No, it isn't racist to talk about the working class

Liberal ideology's campaign of disnomination against socialist language continues.

Senators Chris Murphy and Bernie Sanders shouldn’t be defending embattled Senate candidate Graham Platner, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes for the New York Times. Voters have discovered in recent weeks that Platner has a Totenkopf tattoo, along with a history of sordid Reddit posts and a dubious background as a troop. Murphy and Sanders respectively described Platner’s actions as “mistakes” and “things that are stupid, things that were hurtful”; but their willingness to forgive, Cottom writes,

suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base.

While I can understand a left politics that finds Platner’s past disqualifying, I have to admit that I am baffled by the selective forgiveness here. Less than a year ago, Cottom was going on about how she felt “a sort of overidentification with a very qualified, high-profile, Black female leader” in Kamala Harris — whose past as a prosecutor ruined far more lives than anything Platner did. Five years ago, Cottom backed Joe Biden — despite his central role in passing the 1994 Crime Bill and multiple accusations of sexual assault. One might object that in those latter cases lesser-evil logic compelled her to vote for Biden and Harris, but no one is actually arguing that Platner is the greater evil. No one has claimed, for example, that his tattoo has caused more harm than opponent Janet Mills running defense for a juvenile prison.

That aside, what really caught my attention was Cottom’s broader point…

I cannot swear to know the minds of men like Murphy and Sanders. But, were I a betting person, I’d wager someone else’s riches that they know racism and xenophobia are inextricably linked to America’s inchoate understanding of class politics. They know that “working class” has become a powerful political totem of its own — a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns.