​In the summer of 2020, the largest protest movement in U.S. history surged across the nation and reverberated in global demonstrations of solidarity. Voices in the streets demanded the dismantling of prisons, borders, and police, calling not for reform but for abolition, redistribution, and radical transformation. Protesters understood racism as a structural force, asking not for infrastructures of violence to be softened through better officer training or diversity workshops, but for the defunding and dismantling of policing, carceral systems, and border regimes themselves. And for a moment, it seemed as if a true racial reckoning might be underway. 

Yet the revolutionary clarity of those demands was swiftly absorbed and deflected as Amazon, Walmart, and other corporate giants declared that Black Lives Matter, branded themselves as allies, poured resources into diversity trainings, and rescripted the cry for abolition as calls for representation and more “Black faces in high places.” This is the hallmark of liberal antiracism, a politics of inclusion and interpersonal bias correction that leaves intact and untouched the machinery of racial capitalism. In contrast, the Black tradition of radical antiracism — carried forward by luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Kwame Nkrumah, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jamil al-Amin, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor insists that racism is inseparable from capitalism itself, and that justice requires dismantling the structures of policing, prisons, borders, and militarism that sustain the extraction, expropriation, and exploitation of an underlying racial capitalism.

When Larry Fink, billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the largest multinational investment management company in the world, wrote a letter in 2020 to colleagues of racism as a “deep and longstanding problem in our society and must be addressed on both a personal and systemic level,” did he mean canceling his donations and corporate influence on the New York City Police Foundation?1 Terminating BlackRock’s investments in arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, and the military-industrial complex supplying weapons for the wars in the Middle East? Redistributing the vast wealth he manages to confront the grotesque scale of global inequality? No, his response to “systemic” racism was not to focus on systems at all, but to “talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships... and [build] a more diverse and inclusive firm.”2 In other words, the solution to structural racism was to double down on interpersonal bias work and liberal antiracism’s familiar script of diversity and inclusion.

Interpersonal remedies matter, but they are painfully inadequate for structural injustices. Antiracist work “within” and “among” remain necessary, but it must not be confused or substituted for the work “beyond.” The racially differentiated effect of Covid was not rooted in individual prejudice, poor health habits, lack of education, or other narratives that gaslight communities of color. Such factors may always be present, but the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on nonwhite people was structurally rooted in the political economy of racial capitalism: the exploitation of “essential” labor, precarity of housing, unequal access to healthcare, policing of lockdowns and health mandates, unchecked outbreaks within prisons and detention centers, and the scapegoating and intensification of racial discrimination. It is the structural which frames the interpersonal, as racial capitalism organizes our reality through educational apartheid, mass incarceration, segregated neighborhoods, redlining and bluelining, segmented labor markets confining workers to unequal tiers, persistent wage gaps and job insecurity, and militarized borders that inscribe violence on collective life. From the slave patrols of the plantation to the strike breaking squads of the factory, policing has always functioned to guard property and control labor. Border regimes allow capital and goods to freely move across borders, while migrant labor remains violently restricted. The vilification of migrants as terrorists, criminals, drug dealers, “illegals who are taking our jobs” and “bogus asylum seekers” rehearses the old script of colonial racial capitalism. Most forcefully, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, renowned public scholar-activist, punctuates how racism and capitalism have always been structured together:

Detention and deportation are not aberrations at the edges of racial capitalism but border violence designed to preserve a global racial division of labor. 

The violence persists not because officers or capitalists fail to examine their biases, but because the system itself requires racialized control to sustain exploitation. Racism has never been incidental to capitalism; it is one of its core operating principles. To be an antiracist, then, is not merely to change minds or diversify institutions, but to collectively expose structures that require diseased imaginations to rationalize inequality. Antiracism means dismantling the infrastructures of racial capitalism hiding in abstract financialized economies, systems of land ownership, and global trade agreements that codify and normalize extraction. Antiracism means committing to the redistribution of wealth, repairing deep inequalities inscribed upon our world for centuries, and prophetically reimagining beyond the strictures of racial capitalism where political economies serve life rather than devour it. 

1 Morris Pearl, “Dear Larry Fink: it's time to stop lavishing your wealth on the police,” Guardian, August 1, 2020.
2 Alexandra Sternlicht, “We Must Do More—What CEOs Like Tim Cook, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink Say About Racial Inequality Protests,” Forbes, June 1, 2020.

​We no longer believe that witches ride on broomsticks or that witchcraft was at work in the mysterious illness and the contagion of panic that swept throughout Salem in 1692. But for false accusations to gain traction, go to trial, and result in imprisonment and executions, there had to be widespread complicity from public officials and institutions willing to give legitimacy to spectral evidence. Physicians pointed to witchcraft as the cause of illnesses, ministers publicly confirmed signs of the devil, magistrates conducted interrogations and pushed for prosecutions, judges and the apparatus of the government gave the go-ahead, all enabling the escalation of mass hysteria and the very real consequences of the Salem witch trials.

