IN THE APPROACH TO THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION and in its aftermath, the American press ran a lot of stories asking (as the Washington Post put it), ‘Is America More Divided by Race or Class?’ The question was not unfamiliar – writers on the left had long debated whether class and race should be understood as distinct categories or whether ‘the production of racial and other difference is itself part of the logic of capital’ – but in 2016 it was framed largely in terms of a struggle between a politics of identity and one of economic equality.