Socialists don’t really care about racism and sexism — at least, that’s what establishment Democrats and liberal pundits would have us believe.

For daring to highlight class inequality, Bernie Sanders and his supporters since 2016 have been widely accused of ignoring women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. As journalist Michael Arceneaux declared in the Guardian, “if Sanders’ insistence on moving past ‘identity politics’ is the next step in his revolution, may it suffer even more defeat than it did in the primary.”

This line of attack is hard to square with Sanders’s decades-long track record as a legislator and activist. But it also raises a broader question: does a strategic focus on class really require sidelining the fight against racial and gender oppression? If not, what exactly should a class-centered strategy mean today for the kind of demands socialists should emphasize? And where should we focus our organizing efforts?