I won’t hold my breath for more but it’s good to see Marxist ideas appearing in the mainstream press:

Liberal antiracists have succeeded over the last half-century in reducing racial prejudices in interpersonal relationships. And they have transformed popular culture: people of colour are now represented in Hollywood movies at levels proportionate to their presence in the US population. But advances in reducing prejudice and improving representation have not lessened the racism that exists in law, policy and broader economic and institutional practices.

Take, for instance, the expulsion of more than a million, mainly Mexican, people from the US in 2021. This policy behind this is driven by the need to maintain a worldwide racial division of labour. It makes no difference if the immigration officer who carries it out and the employer who profits from it have worked really hard at their diversity awareness training. And it is at the structural level where, since the 1970s, racism has reproduced itself, as ruling classes in the US and Europe mobilised a neoliberal conception of market forces to defeat mass movements for the redistribution of wealth. With those defeats, new ways of dominating Black people and the global south became possible.

It was not simply that racism became more subtle or unconscious after its overt forms had been defeated. It was more that there was no longer a need to routinely make explicit assertions of racial superiority. Racial inequalities were reproduced through market systems, alongside newly intensifying infrastructures of governmental violence, carried out in the name of seemingly race-neutral concerns about crime, migration and terrorism. …

The many millions of people around the world judged surplus to the requirements of neoliberal capitalism, and framed as bearers of cultural values antagonistic to market systems, are the targets of this form of violence. …

Liberal antiracists are powerless against this new structural racism. They demand we use the correct racial vocabulary, shaming Conservative MPs or sports commentators when they use derogatory terms; but abolishing a word does not abolish the social forces it expresses. They implement diversity training programmes, but these fail, owing to the mistaken premise that racism now resides primarily in the unconscious mind. … By relocating racism to the unconscious mind, to the use of inappropriate words and to the extremist fringes, liberal antiracists end up absolving the institutions most responsible for racist practices. They are effective at getting more people of colour into senior jobs in police forces, border agencies and the military, but unable to get fewer people of colour killed by those same agencies.

For these reasons, to look to liberal antiracism as the solution – with whatever good intentions – is to help sustain structural racism. White liberals can heroically confront their own unconscious biases all they want, yet these structures will remain. To be antiracist today means working collectively with organisations to dismantle racist border, policing, carceral and military infrastructures. It means organising in the community to get the police out of our schools; taking direct action against deportations; and confronting corporations that trade in violence. It means understanding that the poor of the global south are as equally entitled to the world’s resources as the wealthy residents of the north. In the end, it requires us to build an economy of care, not killing – uplifting all working classes of whatever colour. The radical tradition, with its anticapitalist impetus, might once have seemed impractical. Now it is the only viable antiracist politics.