TITLE:
Between Racialization and White Supremacy: Another Marxist Response to Sean Walton
AUTHORS:
Ayodeji Bayo Ogunrotifa
KEYWORDS:
White Supremacy, Racialisation, Black Radicalism, Racism, Marxism
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.10 No.2,
February
23,
2022
ABSTRACT: Following the debate between Marxists and the
Critical Race Theorists (CRT) over the analytical utility of the concept of
White supremacy in the contemporary discourse on racism, this paper offers an
additional Marxist response to Sean Walton’s article to complement the existing
Marxist thoughts on the debate. This paper further deepens the discussion on
racialization as the general descriptor of racism in western societies, by
introducing the class context in which racialisation has sustained and
maintained racism in the contemporary era. Racialization is defined in this
paper as an ideological process that involves racialising benefits, privileges,
and opportunities to one group [possibly an ethnic group] over other groups by
the capitalist ruling class and the state, and legitimising it by using
policies, media, laws, regulations, and institutional practices as a means of
entrenching division and disunity in the society and preserving their system of
control under capitalism. Following this definition, it is argued that racism
is being reproduced through the process of racialization in the contemporary
western society. In the overall discussion on racialisation and White
supremacy, the ideology of racism was espoused, and the future of racism as
articulated in Critical Race theory and Black radicalism is reviewed.