J OURNAL OF W ORLD - S YSTEMS R ESEARCH Class Struggle for the 21 st Century : Racial Inequality , International Solidarity , and the New Apartheid Politics

Wilma Dunaway and Donald Clelland’s article, “Moving toward theory for the 21 Century: The centrality of nonwestern hemispheres to world ethnic/ racial inequality,” is structured around a contradiction between the interrogation of global apartheid theory’s political correctness and reverse racism and the scathing, yet hyperbolic, critique of the semiperipheries as the most egregious site for the reproduction of racial inequality in the world today. This contradiction is articulated in the form of a disavowal of race: On the one hand, they criticize global apartheid theory and whiteness studies scholars, and rightly so, for enforcing a Eurocentric conception of race that racially codifies the increasing polarization of wealth in the non-western world into a dichotomy between “white affluence” and “colored poverty/ stagnation.” The claims of global apartheid theory, they suggest, are undercut by the ascent of the transnational capitalist class (Robinson 2014) and the rising power of the semiperiphery as a neo-colonialist and sub-imperial power block which “causes, contributes to, and exacerbates” ethnic/ racial inequality around the world today.