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By: Haywood Cabral
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.
As Donald Trump’s second presidency is nearing the 1-year mark, we’ve seen a number of attacks directed at working class communities of color. From ICE raids targeting racialized immigrants, to National Guard deployments in blue cities with large Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities, Trump has made it clear who he is targeting and in many ways, it’s nothing new.
This has not come without organized community resistance. We’ve seen people confront secret police agents to protect members of their communities across the country, we’ve seen organized ICE watch groups form, such as LUCE Immigrant Justice Network in Massachusetts. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has been a part of these efforts, but insufficiently; historically, majority white socialist or communist organizations have struggled to maintain solidarity with BIPOC communities. This is a trend that we cannot continue. DSA needs to become an organization where BIPOC communities feel welcomed as leaders and organizers, and trust DSA as a representative of their class interests.
To do that, we must understand where the socialist and labor movements have struggled to adequately consider people of color and the consequences of that, why DSA’s class makeup skews so heavily towards the labor aristocracy, and what DSA can do to fix that.
Race, Class, and White Supremacy Culture
Race, constructed, began to emerge roughly around the sixteenth century to facilitate European settler-colonialism. As Spain struggled to gain a foothold in what is now the United States, due to the resistance of the Indigenous population, it became clear to British colonial leaders that a broader front of settlers would be needed in order to ensure that colonies had the manpower to control both the Indigenous peoples and African slaves. The British colonial power embarked on a pan-European project, constructing whiteness over a labor force of enslaved African and Indigenous workers. This meant that, unlike the Spanish, the British were willing to overlook the religious differences of the time to a degree, and accept Catholic, Protestant, even some Jewish settlers and rebrand them as “white.” This allowed Britain to have a larger pool of settlers to bring to the “New World” and fight enslaved Indigenous and African people, while Spain struggled to find enough Catholics to risk their lives.
Many of these European settlers were able to become landowners as these colonies eventually developed into the United States, something that would not have happened for these people had they stayed in Europe. The land transfer necessary to provide those settlers their landownership and subsequent class stake in white supremacy was bloody – a mass land grab through the genocide of Indigenous people, providing the basis for the class collaboration between the settler working class and the bourgeoisie.
This new “white” identity was solidified in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. While Bacon’s Rebellion tragically targeted the Indigenous population, it was in response to rampant poverty in the Virginia Colony and saw interracial unity primarily between white indentured servants and black slaves. The British colonial power was terrified by this and made explicit concessions to the white indentured servants to facilitate the class collaboration with the ruling class and deepen racial lines between black and white workers.
This class collaboration between the settler working class and the bourgeoisie under the new category of “white” created a culture of white supremacy as a means to control and oppress Africans and Indigenous peoples through manner and mannerism, policing the very nature by which they engage and incentivize socially, a white supremacy culture reinforcing whiteness’s own standards. We see this still today in a number of ways, from black hairstyles being deemed unprofessional in the workplace, to black women being labelled too loud or too masculine, to black men and women being seen as more dangerous or more threatening.
We can see these dynamics replicated in many DSA spaces, where white workers unconsciously follow the same script, reinforced by a rank-and-file and leadership that also consists primarily of workers from the white middle classes. People of color in DSA have frequently encountered class reductionist (meaning reducing all other social questions to class and nothing else) responses to systemic racism, the deprioritization of organizing projects by white comrades, and the silencing of those who call out not just racist microaggressions, but also misogyny and ableism, by calling their critiques “uncomradely” backed by an uncomradely reluctance to commit to intentional organizing in primarily BIPOC cities and neighborhoods.
This culture programs people into whiteness, especially but not exclusively white people, through the dominant class ideals and values (i.e. bourgeois ideals and values) necessary to perpetuate the racism that maintains these class perspectives. This tends to foster feelings of superiority, fear of black people, and this great replacement theory-type of attitude when seeing black people succeed. In turn, among BIPOC workers and organizers, this creates its own cycle of self-hatred and inferiority. In this, we can look to similarities with what Fanon discusses in The Wretched of the Earth about the psychology of the colonizer versus the colonized, where shame leads to envy of the colonizer’s social position and a desire to replace the colonizer. In the US context, this is manifested when BIPOC workers want to be “one of the good ones.”
Racism in Labor and Socialist Movements
Historically, many mainstream elements in the labor movement had no problem excluding BIPOC workers from their idea of working class solidarity. During the Civil War, the nascent labor movement in the North largely favored deportation of African slaves instead of radical abolitionism galvanized by the Black general strike and Black-led organizing ferment in movement centers like Boston. Unions were segregated, with the exception of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the question of civil rights and self-determination for black workers largely ignored. White workers generally viewed enslaved people as low-wage competition for the meagre set of jobs allowed by the ruling class, not as fellow workers to be organized — the class collaboration of whiteness in tact. This culminated in the New York race riot where white working class New Yorkers began to blame free black people in the city for the Civil War, slaughtering black people around Manhattan Island and beyond.
When the New Deal was passed, the labor movement celebrated it as a victory, ignoring the qualification that black workers were disproportionately represented in agricultural and domestic work and excluded from many of the labor protections of the New Deal. Most of labor celebrated the New Deal as black tenant farmers were evicted, rehired, and forced to work for extremely low wages.
Racism and white chauvinism existed in the early years of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) — but to differing degrees. Both the SPA and the CPUSA initially held the position that black liberation and civil rights were simply extensions of the labor movement and therefore required no special consideration. The SPA even had some of their chapters in the South supporting segregation because black workers were sometimes used as scabs, thus they believed that black workers were a threat to their job security, a sentiment that should sound familiar. The SPA chapter in Louisiana adopted “The Negro Clause” in which they opposed disenfranchisement of black people but endorsed segregation both in society and in the party.
CPUSA eventually would develop the line of self-determination for black people in the Black Belt, a part of the South spanning roughly from Virginia to Texas, two hundred counties that at the time had majority black populations (most still do). This led to CPUSA prioritizing organizing in the South among black workers and gave the party real legitimacy among the black working class, however the white chauvinism among the party leadership ultimately led to this effort being relatively short lived.
As a result, the black middle class and black bourgeoisie would come to dominate the coming Civil Rights Movement, which was a mass uprising of the black population in the US that had the potential to serve as a revolutionary struggle against capitalism and internal colonization. However, the necessary organizing for this to happen did not occur, and as a result the Civil Rights Movement became one led by the class interests of the black bourgeoisie and black middle class. The energy of the movement was focused on integration, not on liberation. CPUSA and SPA’s lack of sustained organizing among black workers allowed the black bourgeoisie to take the lead, and the pursuit of integration was largely in the interest of that class.
This isn’t to say that the Civil Rights Movement was not impactful for all black people, or even that socialists and communists were uninvolved, but rather that integration primarily allowed already economically well off black people increased access to the benefits of US capitalism by removing the legal barriers that limited them. It did not do nearly enough to lift up the millions of black working class families forced into ghettos and poverty. We see the evidence of this in the differences in income between black and white families, the continued segregation, and mass incarceration that immediately followed the Civil Rights Movement.
DSA: How We Got Here, Where To Go
DSA’s membership and largest base of support consist largely of white, upper middle-class professionals, even if some campaigns like Zohran Mamdani’s may have shifted these dynamics in local landscapes where organizing projects have prioritized BIPOC communities. This may not seem like a crucial problem at first glance, but the history of settler-colonialism in the US, and its operation in organizational cultures, shows that the fact that the DSA base remains so limited also profoundly limits the organizing, potentials, and efficacy of DSA organizing. When we think about the material interests involved in land back for Tribal Nations, or autonomy for black workers in the Black Belt, this is often perceived as in contradiction to the interests of white workers, particularly because most white workers today take on the interests of the capitalist class in the name of whiteness.
Now this isn’t to say that white workers and intellectuals can’t contribute to the movement, when the history of Abolitionism, Civil Rights, and the George Floyd Uprisings shows us that they can. I only suggest that the base of any socialist revolution in the United States (i.e. the classes most heavily represented) must center on BIPOC working classes. The BIPOC workers represent the most oppressed elements with the most to gain from revolution and have demonstrated a history of powerful and successful class struggle, lineages that connect to regular contact with the repressive apparatus of the state and intentional underdevelopment that provides the necessary material conditions for mass radicalization. It’s no coincidence that the ruling class incarcerates this population at such high rates, as a means of counter insurgency against a population most likely to rise up.
DSA was formed out of a merger between the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM), forming around the politics of the American New Left. This movement was a primarily white student and professional class movement, led primarily by college students against the Vietnam War. Membership bumped in response to movements such as the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders, the activist core of which skewed white. Bernie struggled significantly with black voters, particularly older black voters who were less familiar with him than with Clinton in 2016, a trend that continued with Zohran in the New York City primary back in June before Mamdani’s heavy prioritization to socialist politics and targeted constituency oganizers led to significantly more work in particularly Black communities. When he did so, and showed his campaign to be viable, the wave of support was massive — demonstrating the reservoir for socialist politics within the Black working class.
