Eugene V. Debs began “The Negro in the Class Struggle” (1903) by criticizing socialists who “either share directly in the race hostility against the Negro, or avoid the issue, or apologize for the social obliteration of the color line in the class struggle,” so it is remarkable that the essay and its author have come to epitomize white radicals’ alleged indifference to racism and its significance to the history of the working class in the United States.

Robert Craig expresses the common sense in his assertion that, “Like so many well-meaning radicals before and since, Debs tried to subsume the race question in the class struggle, and in the process he moderated his radicalism and failed to come to terms with the unique quality of the African-American experience.” The term “Debsian” serves as shorthand in the work of David Roediger and Nelson Lichtenstein for white labor leaders who, as Roediger writes, “never reckoned with labor’s past where race was concerned.”

Repeating one of the only well-known phrases from the Socialist leaders’ voluminous writings, Nikhil Pal Singh, Beth Bates, and other scholars contend that the racial politics of white radicals and reformers in the early twentieth-century United States were summed up most clearly in Debs’s statement that “we have nothing special to offer the Negro.”