Overcoming Black Mistrust of the Left

In 1939 discussions with members of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Leon Trotsky asserted, “We must say to the conscious elements of the Negroes that they are convoked by the historic development to become a vanguard of the working class.… If it happens that we in the SWP are not able to find the road to this stratum, then we are not worthy at all. The permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie.” It is the duty of every revolutionary in this country to fight to win black people over to communism, not out of moral obligation, but out of recognition that doing so is crucial to make a revolution in this country.

The task of winning black people to communism and unifying the working class across racial lines is even more pressing now that we are in a reactionary period and attacks are raining down on workers and the oppressed. Currently, there is very little to no integrated struggle, and the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights Movement have all been gutted or overturned. Look at what just happened to the Voting Rights Act. Liberals who used to be all about diversity have dropped all talk of opposing black oppression now that they no longer have anything to gain from it, and the left seems to have followed suit. This is not good. Black people need to defend themselves, and socialists should be trying to give them answers in the here and now.

We understand that socialism is the way to liberate black people. So, why aren’t the black masses flocking to us, and why are most left groups majority white? As a black leftist, I often attract other black militants at demos and events. They express an interest in Workers Vanguard, but they often say that they would not have approached me if I were white. Black mistrust of the Marxist left is a very real issue that the left must fight to overcome.

But most left groups don’t even try. Some even put off doing anything for black people until after the revolution. In an article dedicated to explaining “The Roots of Racism in America” (9 July 2025), the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) state: “When the working class unites across racial lines, overthrows capitalism, and organizes a workers’ government, we will uplift wages, benefits, and conditions for everyone.” Sure, but what about today? This gets everything backwards. Should black people (and everyone else) just wait however long it’ll take to finally make a revolution to be uplifted? The daily lives of black people are filled with poverty, unemployment, police brutality, crime and countless other afflictions. The fight against black oppression cannot wait until after the revolution, it must proceed now. In fact, only by forging unity on the basis of fighting against black oppression are we going to be able to make a revolution in this country.

Many black militants do not believe that the left can actually provide a road to black liberation. This is largely because the left is seen as a bunch of white people who are colorblind. The common view is that the left only emphasizes class while downplaying the importance of racial oppression, leaving these militants to think that communism is just a “white thing.”

Of course, every left group is anti-racist and calls for interracial unity—but most do not offer a path to win the working class to the fight for black liberation. Instead, they conciliate the existing leadership of both the economic struggle of the working class and the black struggle. When intersecting strikes and the unions more broadly, they exhibit some form of “economism,” de-emphasizing the fight against black oppression in the name of getting workers to close ranks around economic demands and not let “divisive” issues like race get in the way. This is the position of even “progressive” union bureaucrats. But it is very difficult to achieve economic gains without taking racial divisions head-on.

In the same way, whenever black struggle erupted in recent decades, most of the left tailed behind the liberals at the head of that struggle. But the liberals are allied to a wing of the capitalist class, whose power and profits are sustained by black oppression. Liberal movements will only ever bring defeats. Both economism and the conciliation of liberalism reinforce black militants’ mistrust of the left, ensuring that the left remains mainly white.

Economism: Burying the Fight for Black Equality on the Job

Everyone is aware of how divided U.S. society is. Workers are divided by race, gender, nationality, craft and tier and constantly at one another’s throats. All socialists in this country advocate that all workers join together and fight. The key question is how to build this unity and on what basis.

Many on the left believe that emphasizing the common economic interests of all workers is all that is needed to lay the foundation for black and white workers to transcend racial divisions and “unite and fight.” They hope that, because high wages, shorter hours and better conditions benefit everybody regardless of race, the championing of such demands will spur interracial struggle. This is often expressed in slogans like “no war but class war” and “black and white, unite and fight” and by saying “class struggle” over and over.

This is all well and good, and we’re all for integrated class struggle. But simply declaring “unite and fight” is not going to cut it. Many black people will look at you like you got three heads if you tell them that they gotta unite with white people. It just sounds like you’re telling them to join hands with the enemy—a completely suicidal prospect. Growing up in this horribly racist society, black oppression defines the daily life of every black person and shapes their entire consciousness. They are brutally segregated into the lowest rungs of society, forced to fight twice as hard to get basic opportunities that they see their white counterparts get with ease and must deal with everyday racism, subtle and not so subtle.

Experiencing all this without any white person standing up for them only reinforces the false idea, pushed by the racist white ruling class, that the white population as a whole is responsible for black oppression, rather than just those actually calling the shots. Because of this reality, black people have developed a strong distrust of white people, who they often see as their oppressor or, at best, not willing to fight against racist conditions. To overcome this distrust, you cannot just will this reality away, but must directly confront it.