Solving DSA’s struggle to center BIPOC workers is twofold. DSA must prioritize organizing in BIPOC communities around issues impacting these communities most while also challenging the implicit white supremacy culture within the organization. The latter is the place to start, because it does no good to organize in BIPOC communities if DSA’s culture only drives these members away from the organization. In short, DSA needs to seriously incorporate anti-racism into our organizational norms. DSA organizers need to understand that being in DSA does not absolve oneself from upholding racism and white supremacy, when one Yale study suggested that those who participated in the study and viewed themselves as far left and allies of the black community tended to simplify their vocabulary when talking to black people compared to when they talked to white people even more so than conservatives in the same study did. Now, of course, this isn’t to suggest that the left is secretly more racist than the Right, but what it does suggest is that the implicit bias assumes black people are inherently less intelligent and less capable of understanding complex words and concepts. And that is present in the minds of comrades, present even in those who consider themselves allies to the struggle of black people.
DSA members understand that the key to anti-racism is a systemic approach to combating racism rather than an individualistic one, but we still must call out microaggressions that occur against BIPOC members. We must stop ourselves and protect each other from quips and comments that make BIPOC members feel unmoored, antagonized, and alienated, all deeply disorganizing experiences, whether those come in the form of class reductionism or referring to accusations of racism as “uncomradely” critiques. This requires us to conduct systematic political education around what anti-racism is and the issues that face BIPOC communities in their unique experiences within the working class. We will also need to work to cultivate a culture where BIPOC members are able to call out microaggressions without facing accusations of “bad faith criticism” and “uncomradely criticism” by continuing projects like the wholehearted praxis presentation from the General Organizing Meeting (GOM) of the Boston DSA chapter in October 2025, to develop our collective ability to give and receive criticism constructively.
From there, we should shift priorities towards organizing BIPOC workers around issues that impact BIPOC communities most heavily. For Boston DSA, specifically, this could look like focusing on supporting tenant union networks like Greater Boston Tenants Union (GBTU) to help them expand tenant organizing in places like Dorchester, Roxbury, Hyde Park, Mattapan, Brockton, Fall River, New Bedford and other more diverse areas. Gentrification and massive rent increases in Boston has led to more and more BIPOC individuals being forced out of the city or forced onto the streets. Combined with redlining, these factors have also created a dramatically segregated Boston, with large chunks of the city’s BIPOC population in Roxbury, Dorchester, Hyde Park, and Mattapan. Tenant unions are a great method for fighting these processes. When tenants organize we are able to use our collective power, as the ones providing the rent the landlord so desperately craves, to fight rent increases, bad conditions, slow to respond landlords, and more. Many of these tenants are already organizing their neighbors to help fight evictions, but are systematically cut off from the time, money, and people power to do it on a larger scale. DSA and GBTU can provide these resources that will allow tenants to organize on a larger scale and lead this movement themselves.
Another example could be working with existing community groups on prison abolition, where the goal is to prevent a municipality from opening more prisons or prevent police departments from receiving more funding, complete with chokepoints and victories that can be fought by coalitions. This is particularly relevant today, with the intensification of ICE raids around the country, targeting BIPOC migrant workers and their families. Mass incarceration has disproportionately targeted BIPOC communities primarily as a means to quell any revolutionary energy by targeting those most likely to rise up against the system as a result of their material conditions and the degree of exploitation they face. Any reduction in the state’s ability to repress class struggle through mass incarceration would allow us to grow the socialist movement exponentially.
The point is to work in BIPOC communities, to build trust through praxis, to prove that DSA is an organization that will stand up for the right of self-determination for all oppressed nations.
DSA should take inspiration from some of the core tenants of CPUSA’s organizing in Alabama during the Third Period Era, emphasizing organizing in BIPOC communities around issues that particularly impact BIPOC communities, and committing to developing a base of BIPOC membership and leadership in these struggles. A great first step, which is already under way in Boston, would be developing neighborhood groups in these communities that can take on a lot of this work.
This is a process that will take years to see the fruits of, but this is the only way for DSA to become the party of the working class. We need our primary base of support to shift away from the white, upper middle class professional worker, and shift towards the heavily oppressed BIPOC workers in the United States and around the world.
Haywood Cabral is an engineer and a member of Boston DSA.
The post OPINION: DSA and the BIPOC Working Classes appeared first on Working Mass.
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