Andrew Pierce

This article revisits the Frankfurt School’s reflections on race, anti-Semitism and fascism, focusing especially on the theory of race implicit in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It argues that this theory has the potential to be developed into a critical functionalist theory of race that avoids both class and race reductionism, offering a thoroughly intersectional competitor to currently dominant philosophies of race. The key to such a theory is the view that racialization plays a functional role in sustaining capitalist exploitation. While Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the scapegoat function of racialization, I argue that this function, while important, does not exhaust the possible functionalities of racialization and neglects an especially crucial function: the maintenance of a specifically racial form of exploitation.

In this paper, I offer a psychologically informed critique of and alternative to approaches to teaching issues of race and racial justice that are based on the recognition of white privilege. White privilege pedagogy, I argue, faces serious limitations avoided by a pedagogy grounded in “interest convergence.” Advanced by critical race theorist Derrick Bell, the theory of interest convergence holds that racial progress is most likely when the interests of whites converge with the interests of oppressed racial groups. Applying this insight to pedagogical practice, I argue that it has the potential to overcome white resistance to acknowledging and addressing racial injustice, in the classroom and in the broader public sphere. After making this case in general terms, I illustrate it concretely by describing an interest convergence-based approach to teaching affirmative action.