The Relationship Between Race and Class

• Pages: 265-285
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

265

Chapter 12

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

RACE AND CLASS

I. Introduction

People of color disproportionately bear the burdens of poverty in

the U.S. today. In 2022, the poverty rate among indigenous people

was 25 percent.

1

This means that one in four indigenous persons are

impoverished. The poverty rates among black and Latine people were

better, but not by much—at 17.1 percent and 16.9 percent,

respectively.

2

People of Asian descent, overall, are doing well; the

poverty rate among this group was 8.6 percent in 2022,

3

better than

the national average of 11.5 percent.

4

However, some groups of people

of Asian descent are desperately impoverished. The poverty rate

among Burmese persons, for example, was 19 percent in 2022.

5

Significantly, non-Hispanic white people overall have very low rates

of poverty—at 8.6 percent in 2022.

6

Progressive thinkers about race cite the statistics above as

evidence of the close relationship between race and class in the U.S.

That is, if one has race privilege, one is more likely to have class

privilege. And the reverse is also true: If one lacks race privilege, one

is more likely to be unprivileged along class lines. These scholars

propose that there is a tight, frequently symbiotic relationship

between race and class. Professor Athena Mutua describes it in the

following way: “[R]ace itself is a system for allocating resources but

one that is part and parcel of, or intertwined with the class system,

even as it operates independently and relatedly as a belief system

that provides a ready justification for the racialized results of various

distributions.”

7

1

U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES: 2022, at 4 (2022)

(using the Official Poverty Measure).

2

Id.

3

Id.

4

Id.

5

Ziyao Tian & Neil G. Ruiz, Key facts about Asian Americans living in poverty,

PEW RSCH. CTR. (2024).

6

U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, supra note 1, at 4 (2022).

7

Athena D. Mutua, The Rise, Development and Future Directions of Critical

Race Theory and Related Scholarship, 84 DENV. U. L. REV. 329, 392 (2006) [hereinafter

Mutua, The Rise, Development and Future].

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

RACE AND CLASS

Ch. 12

To illustrate Mutua’s description, we might think of racial

disparities in wealth, which will be discussed in greater depth later

in this chapter. The short of it is that, on average, nonwhite people

have a fraction of the wealth that white people possess. This is due,

in part, to nonwhite people being much less likely to inherit wealth

than are white people. Nonwhite people are less likely to inherit

wealth because their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents

before them were, on account of their race, prevented from

accumulating it. Instead, their forebears were consigned to the

laboring class: They were placed in the group in the class system

whose labor would generate wealth for others. In this way, race has

been intertwined with the class system in such a way that resources

have been allocated toward some racial groups and away from others.

Indeed, the primary insight offered by philosopher Cedric Robinson’s

concept of racial capitalism is that the racialization of peoples has

facilitated capitalist wealth accumulation throughout history.

8

Further, Mutua’s description proposes that when nonwhite

groups disproportionately find themselves on the bottom of the

socioeconomic ladder today—because they have inherited

disadvantage, not wealth—racial narratives explain this result:

Black people are lazy and do not like to work, Latine people prioritize

family over work outside of the home, indigenous people are

alcoholics whose addiction makes them unproductive, Burmese

people prefer welfare over hard work, white people are naturally

industrious, etc. In this way, race “provides a ready justification for

the racialized results of various distributions.”

9

Mutua’s point about the intertwining of race with our class

system might deserve some elaboration. Many progressive scholars

have observed the intermeshing of our systems of racial ordering

with our economic systems. They invite us to think of slavery. The

institution of chattel slavery in the U.S. explicitly created a racial

hierarchy. Black people were the class that could be enslaved, while

white people were those who could never be slaves. However, the

reality that slavery was a profoundly race-based system should not

detract from the fact that it was also an economic system. One of its

purposes—some may even say its primary purpose—was to generate

profit from the labor of the enslaved.

10

8

CEDRIC ROBINSON, BLACK MARXISM: THE MAKING OF THE BLACK RADICAL

TRADITION (1983).

9

Id.

10

Indeed, Mutua describes slavery and Jim Crow as “economic systems meant to

facilitate the exploitation of black labor, to deny black material well-being, a nd to

assist the few in hoarding the resources created by the many.” Athena D. Mutua,

Introducing Classcrits: from Class Blindness to a Critical Legal Analysis of Economic