For a century and a half, socialist movements in the United States have been dogged by the allegation that they fail to understand or properly address the complexity of racism. While socialism has surged in popularity in recent years, centrists and liberals have seized on socialism’s “race problem” as fuel for a host of self-serving distortions: that Marxism is inherently Eurocentric; that socialism is a “white movement” that “only cares about class”; that Bernie Sanders was unelectable because he lacked nonwhite support; and that because some New Deal programs were racially discriminatory, universal programs such as Medicare for All are somehow innately exclusionary or even racist.

Most of these are willful obfuscations — part of the liberal tendency to separate racial justice from economic justice and frame “anti-racism” in terms of moral reckoning and individual “work” rather than material redistribution. Others are sincere misunderstandings. Some are, however, rooted in demographic realities, made worse by deunionization, rampant segregation, and the decline of working-class institutions. Indeed, despite holding less racist attitudes than liberals, the disproportionately white, urban, and college-educated composition of present-day organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has exposed the barriers between socialists and other sections of the working class.

Socialists of all colors have largely attempted to address and overcome rather than sidestep these hurdles. They have done so through internal education and by spotlighting the rich, heterogenous tradition of black socialism, the essential role socialists played in anti-colonial struggle, and the many socialist experiments in the Global South. Socialists of color have refused to be whitewashed by the liberal commentariat, and contemporary debates regarding so-called identity politics have mostly spurred on racial justice work. In the case of DSA, they have furthered the growth of the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus and the recruitment of candidates of color.