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Hi Aaron,
Thanks for reading and completely agree: academia needs to be decolonised. There’s much work for all us ahead, especially academic journals and editors, who should know better.

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Hi Aaron,
You’re right to say that scholarship has moved in recent decades. Colonialism made capitalism possible; the two are inextricably linked. Any Marxist serious about racial justice and undoing class stratification should understand this. That the author doesn’t grasp this is a giveaway that they aren’t reading widely enough (in fact, not reading much academic work at all).

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Hi Jon,

I’ve backed up my arguments with scholarly references, including to Dr King’s own work, which the author did not do (and as you’ve also failed to do). Non-Black people may, sadly, imagine a whitewashed vision of Martin Luther King Jr to project their own inaction on racial justice. However, his own writing shows he was a scholar, activist and leader committed to Black liberation. Non-Black people can better engage with this legacy by reading his original works, and addressing anti-blackness in our own communities, instead of supporting feelpinions from unqualified White people. We can all join in on a ‘multiracial coalition’ to fight class struggles; but we cannot do this with integrity if we ignore anti-blackness.

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Hi little jon quijote,
Since you’ve linked to it, your Twitter stream (brotherbeat) was filled with this exact copy paste comment to scholars who critiqued the Ethnic and Racial Studies article, as bait to have protracted, similarly copy-pasted arguments with each individual. You’ve used similar wording on ‘can you point to the success of the left’ a couple of dozen times since June 2019, and similar phrases in relation to race (‘left is eating itself’), and you’ve used the term ‘identity politics’ to critique anti-racism and other discussions on discrimination no less than a few hundreded times the past two years.

I’m allowing your comment merely to show how easy it is to spot a troll account, verifiued easily within only a minute or so, and why it’s not worth engaging.

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Hi JProf,
Being ‘socialist’ is not a cloak from academic critique. Marxism has been critiqued for ignoring race, gender and sexuality inequalities for much of its history, which is why other branches of Marxism, and socialism more broadly, have engaged more thoughtfully about how economic and class struggles are impacted by race/ gender/ sexuality. The article lacks academic rigour and instead rests on pop culture right wing sound bites, like the nonsense term ‘identity politics.’

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LMAO, this somehow peer-reviewed journal article by the grad student was pure trash and his arguments have been for decades. Social movement scholarship, especially related to racial capitalism, has demonstrated it’s not a lack of attention to class by POC but rather white leftists’ (not all but still far too many) inability to understand how race and class have from the start intentionally formed the foundation of capitalist exploitation (not to mention the forms of oppression connected with that nexus). Even ignoring the academy, your critiques from your alleged Marxist positioning shows how out of step you are with Marxists. Come into our contemporary world and put away your tired, failed analyses and arguments.

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“Szetela positions King as someone who reframed his vision to suit White sensibilities.”

This is false. Szetela is obviously aware that King centered “racial justice” in his organizing. The point that you either fail to comprehend — or are simply choosing to ignore — is that King’s strategy to achieve racial justice involved building a mass movement of solidarity that united a multiracial coalition of black, brown, and white people. The fact that you see “multiracial class struggle” as a code word for “white sensibilities” reveals the deep underlying flaws in your entire worldview.

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