In this essay, music education is conceptualized as a game or performance within The Game, the "pervasive atmosphere" (Fisher 2009) of neoliberal capitalism, which inevitably shapes scholarship, practice, and policy. Even people who strive to see music education for what it really might be (e.g., those researching and promoting social justice), especially when they hue to identitarianism or reductionism, can remain susceptible to neoliberal rationalities. Imminent critique, applied specifically to antiracist scholarship in music education, reveals a tendency to ignore, disparage, and erase the musical interests and values of poor and working-class whites, which serves to rationalize and reproduce inequality by maintaining the cultural superiority of middle class and affluent whites, and to diffuse opposition to neoliberal capitalism by dividing poor and working classes along racial lines. An argument is made for moving from neoliberal identity politics "back to class," or at least in directions more critical of neoliberal capitalism, more fully recognizing economic dimensions of inequality and oppression in music education.