Reviews | What structural racism really means

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In other words, to the extent that Cox had only one problem with the caste analysis of American racism, it was that he was ignoring racial conflict far from its origins in the development of American capitalism. The effect was to treat racism as a timeless force, outside the logic of history.

We can reiterate that the caste school of race relations works under the illusion of a simple but vicious truism, Cox wrote in a section criticizing Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdals’ famous study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem. and Modern Democracy. One man is white, another is black; the cultural opportunities of these two men may be the same, but since the black man cannot become white, there will always be a white caste and a black caste.

In Cox’s reading of Myrdal, caste exists as an independent force, directing the energies and activities of blacks and whites. The solution to the racial problem, in this view, is to shake white people from their psychological commitment to the caste system. Or, as Cox sums it up, if the race problem in America is first and foremost a moral issue, it must naturally be resolved by moral means.

But that, for Cox, is nonsense. We cannot overcome racial prejudice by proving it to be wrong, he writes. The reason is that racial prejudice is only a symptom of a materialistic social fact. Specifically, racial prejudice is supported by a particular socio-economic need which guarantees strength in its protection; and, therefore, it is probable that at his centers of initiation force alone will overcome him.

For most of American history, until the Civil War, this socio-economic need was the production of tobacco, agricultural commodities, and ultimately cotton. After the war, it was the general demand for cheap workers and a flexible and divided workforce from the planters of the South and the industrialists of the North. Whether in the United States or around the world, Cox argues, it is capitalist exploitation and not innate tribalism that is at the root of racial prejudice and conflict.

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