One thing I notice about many people of color, particularly men of color, is a sense of entrepreneurship and drive that far exceeds our White peers. A lot of my conversations with my Black in-laws revolve around how to make more money, whether it is through side hustles, gigs, investing, or strategic sports gambling.
The same happens with a lot of Asian and Hispanic peers, and as an Asian man, I don’t just try to make more money because I need to, but because it’s fun. It brings a rush. I don’t want to just be mediocre and boring in relying on the stability of my day job — although I am well aware of the dangers of trying to earn fast, easy money, I try to thread the needle and wade into the nuances of high reward, low-risk investments and skills. I have learned through the crypto crash that any money earned that feels too easy and too fast is not worth the risk, but I still buy into that entrepreneurial mindset of my peers, particularly my fellow Asian peers.
I once went on vacation with a bunch of my Hispanic friends from college. I tell this story in jest the vast majority of the time. We were in Miami for spring break, and a couple of guys and I decided to wake up at 5 a.m. and check out a real estate property in Boca Raton, Florida as an adventure for a friend who was getting paid to look at the property for a real estate investor. It was a whole day venture, and we spent maybe ten minutes taking pictures of the property.
Of course, my personal experiences are very biased a lot of exposure to highly educated and business-minded people of color. But the same can be said for working-class people of color I’ve interacted with, and sometimes there’s an even bigger edge among people who haven’t gone to college because there may be a chip on the shoulder or something to prove. College, as an institution, sometimes seems to be a waste of time and money, and too much structure when you’re trying to pursue your dreams.
I don’t portend to speak for all people of color, because I don’t — but there are a plethora of factors that make a lot of people of color and particularly men of color more entrepreneurial-minded and feeling a greater urgency to hustle than privileged White people.
If I were to put a finger on why people of color are more into entrepreneurship than White people, I would say it comes from a place of less privilege. It comes from a place of distrust in the ability of the government to help, support, or even protect. It comes from a place of just dreaming big and making it big against a world that’s not designed for you. It, of course, comes from a greater sense of insecurity that arises from less privilege.
As someone who voted for Bernie Sanders and who wouldn’t shy away from identifying as a Democratic Socialist, this entrepreneurial tendency, which comes from an almost primal sense of self-preservation as well as a sense of getting a rush and “it’s just a lot of fun,” it causes me significant cognitive dissonance to be a progressive leftist while being someone who is always looking for a way to hustle to make more money.
Of course, there are tons of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and other socialist people of color. But the whiteness of the current socialist movement in America can also reinforce the message that socialism isn’t for us. According to reporting from Miguel Salazar at The New Republic, almost 90% of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership was White.
Many media outlets are pointing to Democrats’ embrace of socialism as a reason why Trump made inroads with many Hispanic voters in 2020, particularly in Florida and Texas. Bernie Sanders’s inability to make inroads with Black Democratic voters in the South is seen as the biggest weakness in his 2020 presidential campaign, and the reason why he lost to Joe Biden.
In short, socialism and people of color seem to have a very complicated relationship.
. . .
My father is someone who absolutely hates communism and, by extension, socialism. It makes sense as someone who grew up in communist China and grew up in poverty. For people who escaped repressive, communist regimes, whether it’s China, Venezuela, or Cuba, the prospect of socialism in America raises the specter of a lifetime of living your life in fear of reprisal, a prospect that invokes trauma rather than optimism.
It makes sense that immigrants fleeing socialism would hate it. Alexander Lee, a Vietnamese American writing for the Democratic Socialists of America, documents a huge anti-socialist sentiment from his own ethnic group of Vietnamese Americans, who are notoriously the most Republican-leaning Asian ethnic group in America. This anti-socialism was especially prevalent among those who escaped Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and many older Vietnamese Americans in this day and age see Republicans as the last line of U.S. defense against communism.
Perhaps this anti-socialism stigma will fade with time, but it might take a lot of time.
But there’s also an inherent disconnect in left-leaning Asians like myself and our personal decision-making that aligns with entrepreneurship and personal enrichment.
One of my friends, who is also Asian, also identifies as a Democratic Socialist. He is very gung-ho on antiracism, trans bathrooms, and otherwise very progressive identity-related causes, much like I am. But there is an inherent contradiction in that he is a consultant making six figures for a Fortune 500 company. I would not be surprised if he is a millionaire.
