Within the dark shadows of the global margins negotiating the impact of the global ascent of the authoritarian populisms—felt on the streets of Gaza drenched in blood, the Fortress Europe seeks to safeguard from the brown masses, and the echo chambers of the American red states ruled by algorithms of repression—there is a profound irony.
The same power that the left professes to eliminate continues to propel us toward fascism, not despite our resistance, but due to it. As a scholar who has studies the ways in which colonized and precarized speaking subjects resound within decolonial praxis, I have often argued that communication is the flesh of hegemony. But during this era of global disintegration, it is the left's quietism—the deliberate evasion of whiteness, white fragility, and white supremacy—that fails to preempt the fascist flowers from filling up the soil.
It is not a question of abstention; it is a feature of communication inequality, a refusal to name the normative whiteness that props up the left's own structures. To re-make anti-racist organizing, we must turn the gaze inward, questioning the shame of telling these truths. And then we can build a politics of the working class unmarked by complicity, one that centers hyper-precarity across communities of color, gender diversity, and all those targeted for erasure by the far right.
The empirical ground
Let us begin from the empirical terrain, since critical thought necessitates that we ground our abstractions within the material violences of the everyday. Globally, authoritarian populism turns into full-blown fascism: in Brazil, Bolsonaro's heirs rally against "gender ideology" while burning indigenous territories; in Hungary, Orbán's regime demonizes migrants as white Europe's last test; in America, Trump's MAGA cult metastasizes into Project 2025, an ethno-nationalist purification manifesto. They are not outliers but Accelerations of a logic planted forty years ago.
My own ethnographic fieldwork in Aotearoa New Zealand, among migrant communities in the neoliberal precariat, illustrates the ways in which such populisms subsist on the left's reluctance to state: "whiteness" is the pillar of racial capitalism. When lefts are reluctant to denounce "whiteness" as the pillar of racial capitalism, they abandon the narrative to demagogues who transform economic despair into racial grievance. The 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2024 U.S. election cycles—these were not merely failures of turnout but of discourse. The left's allergy to "white supremacy" makes it possible for figures such as Farage or Le Pen to position themselves as champions of the "forgotten white worker," glossing over how the worker's own vulnerability is co-constituted by the very supremacist systems that pilfer resources from the global South.
This denial is not an accident; it is the signature of white fragility, that delicate armor Robin DiAngelo so masterfully analyzes. Within left organizing communities—seminaries to union halls to academic spaces—I have witnessed the performative allyship that vanishes at mention of "whiteness." Why is this? It dispels the myth of universality, the liberal fantasy that radical politics exists somehow beyond racial hierarchies.
Whiteness, as I've theorized in my own research on communication and justice at the margins, is a cultural logic: an unmarked norm that erases its own violence and demands others to perform gratitude for its goodness. When a brown gender diverse woman condemns white supremacy in a panel on climate justice, the room changes—eyes avoid, throats clear, and the pivot starts: "But we must prioritize class solidarity."
This isn't solidarity; it is erasure. It reenacts the colonial episteme in which subaltern knowledges exist as footnotes to the white canon, in which Audre Lorde's iteration of the intersectionality of race, class, and gender is add-on opt-ins.
Resistance and decolonial reflexivity
Resistance as anti-racist praxis demands we dismantle these normative structures, not as diversity trainings that are little more than cynical gesture, but as a decolonial reflexivity that questions the whiteness of the left. What is it about naming white supremacy that induces such gut-level withdrawal? Is it fear of complicity, the shattering of self-image as enlightened vanguard?
I hear echoes of this in my discussions with Pacific-based indigenous organizers: the left's "universal" class struggle has a tendency to equal amplifying white voices while displacing the land dispossessions that birthed capitalism itself. In order to engage in depth, we must be prepared to ask: How does whiteness write our agendas? In the United Kingdom's Labour Party, Keir Starmer's ambivalent response to Israel's genocide in Palestine—defined as "pragmatic foreign policy"—obscures an even deeper commitment to Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism.