In their seminal work, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012), sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields draw a compelling analogy between witchcraft and racecraft. Both are systems of belief, a form of social alchemy, that explain real events through imaginary causes. Just as witchcraft attributes misfortune to malevolent acts of imagined witches, racecraft rationalizes the unequal distribution of privilege and disadvantage by constructing race. This sleight of hand turns the aggressor’s action of domination and exploitation into perceived traits of the victim’s racial identity — a kind of “magic” that disguises systemic inequities by attributing them to supposedly inherent characteristics of racial groups. Racism conjures race, not the other way around: 

We do not first have “race” and then “white/black” and “red,” with “yellow” and “brown” thrown in later. Rather slavery invents race to justify exploitation, designating some as temporary indenture and others as permanent chattel; and through the official apparatus of slave codes, race serves to entrench racial hierarchies and protect the political economic interests of slaveholders and elites. Even in the aftermath of slavery, the genius resides in manipulating racial designations through divide-and-conquer strategies to redirect dissatisfaction and, more worrisome, uprisings and revolution. Before anything else, race was a category of labor. Racial oppression and economic exploitation have always been entwined in capitalism, as insightfully and powerfully recognized by the Trinidadian-American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox in his groundbreaking work Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948):

Too often, antiracist work narrowly emphasizes identity — prioritizing diversity, inclusion, representation, multiculturalism — while subordinating deeper questions of political economy. As a result, it fails to ask the critical questions, like exclusion from or inclusion for what? Predatory capitalism and a gig economy that offers no labor protections? A narrow identitarian framework that treats race as the cause of racism, rather than its consequence, reinforces the very category of race it seeks to dismantle. Racial identities are not standalone truths. They have always served as ideological cover for an underlying racial capitalism working to maintain hierarchies of labor and wealth. By narrowly focusing on identity without interrogating the structures that give it meaning, we obscure the actual interconnected determinants of systemic oppression. 
Does our current conversation on race and racism get us further or does it instead leave us cornered? Increasingly, the dominant identitarian framework, which narrowly treats identity as foundational for shared life, feels limited in its explanatory power.

It feels at once too easy (collapsing vital, wide-ranging conversations about our political economy into questions about personal identity) and too rigid (unable to account for how race operates within the broader complexities of racial capitalism). But without that wider context, we risk losing both moral clarity and strategic direction for actual change.

What if identity, when divorced from a wider liberative practice, actually stands in the way of liberation itself? What if identity is less about essential qualities that determine who belongs where and more about discovering how we are interconnected, in and through all our differences, and actually belong to one another? What if identity only arrives as an achievement from such shared struggle and solidarity, forged from revolutionary forms of love? What if the so-called race-class debate is a ruse grounded in notions of American exceptionalism, bewitching us into believing that unlike other nations shaped by class struggle, America is a case apart? That here, class exerts minimal influence compared to individual hard work and opportunity, while racial identity somehow bears the weight of history, exercising a singular and transhistorical axis of inequality? Witchcraft indeed. What is the discourse and prophetic vocabulary more capable of unveiling the interconnected roots of oppression and illuminating a way forward? 

All you Black folks, you must go All you Mexicans, you must go
And all you poor folks, you must go
Muslims and gay boys, 
we hate your ways
So all you bad folks, you must go
— "We the People" by A Tribe Called Quest, from the album, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (2016)

I confess, I have to make an effort these days, not to give in to a sense of hopelessness — a sin, according to the nuns who taught me. The all too prescient lyrics above by the hip hop band A Tribe Called Quest, written prior to 2016, now seems to serve as an anthem by the current Administration. All that I value is being challenged, tossed into the wind like fragile tissue. I am heartened that Jodi Pfarr, author of The Urgency of Awareness, came to Unity Church to help us figure out a way to make sense of our world and its cruel inequities; determined to change the status quo workshop by workshop. 

Working through the various lenses of individuals, institutions, communities, and, ultimately, policymaking, Pfarr has built an accessible framework through which we can better understand ourselves and others outside of our own narrow cultural and societal groups. Facilitating with humor and blunt vulnerability, she provides tools to help us visualize how our identities have been informed by our experiences and situations beyond our control. 

We live in a society that normalizes certain things or groups. Normalization means not having to think about how we are perceived, or worry about how we navigate the institutions and systems in our daily lives, or be misinterpreted or merely dismissed. 

Pfarr imagines groups as triangles that either point up or down according to their having been “normalized.” Left-handedness is considered a down-pointing triangle; right-handedness is a triangle that points up. A person with three or more up or down triangles is typically generalized by individuals, institutions, and communities in the dominant norm. As a consequence, individuals lose their personhood, and their needs are dismissed. The alternative is to become aware of our biases and assumptions, own and process them, acknowledge our emotions, and hit the “pause” button when we experience an emotion such as anger or shame in the process. 

It is becoming apparent to some of us that the dominant norm is moving us further away from a just world at an alarming rate. We need to start listening to those in non-dominant spaces who appear to be better positioned to tell us what is needed for true justice.

In reflecting on Pfarr’s engaging workshop, I am struck by the trajectory of Unity’s antiracism efforts, and sometimes wonder how much the needle has moved — if it has moved at all. For 25 years now, we have participated in workshops, read and discussed judiciously, listened to sermons, taken pilgrimages, educated our children and youth, taken cultural audits, and formed partnerships with moral owners. Our Ends Statements embed antiracism into every aspect of church community life. And yet, I know there are some who struggle with this work, even question its relevance, and/or effectiveness. 

I can recall a time, years ago, when an antiracism workshop experience would inevitably end in tears and even shame for some. Pfarr’s Urgency of Awareness takes a different approach, one that is relatively gentle. It is no longer a needle, tortuously sharp, that needs to move, rather, it is a noodle — a soft, slippery one that slides along a continuum. I am getting anxious. If we are to move that noodle, more of us need to share our stories of growth, discovery, and failure. 

Please do read, and share your stories (written or on video) with, the All Our Fullness project. This is an ongoing communal spiritual practice, all of it in service of the antiracist, multicultural world we profess to long for. 

For more tools to help you understand your inherent biases in the ways that you perceive others and how you can build the capacity to truly see others, visit Jodi Pfarr’s website, listen to her podcasts, and/or read her book, The Urgency of Awareness.
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Thanks to Ray Wiedmeyer for our conversation that helped to inform this article.