The contradiction is as follows: how can you be a socialist and working a job that ostensibly does not make the world a better and more equitable place? How does being a consultant align with being a socialist?
There’s another socialist I know who owns multiple properties as investment properties that he rents out to tenants. I don’t have the exact details on whether or not he’s had to evict any of them, but how he generates wealth and what he preaches seem somewhat antithetical.
Sometimes I wonder if my friend (and by extension myself) are inherent contradictions in the disconnect between our politics and our personal career of wealth creation decisions.
But there is a fundamental difference between being born into the bourgeoisie and trying to build personal and generational wealth for you, your family, and your loved ones. No matter how much wealth is created by someone born into poverty and struggle, there’s an almost Jay Gatsby sense that they will never be accepted into circles of the old wealth.
Generational wealth means so much more when generations of your family have been systemically restricted from gaining generational wealth. Politics aside, people look out for themselves and the people closest to them. At the end of the day, we tell ourselves all kinds of rationales to account for this cognitive dissonance of being a progressive leftist and furthering your own wealth creation.
These include telling ourselves we’re doing it for our spouses or kids. It means telling ourselves we have to eat, too. A crux of my argument is that being pro-entrepreneurship and pro-business are inherently incompatible. Some people might disagree, as there are plenty of people who support Black-owned businesses, for example, and identify as socialists. It can be an incredibly nuanced proposition, something we’ll get into.
. . .
We can’t discuss the intersections of socialism and race without taking a look at the long, robust history of Black socialists, of which Martin Luther King Jr. was the most prominent. One of King’s most famous quotes on the issue was that “the country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”
While King never publicly identified as a Democratic Socialist, and had good reason not to, since J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI used King’s alleged communist ties as pretext to try to destroy him.
The long tradition of Black, progressive socialists goes far beyond King, however. The tradition includes Stokely Carmichael, a leader in the Black Power movement, who abhorred capitalism and changed his name to Kwame Ture in honor of two black socialists. Other prominent Black socialists include W.E.B. Dubois and Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, according to John Blake at CNN.
Today, some of the most prominent Black socialists include Cornel West, who is running in the 2024 presidential election as an independent candidate, and Adolph Reed, a Black Marxist professor who believes the left focuses too much on race and not enough on class today.
Perhaps the most high-profile self-identifying Democratic Socialist is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose leftist positions make her a target of the right and more moderate Democrats who believe her to be a liability for Democrats’ electoral chances.
Most of the explosion of acceptance of Democratic Socialism in the last decade originates from the campaign of Bernie Sanders, who channeled an entire country’s frustration at the inequities of unfettered capitalism into an anti-establishment, outsider political campaign. For many voters on the left, particularly younger voters, socialism no longer became the dirty word it had been the whole century before.
I voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary, and I wanted to see his campaign succeed as Sanders defeated the field and Joe Biden in Iowa, and then kept gaining steam throughout the primary. I vocally supported Bernie and his plans for Medicare For All as well as him taking on Big Pharma, among other things.
But Bernie had one big weakness: he couldn’t seem to appeal to Democratic voters of color as much as he could White voters. He would often reframe racial issues through an economic and class warfare lens, which wasn’t always the most appealing message to many. This was highlighted by his clash with Black Lives Matter protestors in 2015, who wanted his campaign to keep racial justice front and center.
His campaign seemingly came to a halt during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, as even his campaign manager, Nina Turner, conceded that Bernie’s campaign was one that fought for racial justice, but not as strongly as the summer of 2020 quite demanded.
“It wasn’t as piercing as this moment demands,” Turner said.
A big appeal of Bernie in the first place was the prioritization of class struggle and warfare over different forms of identity politics that alienated a lot of White working class voters. I bought into that as much as anyone else, if not more than a lot of my left-wing peers. I thought about a left-wing coalition that truly did make the left the side of the working people rather than the side of the highly educated elite. There is a tendency in socialist circles to see divides in other identity categories, like race or gender, to be distractions and a way to divide the underclass and prevent an uprising against the bourgeoisie.
