There are moments in this work where the tension is no longer theoretical.
I have experienced this most clearly not only in classrooms, but in organizing spaces where the stakes are immediate and the consequences are real. For over five years, I served as a steering committee member and later co-chair of the Caucus of Working Educators in Philadelphia. We ran campaigns in both 2016 and 2020 to lead the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. In the first campaign, there was a deliberate effort to center racial justice as inseparable from class struggle. The analysis was clear. The conditions facing educators, including underfunded schools, unsafe facilities, inequitable resources, and labor exploitation, could not be understood apart from the racial hierarchy shaping the city. Unfortunately, that clarity did not hold.
Do We Center Race or Class?
By the second campaign, concerns began to surface more explicitly. In meetings and strategy conversations, there was a growing belief that centering race too directly risked alienating white teachers, particularly in the Northeast. The shift was framed as necessary for coalition-building. If the goal was to win, then the language needed to move toward a broader class-based message.
What followed was not simply a difference in messaging. It was a fracture in analysis. At the time, I did not yet have the language to fully name what we were experiencing. I understood it as disagreement over strategy and audience. It was only later, returning to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, that I recognized the pattern more clearly. What we were encountering was not a disagreement that could be resolved through better messaging. It was a tension produced by attempting to separate forces that operate together.
Some argued that de-emphasizing race would make it easier to build unity. Others held that doing so would reproduce the very conditions that made unity fragile in the first place. These were not abstract debates. They shaped decisions, relationships, and trust within the organization. Over time, those differences hardened. The division that emerged was never fully reconciled.
That experience clarified something that continues to shape both my organizing and my work as an educator. The separation of race and class is not simply an intellectual mistake. It is a practical problem with real consequences. When race is treated as secondary, it does not disappear. It continues to shape how policies are interpreted, how trust is built, and how people experience participation and power. When class is treated as secondary, material conditions remain unchanged, even when representation shifts. In both cases, the result is instability. Coalitions struggle to hold because they are built on partial understanding.
To say that race and class are co-constitutive is simply to say this: they shape one another.
The Assumptions We Carry
You cannot fully address one while ignoring the other. But even this recognition leads to a deeper question. If our explanations have been incomplete, what frameworks have shaped how we understand both race and class in the first place? Much of our analysis rests on a shared way of thinking about the world. By this, I mean how we are taught to know what we know. It includes what counts as progress, what counts as value, and what assumptions we carry about our relationship to land, labor, and one another. Capitalism is grounded in extraction. It treats land as property, labor as a resource, and growth as a measure of success. As Cedric Robinson argues, this system was racialized in its formation. Economic exploitation has always been tied to racial hierarchy.
At the same time, classical Marxism, while offering an essential critique of class exploitation, often remains tied to a similar orientation. It challenges who controls production, but does not always question the assumption that increased production defines progress. This is where the argument becomes more difficult, and where I continue to wrestle. If both systems rely on an extractive relationship to land and resources, then the difference between them is not as complete as it is often presented. The disagreement is not only about who benefits. It is also about whether the relationship itself is ever fundamentally questioned.
The work of Sylvia Wynter pushes this further by asking us to reconsider what we mean by “human” in the first place. If our dominant systems are built on a narrow definition of the human, one shaped through European and colonial history, then both capitalism and its critiques can reproduce that limitation even when they oppose one another. In practice, this shifts the kinds of questions we ask. A lesson is no longer only about how resources are distributed, but about whose lives are recognized as fully worthy of care, stability, and repair.
I do not raise this as a settled conclusion. I raise it because it helps explain why partial solutions often reproduce familiar problems. This becomes visible again when we return to questions of strategy. There are those who argue that class-based policies such as universal healthcare, housing, and wages can address inequality without centering race. Others suggest that emphasizing race risks fracturing coalitions that might otherwise form around shared economic interests. I have seen this argument play out in real time. The assumption is that minimizing race creates unity. In practice, what often emerges is something more fragile.
Ignoring Race Is Not A “Strategy”
When race is not named, it does not disappear. It operates indirectly, shaping how policies are implemented, how trust is built, and how outcomes are experienced. What appears as unity at the surface often reveals itself later as division. At the same time, I do not dismiss the concern. Building multiracial solidarity is difficult work. It requires navigating differences in experience, perception, and material reality. It is not resolved by simply naming race and class together. That tension remains. And it should remain visible.
In my work as an educator, this understanding shapes how I approach the classroom. It is not enough to teach race and class as separate units. Students must be given opportunities to examine how these forces interact within the same system. In a unit on housing in Philadelphia, students analyze historical redlining maps alongside present-day eviction data. They read policy documents, but they also engage local histories, including accounts from communities that have experienced displacement across generations.
These are not easy conversations. Students do not always arrive at resolution. At times, they resist. At times, they simplify. That, too, is part of the process. What changes, when this framework is taken seriously, is not just what students know. It is how they think. They become more attentive to connection. They begin to question explanations that isolate what has always operated together. They develop the capacity to hold complexity without rushing to resolve it. Ultimately, the work of social justice requires coherence. It requires that we move beyond reduction, question the frameworks we inherit, and remain honest about the tensions we have not resolved. Avoiding that complexity does not produce unity. We have already seen what it produces.
