category, depending upon the needs of the bourgeoisie in a given time period. For example, in recent U.S. history, at one time ethnicities such as Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, Greek Americans, Russian Americans, and so on, were not considered “white” and therefore were not considered “full” U.S. Americans. Today, this is no longer so. 

To give another example: racial formation theory would suggest that the intensifying class warfare perpetrated by the bourgeoisie on the U.S. working classes through the processes of globalization (symptomatic of which, above all else, is the massive income and wealth inequality, perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history, effected through the subversion of procedural democracy by the bourgeoisie), has called for another racial project in order to distract sections of the white working class from this warfare, and it is represented by racist right-wing populism in which the immediate target, that is first-level target, are not African Americans, as used to be the case traditionally, but other people of color, all swept together into the category “illegal immigrants” (which, from the perspective of this populism, e.g., Trumpism, not surprisingly, does not include white immigrants, legal or illegal, from Canada, Europe, and elsewhere)—and this is regardless of whether they are U.S.-born citizens or not. Of course, other factors may also come into play in this diversionary effort, such as gender or homophobia, but in this instance it is ancillary. Note also that just because African Americans are not the first-level target of this racist populism, they are not completely off its radar; they remain a second-level target.

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NOTES

[1] The theory behind intersectionality was first articulated by Professor Crenshaw in her article published in 1989 in the journal University of Chicago Legal Forum, titled "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." She had written it as a criticism of white feminists who, quite often, remained naively insensitive to the racism that black women experienced in United Sates--a problem that continues to plague many of them to this day, even in academia, because of their colorblind racism. 

[2] Feminist history, that is Western feminist history, to be specific, is sometimes divided into "waves" (or eras) where certain themes and concerns are identified as dominating a particular wave. This historiographical categorization, while not entirely accurate (given that it focuses primarily on the struggles of white women, and the fact that struggles and concerns of each wave do not entirely disappear but continue in each successive wave), is nevertheless useful to some extent in the task of documenting analytically the long and continuing struggles of women for democratic inclusivity--in terms of human rights, civil rights, the rule of law, and so on. So, very, very simplistically put: the First Wave (roughly 1800s to 1920s) marked the struggle for the right to vote (emblematic of which, in the U.S., for example, was the eventual passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote at the behest of the women's suffrage movement. The Second Wave (roughly 1960s to 1990s) constituted the struggles of women (primarily white middle-class women) for participation in the economic sphere--reminder, working class women have always participated--with one important difference, that this participation should be on par with that of men in terms of working conditions, pay, promotions, respect and dignity, and so on. The Third Wave feminism (1990s to early 2000s) was about respect and dignity in all its forms (e.g., freedom from sexual violence and harassment in the workplace), the broadening of feminism to include the struggles of women of color (intersectionality), and making further advances in political participation and representation--e.g., in the U.S. Congress. The Fourth Wave (2010-2020s) continues the struggles for respect and dignity, political participation, assaulting intersectional oppression, etc. but incorporates tools of the digital revolution in these struggles. These tools have become relevant as well for resisting right-wing male-chauvinist propaganda in social media, and the sexist uses of AI (Artificial Intelligence).