Despite its militant veneer, just yelling “class war” while offering no real perspective of how to fight against black oppression only maintains the racial divisions within the working class and deepens black mistrust of socialism. To insist that the working class unite across racial lines without proposing a single demand directed against racial oppression amounts to calling on black workers to abandon any fight for their specific needs because it might offend white workers. For black workers, this means that they should shut up in the interest of unity and puts the responsibility for “getting past race” on them.

Of course, black and white workers will sometimes fight together for economic demands on strike picket lines. But this unity rarely lasts. Black workers, like white workers, need more money and other improvements to make life a little better. The left thinks that, because a rising tide lifts all boats, this is good enough for black people. But a rising tide that does not even attempt to take on the barriers to black progress will only preserve the lower status of black people. A militant strike for economic demands might temporarily forge unity, but then black workers have to go back to work in the lowest tiers, in the least skilled positions, and sometimes even in segregated unions. The racist status quo remains unchanged, and all the old divisions come roaring back.

How to Forge Working-Class Unity

This begs the question: how do you actually win white workers to fight for black liberation? Let’s start with what not to do, and that’s make moral appeals. Liberal moralizing is a big reason that many workers have moved to the right and now see the struggles of the oppressed as a threat to their interests. For decades, the liberals told workers that they must sacrifice their well-being to ensure the advancement of minorities. White workers were told to be happy and embrace diversity when more immigrants were brought into the workforce and their own jobs slipped away. They were told that black people are oppressed because white people are just too privileged. They were lectured at DEI workshops to unlearn their internal biases and accept that being a white man is bad. If they said anything against holding spots for black and other minority workers while the overall unemployment rate was rising, the liberals called them racist. The liberals have instilled the belief into the working class that whatever a black person gets has to come at the expense of a white worker. And the left has only made the problem worse by echoing liberal arguments and calling anyone who is concerned with their own declining conditions a chauvinist.

The answer to the question of how to motivate the working class to fight for black liberation is not to indulge in moral righteousness, but to point to the link between this fight and the struggle to better the conditions of the entire working class. Black people come into the workforce at the bottom, and their degradation sets the standard for the rest of the class. The bar for everything from wages to healthcare and general quality of life is set so low because of the position of black people in society. Successfully fighting to bring black people up from their degraded position will raise that bar and remove a significant downward pressure on everyone else’s conditions. Separate is unequal by its very nature, and breaking down barriers for black people by fighting for things like quality, integrated housing and education would benefit white workers too.

So, instead of making interracial struggle depend on ignoring black oppression or browbeating white workers and never getting anywhere, working-class unity can only be forged in common struggle against black oppression to elevate all workers. Marxists must place the fight against black oppression at the center of their activity in the working class and society in general. Instead of trying to forge unity on the lowest level of economic demands, Marxists must direct the working class to fight for their needs in a way that explicitly confronts black inequality, which is a great obstacle to getting those needs met. For this reason, all workers stand to gain from championing demands that take on black oppression.

For example, in many industries, tiers have been introduced to ensure a cheaper pool of labor, create divisions in the workforce and weaken the unions. In most cases, black workers are confined to the lower tiers, and so the tier system institutionalizes racial divisions among workers. Sometimes, workers at the top view simply abolishing the tiers as a threat to their hours, wages and benefits. To unify everyone around the fight to abolish tiers and fully integrate black workers, Marxists fight to both make everyone a top-tier worker and shorten the workweek with no loss in pay so that those already at the top do not lose out.

We must also be aware that talk of the working class fighting on behalf of the oppressed sounds like a complete joke to many black workers, especially now when lots of their coworkers went for Trump. The union bureaucrats inspire no confidence. They range from liberals to raging chauvinists, and they usually help the bosses fuel racial divisions in some form. All this only reinforces black people’s view that the unions could never be mobilized to fight against racial oppression or, even worse, that the unions enforce their oppression. If left groups were serious about making a revolution, one of their main tasks would be to go into the unions and fight to overcome the existing divides between the working class and the left and between the working class and the specially oppressed. Above all, the left must put up a fight in the concrete against the union bureaucracy.

Stop Trying to Revive Failed Liberal Movements

Many years of liberal betrayals made right-wing populism attractive to working people. Trump was propelled back into office, and attacks have been nonstop ever since. From racist purges of black workers to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, black people know they are under the gun. A year and a half of Trump has had a real chilling effect, resulting in some black people reluctantly retreating back to the Democratic Party, looking for some means to shield themselves from the turbulent storm. The Democrats don’t even have to offer much. They certainly haven’t started making any noise about black oppression. Instead, they have just stood by and tried to seem less crazy than Trump. It looks like they will score big in the midterms.

