Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory? Verso Student Reading on Race, Class, and History

Every year, right wing politicians choose a new target for the culture war. While in the past they fulminated against “communists” and “Judeo-Bolshevism,” the position of the radical other as an agent of civilizational collapse has been filled by many subjects through the years. Recently we’ve been alerted to the scourge of “cultural Marxists,” antifa, and BLM terrorists. The latest embodiment of evil is “critical race theory,” which has been mentioned by Fox News alone more than 2000 times. The readings below all circle around the function of race within capitalism, with particular attention placed on how race works as an ideology of ascriptive difference. Race works to define people by what they are as opposed to what they do, and functions as a construct of direct social domination and a tool to dissolve solidarity and keep workers in competition.

What are the historical roots of race in capitalism? How should we combat racism from the left? Is there a radical anti-racist politics that is distinct from liberal perspectives that focus on identity, privilege, and personal responsibility, and which naturalize racism as an outlook people are simply born with? Should the goal be to ensure that positions of privilege, wealth, and power within capitalism are distributed more fairly, or to eradicate the very roots of inequality that give rise to racial oppression in the first place? 

All books are 40% off as part of our Student Reading Sale. Ends September 30 at 11:59PM EST. See all our student reading lists here.

A previously unpublished collection of Rodney’s essays on race, colonialism and Marxism.

For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of “whiteness” — a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late firebrand covers the breadth of his life and insights as an autodidact steel worker, a groundbreaking theoretician, and a bitter enemy of racists everywhere.

An exemplary work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis.

Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Thanks to his personal history and political acumen, we see America’s apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people.

Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. 

The Invention of the White Race is a comprehensive, tour de force analysis of the cruel ingenuity that gave birth to racism and made our modern world. Long heralded as a classic study of the origin of white privilege from the activist who first coined the term, Theodore W. Allen’s work remains an indispensable resource for making sense of our conflicted present, a reference point for everyone from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Nell Irvin Painter to Reni-Eddo Lodge and Aníbal Quijano.

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.

A powerful challenge to the way we understand the politics of race and the history of anti-racist struggle.

Race reductionism is used as a tool to criticism "racism" without tying it to capitalism. Touré Reed in this rigorously constructed book criticises this view, arguing that the fate of poor and working-class African Americans is inextricably linked to that of other poor and working-class Americans. 

A remarkable book on the international operations of racism and the global meaning of Black Power.

A powerful document of theday-to-day realities of Black women in Britain.

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas.  

Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally, he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West. 

With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power

Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Charting the different modes of domination that engender specific regimes of race and the strategies of anti-colonial resistance they entail, the book powerfully argues for cross-racial solidarities that respect these historical differences. 

The story of how enslaved women struggled for freedom in the West Indies.

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital outlines a profound and rigorous critique of postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. 

A classic work of Black feminism.

A classic history of the role of Black working-class struggles throughout the twentieth century.

Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contemporary racism? How can it be related to class divisions and to the contradictions of the nation-state? And how far, in turn, does racism today compel us to rethink the relationship between class struggles and nationalism?

The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. Du Bois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually nearly 80 years ago in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. Part essay, part autobiography, Darkwater explicitly addresses significant issues, such as the oppression of women and Eurocentric standards of beauty, the historical rise of the idea of whiteness, and the abridgement of democracy along race, class, and gender lines. 

How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming “Water is life”.

Highly acclaimed dissection of the “new racism,” from one of the greatest radical black intellectuals of our time.

All books are 40% off as part of our Student Reading Sale. Ends September 30 at 11:59PM EST. See all our student reading lists here.

Decolonial Marxism

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...

Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity

by Noel Ignatiev

Foreword by David R. Roediger

Edited by Geert Dhondt, Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan

For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of “whiteness” — a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late fi...

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...

The South

by Adolph L. Reed Jr.

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but ...

Racecraft

by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most p...

The Invention of the White Race

by Theodore W. Allen

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. Historical debate about the orig...

Abolition Geography

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, of...

Mistaken Identity

by Asad Haider

Toward Freedom

by Touré Reed

For many progressives, racial identities are the engine of American history, and by extension, contemporary politics. They, in short, want to separate race from class. While policymakers and pundit...

The Groundings With My Brothers

by Walter Rodney

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, th...

Heart Of The Race

by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

Introduction by Lola Okolosie

Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...

The American Crucible

by Robin Blackburn

For over three centuries, slavery in the Americas fuelled the growth of capitalism. But the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the late eighteenth century challenged this “peculiar institution” an...

The Making of New World Slavery

by Robin Blackburn

The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought—succes...

If They Come in the Morning

by Angela Davis

The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...

Traces of History

by Patrick Wolfe

Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on A...

A Kick in the Belly

by Stella Dadzie

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

by Vivek Chibber

Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universali...

Invisibility Blues

by Michele Wallace

First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...

The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

by Ron Ramdin

This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain’s labour needs. It places in an historical context the developm...

Race, Nation, Class

by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein

Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contempo...

Darkwater

by W. E. B. Du Bois

Foreword by Manning Marable

Introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

“I have been in the world, but not of it,” W.E.B. Du Bois begins this book, a continuation of the project he began in his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, describing the devastation of segr...

Our History Is the Future

by Nick Estes

In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenou...

Beyond Black and White

by Manning Marable

Many in the US, including Barack Obama, have called for a 'post-racial' politics: yet race still divides the country politically, economically and socially.In this highly acclaimed work, Manning Ma...

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