But that moment has long passed, and that class essentialism, at that moment, lost in the battle for the left’s identity over race essentialism. People like me could no longer pretend class was more important than race after seeing the video of the murder of George Floyd.
All of a sudden, every major corporation that posted a black square on Instagram seemed a lot more in touch with the political moment of the country than the most high-profile socialist in America.
The downfall of the Sanders campaign started, however, well before his profile seemed to completely disappear during the protests. The South Carolina primary, where Representative Jim Clyburn endorsed Joe Biden and seemed to reverse the momentum of the 2020 Democratic primary.
Astead Herndon interviewed Jim Clyburn about why he supported Biden in the 2020 presidential election in New York Times podcast, The Run-Up. Clyburn’s answer was simple: Biden was the only person Clyburn thought could win. Bernie, by extension, wasn’t someone Clyburn saw as being able to appeal to both White and Black voters in the South. Herndon probed about whether Biden was the lesser of the two evils, when facing other Democrats, and when facing Trump, and Clyburn acknowledged that Biden was the best candidate for someone willing to work within the system and make pragmatic gains.
Sydney Ember at the New York Times also notes that a tough part of Bernie’s campaign courting older Black voters is that many of his proposals, like single-payer health care, meant more government power, which was a very hard sell if you’ve historically been let down by big government.
Even at the peak of the 2020 protests, one of the biggest trends was to actively support Black-owned businesses, an ostensibly more capitalist way of making inroads on racial equality.
According to a 2019 Cato Institute poll on favorable and unfavorable views of capitalism and socialism, White and Asian respondents had the most favorable views of capitalism (64% and 60% respectively) and unfavorable views of socialism (36% and 33% approval respectively), while 52% of Latino respondents had a favorable view of capitalism and 36% had a favorable view of socialism. 62% of Black respondents had a favorable view of socialism and 40% of respondents had a favorable view of capitalism.
Many Black respondents to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey fit the mix of not liking capitalism and having favorable views of socialism compared to other racial groups. 54% had a negative view of capitalism to the survey.
But there are also very interesting findings from a poll the year before. 83% of Black respondents said the economic system needed to be completely rebuilt or that there needed to be major changes. But 62% of respondents who said economic changes were needed said this change to the economic system was not at all or a little likely during their lifetime. In that same survey, 58% of Black respondents said supporting Black-owned businesses was a very effective tactic for helping Black people move towards equality.
. . .
For many immigrants to America who fled from communist countries, their relationship to socialism is not complicated: socialism is just a really bad idea and, sometimes, the entire political system they were escaping in their native countries. The fact that socialism is becoming a more accepted political ideology in the U.S. is, for some, a reason for a rightward swing and a very dangerous proposition.
It’s also no secret that people of color have a harder time trusting the state. But for a lot of other left-leaning people of color, there is this acknowledgment that you can want the world, and particularly the country’s economic system, to be a certain way, but still have to live in the world as is. You can aspire to an ideal and still need to learn to survive within your day-to-day surroundings.
That’s why, perhaps, my view that being a millionaire, owning rental properties, and being a business owner or entrepreneur are all incompatible with socialism might be wrong, or at least a lot more nuanced than I would like to admit. That is one explanation why so many Black, Hispanic, and Asian leftists can be all about wealth creation, investing, and entrepreneurship in their daily lives while preaching revolution and tearing down an unfair capitalist economic system in their politics.
I admit that I’ve had to be very careful writing this, to not speak in broad generalizations while being fair to people who might have that substantial distrust while not allowing my own sympathies towards the Bernie Sanders campaign and Democratic Socialism to cloud my judgment. I will also admit I anticipated a lot more pushback from the left than the right in tackling this topic, or at least I care a lot more about pushback from the left since most of my friends and peers are on the left.
It does complicate the relationship substantially, and the individual views of every Democratic Socialist person of color likely can’t be captured in a series of polls.
But the reality for almost all of us, in having to live our day-to-day lives and create wealth with the cards we were dealt, while also aspiring for a whole new system, is a good reason for cognitive dissonance. The revolution Bernie spoke of gave a lot of hope to young left-leaning people, but there’s good reason to be pessimistic that it will ever happen.
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This post was previously published on Ryan Fan’s blog.
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