Abundance, Scarcity, and the Race/Class Short-Circuit

Just as black struggle is taken to stand in for working-class struggle, so too is the present enemy of black struggle—the police—taken to stand in for the capitalist class.

Stuart Hall famously described “race as the modality in which class is lived, the medium in which class relations are experienced.” The claim has served as a point of departure for contemporary theorists of race and class, including Nikhil Pal Singh and Asad Haider. Its utility lies in sidestepping the question of the existence of race itself: to thinke…