This is fine for the tiny majority of people from oppressed groups who make it into elite jobs, and it is of course important that such opportunities are widened. The most comprehensive and far-reaching critique of disparities discourse comes in “Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and Its Analytical Discontents,” coauthored by Reed and Merlin Chowkwanyun. Again, I often get – on the elite media like the ABC – I often get criticised or sent up, and I don’t object to that, by the way, for catching public transport a lot.

There is no singular, transhistorical “Black Liberation Struggle” or “Black Freedom Movement,” and there never has been. If anything, this project simply serves as a demonstration of neoliberalism’s victory, as Reed explains in his essay “ Django Unchained, or, The Help,” “Nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. When faced with, say, a Sanders-style option of making existing jobs better—so that they guarantee a living wage, benefits, and job security—or swapping out workers to match the racial and gender breakdown of the US census and avoid discrimination lawsuits, employers are not really faced with an option at all. Three of his best-known books are Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004) and The Trouble with Diversity (2006). The relentless exploitation they experience also gives workers a unique vantage point from which to understand the fundamental drives of the system, ‘to see society from the centre as a coherent whole’.Nate Parker’s 2016 dramatization of the 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, The Birth of a Nation (which quite intentionally sets itself up as an answer to Griffith’s film from a century earlier), is an even more strident display of the inclination to subordinate the complexities of actual history to a narrative of black heroism in the face of universal and unremitting white supremacy and racism. Because people without wealth are denied jobs all the time, we just happen to describe this as competition. Consider the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ vote to accept a draft plan of reparations recommendations that include a one-time payment of 5 million dollars, the complete discharge of all personal debts, a guaranteed income of 97,000 dollars, and the ability to purchase any home in the city for 1 dollar. Yet, as Anwyn Crawford notes, liberal commentators enthusing about the speech paid very little attention to Gillard’s role in passing, on the very same day, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Act 2012, a bill slashing slashed payments to single parents.

The second thing worth mentioning is the report’s use of the word “disproportionately,” which does a great deal of conceptual work.There are few scholars, if any, with a more penetrating analysis and critique of contemporary black politics than Adolph Reed Jr. Stein’s work shows the depth, breadth and intellectual richness that a grounded historical-materialist perspective can bring to scholarship and understanding. On the contrary, the nature of wage labour provides a basis for the expression of a very different politics. But what would be the consequences of an anti-sexist campaign that oriented to the bottom of society rather than to the top? From Clover’s and Singh’s standpoint, of course, that appeal on behalf of the working class itself looks racialized.