Ethnic and Racial Studies· 2026Q1
Race, class and totality: left disputes over how to think and know
- 1citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
This article argues that left-wing debates on race and class are hindered by conflicting assumptions about grand theory, particularity vs. totality, and epistemology, rather than just competing primacies.
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Key points
- Left-wing debates on race and class are hampered by conflicting assumptions about grand theory and epistemology.
- The article examines disputes over particularity versus totality and the primacy of social systems.
- Key theoretical frameworks analyzed include Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, decoloniality, and postmodernism.
- The paper moves beyond conventional debates on competing primacies to explore underlying ways of knowing.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
This article engages with several of the contributed chapters in On Class, Race, and Educational Reform (Darder, A., C. Hayes II, and H. Ryan. eds. [2023. On Class, Race, and Educational Reform: Contested Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury]) to explore deeper issues in political and social theory that undergird the left’s longstanding race-class debate. These include conflicting beliefs about grand theory, particularity versus totality, categorical primacy among social systems and “oppressions”, and epistemology. The pertinent contested frameworks are Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, decoloniality and postmodernism/poststructuralism. Race-class debate has conventionally tangled over competing primacies, and such queries should indeed continue. The article, however, seeks to plow deeper, to examine certain competing assumptions and ways of knowing that may impede left discussion – on race, class and more.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗
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