The left must fight to win black people who are rightly scared away from “lesser evil” politics, but this requires presenting an actual way out that is counterposed to liberalism. But most left groups do the opposite. They look to revive liberal social movements to beat back Trump’s attacks. But such failed movements helped put Trump back in office by fueling divisions in the working class and breeding demoralization when nothing really changed. Just look at the “No Kings” demos. The Democratic Party dominates these liberal demos, and their entire purpose is to prepare a Democratic victory in November and in 2028. But this doesn’t stop the left from treating them as the foundation for an anti-Trump movement.

This is nothing new. The left has a long history of economism in union struggles and liberalism in social movements. An example of the second is the Left Voice article “Repression and Raids in Chicago Show Why Black People Must Join the Fight Against Trump” (7 October 2025), which was written in the lead-up to the October 18 “No Kings” march. The article emphasizes, “If Black people mobilize like we did during the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, we not only play a uniting force of the various movements against Trump, but we ensure that our specific issues are part of the agenda and addressed.”

Black issues do need to be at the center of the movement against Trump, but any fight against black oppression will be futile as long as it remains a liberal, Democratic Party-aligned movement. This is a key reason why black people, who are usually at the forefront of most mass movements, are not mobilizing today like we did in the past. Look at what happened the last time black people took to the streets.

The failure of BLM demoralized a generation of youth. The liberal cop reform program that dominated BLM channeled justified rage into Biden’s election campaign, leaving the racist status quo intact. We cannot continue to go down the same dead-end road. The left must break out of its liberal shackles and clearly differentiate itself. Otherwise, why would black people take the risk of joining some fringe socialist group that requires much more of their time and money than mass liberal organizations or the Democrats do? At least black Democrats lie and say that voting for them will at least do something for the black community ’cause black people are supposed to look out for each other.

What Should the Left Do?

By now, no doubt perceptive readers are asking, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” That is, for all of our insistence that it is necessary to fight black oppression, the Spartacist League remains largely white, like most other left groups. Why should black youth or workers trust the Sparts? This is a fair question, especially when one considers that long before 2020, we no longer saw ourselves as attempting to provide leadership in struggle against either the trade-union bureaucracy or the politics of BLM. Since that time, however, through internal discussion and political fights, the SL/U.S. has reaffirmed that our purpose is to provide revolutionary leadership to the struggles of the oppressed, as part of the rearming of the International Communist League (see “For Black Trotskyism,” WV No. 1177, 17 March 2023).

We have been doing work consciously orienting toward this perspective. While we do not have all the answers and surely have much more work to do, we think we can offer some guidance on how to start building more links between the left and the black community.

An example of the work we have done is the recent relaunching of our journal, Black History and the Class Struggle. This issue seeks to show black militants that liberalism has only betrayed the black struggle and bred reaction, and the way to fight back during this reactionary period is to take up a class-struggle strategy that puts the fight for black liberation at its center.

We have also been doing concrete work among the oppressed. For too long, Trotskyists have been known in community groups as wreckers, who stand on the sidelines shouting about socialism and who care more about peddling their newspapers than actually engaging in the daily struggles of black life. Many black people do not automatically see how Lenin or Trotsky relate to their lives. Hell, when I was first presented with the Communist Manifesto, my first thought was: “What does this have to do with black people?” The left for too long has only oriented to majority white college campuses and not had any orientation to the youth and workers in the black community. You can still do sales at NYU, but send some of your comrades to East New York too.

Housing and the fight against police brutality are key issues where the black question must be put out front. We are doing work in the projects to fight against privatizations independently of Democratic Party politicians who falsely claim to support public housing residents. For far too long, the public housing movement has been tied to the Democrats, but the only way to push this movement forward is to link it to the unions. This link is natural because a lot of tenants are union members.

We also have our campaign to Open Police Archives (OPA). Cops still terrorize black communities and barely anyone makes a fuss; something must be done. We want to rebuild the struggle against police brutality on a different basis from BLM, one that exposes the liberal politicians who say they care about black people as the liars they are and that looks to mobilize the working class in defense of the oppressed. We encourage everyone on the left to join us in these fights.

We make a point of bringing the OPA campaign into the unions to get their social weight behind the fight for justice for the cops’ victims. Our supporters in the trade unions have launched committees to combat racial and other divisions in their workplaces and begin to transform the unions into real fighting forces for the workers and oppressed. They have sought to rally opposition to tiers and made black liberation a key part of their election platforms for union office. During the 2023 auto strike, we laid out how UAW members could maximize their fighting strength by championing black liberation. In all this work, we have sought to fuse the black struggle and the union struggle.

The black question has been the historic problem of the socialist left in this country, with the gap between the left and the black masses widening year after year. The purpose of acknowledging this reality is not to make white leftists shed guilty white tears, but to make conscious to them that they must fight to close this gap. To paraphrase Trotsky, if we cannot find a road to the black masses, then we are not worthy at all.