Paragraphs 1-4: Carmel Laniado

The question you pose in the end is very similar to the reflection that Wilson's piece sparked within me as well. On the one hand, the race-neutral approach he proposes entails the danger of hiding or masquing the history of racialized oppression that African Americans have undergone and that still affects them economically, as Wilson's data itself seems to be hinting at. However, it is interesting to read Wilson's argument through an intersectionalist lens, as it has also been done in other posts. Such reading turns into a further tool to counter Wilson's argument, at least nominally: seeing the intersections behind the social location and the position of unprivilege of African Americans does not cancel racialization and make their discrimination "race-neutral", but emphasizes the connections between the frameworks lying behind that discrimination or unprivilege. I think that what captured my attention the most in trying to answer "how can you speak about the poverty of all communities through a lens of racial neutrality, when one has specifically been targeted by slavery and systemic oppression?" while thinking about intersectionality and having Wilson's argument in mind, is that what the latter actually seems to compel us to do in order to answer is to take a fully Marxist approach, which, I have to say, I quite second in this case. Indeed, even "slavery and systemic oppression" which target a specific community would be defined as an example of structural exploitation of workers by the capitalist class, which in this case is embodied by white masters (or maybe by white privilege itself) versus African American workers. Now, the acknowledgement of material inequality as basis for oppression and position of unprivilege, if taken alone and as a totalizing force, would lead us to necessarily agree with Wilson and see the structural oppression of all workers as the root cause of all oppressions. Nevertheless, I still believe it is fundamental today, in the light of critical theory and especially its developements in terms of decoloniality theory, to merge that awareness which equates the struggles of workers across the global board without forgetting further layers of internalized inequality that have been growing throughout history. Now, then, the question that I feel urged by is: will there ever possibly be a communal class consciousness of workers, and thus a revolutionary overthrow of the ruling class, if it is true that we cannot equate (and thus unite) "the poverty of all communities" and that of those that have "specifically been targeted by slavery and systemic oppression"?