In 1980, Lee Atwater said this as a description of the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Some would read this as the Republican's attempt to couch their racism in an apolitical, economic language. However, I submit that the change in strategy outlined by Atwater was precipitated by the successes of the Civil Rigthts Movement. Indeed, the de-racialization of the Republican strategy reveals very specifically how capitalism actually works - it exploits for profit, and this structure underpinned racism from slavery and colonization to Jim Crow.

As American capitalism developed and private property became a dominant institution, the emergence of a particularly black slavery also became written into the law. In this way, American culture became divided with black skin serving as a signifier for the lower, working class, and white skin serving as a signifier for the American bougeoisie, and over the years as black skin has slowly been stripped of its negative meaning, though not completely, the economic central nervous system that produced and reproduced class-based subjectivities serving under the signifier of skin-color has slowly transformed through the demystification of race into an economic central nervous system more technicalized, or more along the lines of Atwater's political vision (It must me noted that this fits with the trend of late capitalism in which capital removes all social markers from racialization to subsidies for education and healthcare). And while capital increasingly functions in a global and post-racial way, the residuals of past-racialized paradigms still permeates the everyday reality of many, allowing capital to be nominally race neutral while benefiting from a working class divided by race and ethnicity. Indeed, Atwater's dream, particularly, but not exclusively, in the American South seems to have come true. Because of this, it is imperative for the construction of a sort of commons of subjectivity where those occupying and constructing forgotten places can develop post racial identities and solidarities which can be deployed to secure material commons - such as universal healthcare, affordable housing, public space, decent school systems, collective ownership of productive properties, and real political voice.