By "class-only" warriors, I mean the likes of Adolph Reed, who pretty much claims that all issues of race, or nearly all, are ultimately reducible to issues of socioeconomic class. I mean the likes of Reed touter Doug Henwood, who ultimately blocked me on Twitter because of this.
I am building on an old post about Reed, where I take on his claim that New Mexico is one of the whitest states in the nation. It was part of a broader effort of his to largely diss Black Lives Matter.
The meat of that, relevant to this piece, follows.
A few months about, when discussing Black Lives Matter raising Police brutality issues across the country, he responded rhetorically, wondering why police brutality was so high in New Mexico when it's one of the whitest states in the country, in his claim.
And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%.
I tie it to this new piece from High Country News about American Indians' problems with police violence, and how a "Native Lives Matter" movement has struggled more than Black Lives Matter to gain traction.
First takeaway? This:
In the West, as in the rest of the nation, Native Americans are the racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement, at a rate three times higher than whites.
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And, no, socioeconomic class didn't lead to Indian marginalization. Indian marginalization led to them being poor. Indian marginalization, not poverty, led to them being considered as having few rights.
That's simple. Or, it should be.
Here's much of the "why":
Several factors contribute to that statistic, including the lack of mental health services (nearly half of the victims had histories of mental illness) and the often-strained relationship between Native Americans and non-native police. Many tribes are under the jurisdiction of nearby non-tribal authorities, leaving cities and counties struggling to come up with the additional policing resources. According to researchers at Claremont Graduate University, 83 percent of the deadly encounters between Native Americans and law enforcement involved non-tribal police.
Now, per this interview with Reed, it's possible that identity politics CAN have a neoliberal bent. Yeah, and so can mercantilist trade policy. Neither one HAS TO be such, though. Reed also comes very close to making this into a zero-sum game. People who are concerned about racism — and racism against people of individual racism, not a blanket word game like Reed claims — and class issues as well could argue that Reed himself is playing into other hands.
I should add, per this Existential Comics issue, that it's "interesting," during the time I followed him on Twitter, that Henwood just about never, if at all, mentioned Frantz Fanon. I'm not sure Reed does a lot, either.