Race-Class: How to Build a Truly Multiracial Movement for Racial Justice and Shared Prosperity for All

Government violence against communities of color is rising to match the Trump administration’s rhetoric of racial fear-mongering. These outrages pose, at once, severe human rights challenges, and also, strategic cover for the right’s economic war on all working-class people. The progressive movement must speak forcefully to both racial and economic injustice. But how, when conversations about racism discomfit significant numbers of whites, and a colorblind economic populism leaves large parts of our base frustrated and alienated?

Our research indicates the key lies in a narrative that centers racial division as the principal weapon in a class war the rich are winning. For the last year, Ian Haney López (author of Dog Whistle Politics), Anat Shenker-Osorio (ASO Communications), and Heather McGhee (Demos Action) partnered in an ambitious multi-phase project to create an effective new narrative around racism as a divide-and-conquer weapon that generates both racist violence and surging economic inequality. We crafted, empirically validated, and field-tested the result against a range of existing progressive and reactionary frames—and narratives fusing race and class outperformed both colorblind economic populism and racial justice messages, as well as Trumpian white nationalist populism. We believe the race-class approach provides a route toward a truly multiracial progressive coalition equally and simultaneously committed to racial justice and shared economic prosperity. Please join us for a conversation, with an opportunity for questions and answers, introduced by Heather McGhee and featuring Ian Haney López.

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