Author(s)

Ayodeji Bayo Ogunrotifa

Department of Law and Criminology, Royal Holloway, University of London|RHUL, London, UK.

Following the debate between Marxists and the Critical Race Theorists (CRT) over the analytical utility of the concept of White supremacy in the contemporary discourse on racism, this paper offers an additional Marxist response to Sean Walton’s article to complement the existing Marxist thoughts on the debate. This paper further deepens the discussion on racialization as the general descriptor of racism in western societies, by introducing the class context in which racialisation has sustained and maintained racism in the contemporary era. Racialization is defined in this paper as an ideological process that involves racialising benefits, privileges, and opportunities to one group [possibly an ethnic group] over other groups by the capitalist ruling class and the state, and legitimising it by using policies, media, laws, regulations, and institutional practices as a means of entrenching division and disunity in the society and preserving their system of control under capitalism. Following this definition, it is argued that racism is being reproduced through the process of racialization in the contemporary western society. In the overall discussion on racialisation and White supremacy, the ideology of racism was espoused, and the future of racism as articulated in Critical Race theory and Black radicalism is reviewed.

White Supremacy, Racialisation, Black Radicalism, Racism, Marxism

Ogunrotifa, A. (2022) Between Racialization and White Supremacy: Another Marxist Response to Sean Walton. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 10, 240-257. doi: 10.4236/jss.2022.102017.