They Don't See Us Until It's Too Late

The Strategic Invisibility of Racial Capitalism

Introduction

The most insightful social critiques often reveal that what appears new to the privileged has long been a reality for the marginalised. Two Boston Review articles, Emily Baughan's review of Sam Wetherell's “Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain” (2025) and Alberto Toscano's "The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism" (2020), demonstrate this dynamic through different but complementary lenses. Both pieces illuminate how processes first experienced by racial minorities eventually expanded to impact white working-class populations, creating what could be called an "outward spread" of social harm. This pattern, once recognised, offers important insights into understanding our present moment and the possibilities for meaningful resistance.

Obsolescence as Prophecy: The Liverpool Case Study

Wetherell's analysis of Liverpool's decline, as described by Baughan, provides an essential case study in how racial capitalism, a system where racism and economic exploitation work hand-in-hand, produces "surplus populations." The chronology is revealing, Liverpool's Black community and Chinese dockworkers were rendered "obsolete" from the 1940s onward, while its white working class only faced this reality decades later, from the 1970s. This sequence was not coincidental but structural.

Consider the 1945 deportation of Chinese seamen described in Baughan's review. A hundred dockworkers were "hauled from their beds at night and rounded up in police cars to be deported back to Shanghai, their wives and children never to be told what became of them." Despite having "crewed vital shipments of food and weaponry, even as German bombs razed the docks," these workers were disposable within Britain's post-war welfare state, which was designed to serve "the white national community."

This early disposal of racialised labour prefigured what would later happen to Liverpool's white working class. As imperial trade waned and Liverpool's westerly position disconnected it from growing European trade, its maritime industries collapsed. By the early 1980s, "seven in every eight of Liverpool's dock jobs had already been lost." The welfare state, designed as "a workers' state" where needs would be met through "fairly waged employment," could not save a population that had lost its economic function.

Wetherell's key insight is that Liverpool isn't simply a relic but a prophecy. The processes that rendered Liverpool's populations obsolete in sequence, minorities first, then white workers, have now become widespread: "rising prices, falling wages, chronic labour insecurity, homelessness, and health care failure." What was once localised to Liverpool now threatens to become "our collective destiny."

Racial Fascism: The Boomerang Returns Home

Toscano's examination of Black radical theories of fascism complements this analysis by showing how fascism, too, was experienced as a sequenced phenomenon. Pan-Africanist George Padmore wrote in 1936 of settler-colonial racism as "the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today," while Langston Hughes declared: "We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know."

This perspective inverts the conventional chronology that sees fascism as emerging in interwar Europe before potentially returning elsewhere. Instead, as Aimé Césaire memorably described, European fascism was the 'boomerang effect' in action, the violence Europeans had long inflicted on their colonies had finally come home to Europe itself. What had long existed in colonies was simply coming home to Europe, a form of blowback.

Angela Davis and George Jackson further developed this theory through their experiences in the U.S. prison system during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For them, American fascism was not imported from Europe but emerged from liberal democracy itself. Their "carceral, liberationist perspective" recognised fascism as both preventive (directed against feared revolution) and incipient (developing gradually). Most importantly, they emphasised that fascism is experienced unevenly across populations, the prison-industrial complex represented fascism's "maximally fascist presentation," while mainstream society might perceive only liberal democracy.

As Davis put it, fascism is "primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en-masse and eventually even moderate democrats." The key insight is the sequential movement: what happens to marginalised communities today often forecasts what will happen to everyone else tomorrow. It's like a test run of harmful policies that begins with those who have the least social power to resist.

Parallels in Peripheral Prophets

The parallels between these analyses are striking. Both Wetherell and the Black radical theorists discussed by Toscano identify a pattern where socially marginal groups experience the future first:

1. Sequential Harm: Both economic obsolescence and fascist violence affect racialised minorities before impacting white workers.

2. Blindness to Prophecy: In both cases, those not yet affected fail to recognise the warnings. Wetherell documents how Liverpool's white working class "failed to see their own futures prophesied in the degradation of their Black neighbours." Similarly, Toscano notes that "the experience of racialisation within a liberal democracy could have the valence of fascism," but this reality remains invisible to those on the privileged side of the colour line.

3. Systemic Connections: Both analyses link these phenomena to structural transformations in capitalism. For Liverpool, it was deindustrialisation and the shift away from imperial trade; for the Black radical theorists, it was capitalism's need for counterrevolutionary violence to maintain racial and class hierarchies.

4. Laboratories of Oppression: Both analyses suggest that governments and powerful institutions use marginalised communities as testing grounds, real-world laboratories where new methods of surveillance, policing, and control are perfected before being rolled out more widely to the general population. As Jean Genet observed at a 1970 rally for Bobby Seale: "We often hear the Black Panther Party speak of fascism, and whites have difficulty accepting the word. That's because whites have to make a great effort of imagination to understand that blacks live under an oppressive fascist regime."

