Debating Ellen Wood on race/class 20 years ago, Adolph Reed excoriated her economism: "Racial stratification emerged as a mutually constitutive element of capitalist institutions and evolved and became institutionalized, in tight practically indissoluble connection with them."

He further outlined as the principle task, requisite to creating a robust working-class movement, frontally challenging ideologies of ascriptive differentiation, civic hierarchy and worth underpinned by conceptions of "essentialized, naturalized human difference."

Worth revisiting, particularly as Reed has shifted towards Wood's position in the interim, namely that "class is constitutive of capitalism in a way that race is not," a view he characterized then as the font of wrong-headed debate for over a century. https://advancethestruggle.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/how_does_race_relate_to_class-2.pdf

My sense: Obama years solidified Reed's sense that neoliberalism buttressed by identity politics became a more durable source of ideologies of differentiated ascriptive worth --that in a cunning of history now undermined potential for working-class solidarity as racism once did.

Ironically, this involved invoking precisely the kind of counter-factual thought experiment and "thin" conception of capitalist logic that he chides Wood for -- i.e., the idea that 1%er wealth concentration is fine by neoliberal lights as long as it is race/gender diverse.

Of course such a capitalism does not/has never existed anywhere; and the methodological protocols for understanding the operations of race/class/gender ordering within US capitalism have not actually changed so much over the past two decades.