It is the silent grammar of white supremacy, whispering "not yet" to Palestinian children's justice and opposing domestic austerity. The left's discomfort is a symptom of its own interpellation into empire, a refusal to see how anti-racism erodes the psychic wages of whiteness that even the most "woke" progressive clings to.
Breaking through the silence
And this is the lazy myth that haunts us: "We can't speak out about whiteness or white supremacy, or we'll alienate the majority working class." That is not strategy; that is surrender, an enabling hand to the designers of the far right. It takes for granted that white working class is a monolith, irredeemable except by dilution—Patriarchal assumption which ignores the multiracial alliances which toppled Pinochet or pushed forward the U.S. civil rights movement.
Data from the Pew Research Center substantiates this madness: white non-college-educated voters, generally the populist base, aren't necessarily turned off by anti-racist rhetoric; they are repelled by the left's failure to connect economic justice with racial reconciliation. Within France's banlieues, where Algerian and Senegalese youth bear the brunt of Macron's "republican" oppression, the left's class-exclusive frame has directed fury towards Le Pen's nativism.
The loss story is complacent in that it avoids the effort of building solidarity across difference, blurring electoral tactics with ethics. And even worse, it feeds the far right's paradigms—those which channel fascist forces into state violence—arming us nothing against their tide.
Connecting social and economic justice
Consider the hyper-precarious: the trans women of color brutalized in Brazilian favelas, the Rohingya refugees who go adrift in Andaman seas, the Dalit workers smothered by Modi's Hindutva machine. These aren't at the margins of working-class politics; they are at its center. A vision of proletariat centered on justice can't be manufactured on their backs in exchange for their lives for an illusion of a white vote. Instead, it must make anti-racism, anti-cisnormativity, and anti-patriarchy the fulcrum of freedom.
Following Angela Davis's prison abolition feminism, I argue that material class struggle is intersectional in nature: it exposes power how racial capitalism racializes and genders labor, renders Black and brown bodies disposable, and reproduces myths of power for white masculinity.
In order to be anti-fascist, the left must make space for these voices, not as diversity quotas but as epistemic anchorages. Imagine a working-class movement beginning in the detention centers of Manus Island, turning discourses of imperial extraction into manifestos for universal healthcare, or one linking U.S. opioid epidemics to the forever wars flooding communities across the Global South, the targets of U.S. imperialism.
This reflection demands praxis, not lament. The left must establish truth-telling circles—uncomfortable meetings where white organizers cede the mic, where tension is the curriculum. We must re-write our charters, incorporating anti-racist audits into all of our campaigns: Does this policy map out the racial logic of austerity? Does it dismantle cisnormative exclusions in care work? Globally, from the Zapatista caracoles to Black Lives Matter's decentralized clusters, such centering has been modeled. In India, the Bhim Army's fusion of Ambedkarite anti-caste militancy with agrarian uprising offers a model: condemning Brahminical hegemony without shutting out the rural poor, building solidarity through shared precarity.
Antiracism to dismantle fascism
As fascism's shadow lengthens—detectable in the EU's migrant pushbacks, the U.S.'s ICE raids and full-blown repression, international chilling of protest—the left's choice is evident.
Clutch the familiarity of unnamable whiteness, and we give birth to the monsters we revile. Or, gaze in the mirror, name the supremacy that naturalizes our terrain, and give birth to a politics of refusal: one that reclaims the margin as vanguards, one that deploys anti-racism as the hammer against the chains of authoritarianism.
This is the transformative task before us—not a diversion from class war, but its very reorganization as antiracist work that authentically builds solidarities across communities at the global margins. Let us take back and own the spaces that fuel our capacities to imagine, not through erasure, but on the unyielding terms of named whiteness. The working class—the very, multicolored multitude—demands no less.