This pattern works like ripples in a pond, or what we might call "concentric circles of disposability." Those furthest from society's protected centre (often racial minorities and immigrants) experience harm first. Then these harmful practices gradually expand outward, eventually affecting groups who initially thought themselves safe from such treatment.

Recombinant Forms and Contemporary Relevance

Both articles also illuminate how these processes manifest in recombinant forms rather than exact historical repetitions. Toscano's discussion of "late fascism" suggests that contemporary fascistic tendencies are parasitic on "resuscitating the racialised anti-communism of a previous era" while adapting to current conditions. Similarly, Wetherell shows how Liverpool's obsolete working class was "recycled and repurposed," their bodies generating revenue for private healthcare firms after ceasing to be productive in industry, and their cultural memory commodified for tourism.

These insights help us understand contemporary phenomena. For instance, the targeted violence against migrants and refugees prefigures broader attacks on civil liberties; the surveillance techniques developed in marginalised communities become templates for mass surveillance; and the precarity first imposed on racial minorities expands into generalised economic insecurity.

The ongoing debate about whether to label Trump and similar movements "fascist" misses the point highlighted by these analyses. As Toscano writes: "Davis and Jackson glimpsed a fascist process that didn't need fascists." The question isn't whether current conditions exactly match 1930s Europe, but how processes that begin with targeting vulnerable populations eventually transform society as a whole.

Resistance Through Recognition and Solidarity

Both pieces suggest that understanding these chronologies is essential for effective resistance. Wetherell finds hope in Liverpool's history of mutual care, particularly in how activists responded to the AIDS crisis by refusing to consign the dying to abandonment. This "radical refusal of obsolescence" recognised that "even the addicted, even the dying, deserved to live."

Similarly, Toscano draws on the Black radical tradition to argue that fighting fascism requires more than just opposing openly fascist groups. We must also confront the everyday violence built into supposedly democratic societies, the police brutality, mass incarceration, and border regimes that disproportionately target certain communities while appearing 'normal' to others.

The key insight for resistance is recognising that harm to any group ultimately threatens all. As Baughan concludes from Wetherell's work: "if none of us matter, all of us do." This echoes the long tradition of Black liberation movements calling for solidarity beyond identity boundaries, not because differences don't matter, but because the same systems eventually come for everyone, just at different times and in different ways.

Heeding the Prophets

The connection between these articles highlights something fundamental about racial capitalism: it typically innovates new forms of exploitation and control at the margins before expanding inward. Those who experience oppression first become unwilling prophets, their experiences foretelling what might become general conditions if not resisted.

This pattern reveals a structural dynamic long articulated by Black communities: "They don't see us." This phrase captures not merely an emotional experience but illuminates a fundamental feature of racial capitalism itself-the strategic invisibility that allows authoritarian practices to be normalised at the margins before expanding inward. As we've seen in Liverpool, where the white working class "failed to see their own futures prophesied in the degradation of their Black neighbours," this invisibility serves a systemic purpose.

"'They don't see us' captures not merely an emotional experience but illuminates a fundamental feature of racial capitalism itself-the strategic invisibility that allows authoritarian practices to be normalised at the margins before expanding inward."

The perspective demands we listen differently to marginalised voices, not merely as testimonies of suffering but as analytical insights into developing social processes. When Black communities speak of police violence, when refugees describe detention centres, when indigenous peoples warn about environmental devastation, they aren't just describing their specific conditions but potentially forecasting broader social transformations.

Conclusion: Beyond the Veil of Invisibility

The urgent warnings about America's descent into fascism under Trump and the global rise of authoritarianism represent a profound awakening for mainstream white society but one that arrives decades, even centuries, late for those who have long lived under these conditions. What appears as a shocking new reality for privileged observers has been the quotidian experience of Black and colonised peoples worldwide, their communities serving as laboratories where oppressive systems were refined before expanding outward.

"They don't see us" operates not just as personal testimony but as a structural critique, one that Genet recognised when he observed whites having "difficulty accepting" Black Panthers' descriptions of fascism despite living under it daily. This enforced invisibility isn't accidental; it's essential to maintaining the fiction of liberal democracy's universality.

The lesson from both Liverpool's decline and Black radical theories of fascism is clear: solidarity isn't just an ethical position but a practical necessity. By the time harm reaches those at the centre, it has already been normalised, systematised, and perfected on those at the margins. Recognising the "They don't see us" phenomenon offers not just analytical clarity but the possibility of a more effective, anticipatory politics, one that actively seeks out and amplifies the experiences of those at the margins precisely because their current reality often forecasts our collective future.

The future that mainstream society fears has already been someone else's present; the warnings were always there, visible in plain sight to those who have lived under these conditions, had the privileged chosen to see beyond their limited perspective. In this recognition lies the potential for a solidarity based not on charity but on the understanding that, as Baughan concludes from Wetherell's work: "if none of us matter, all of us do."