More Episodes
Mar 2, 2021
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America with Cornel West & Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (7-1-20)
Join Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and Maya Marshall for an indispensable conversation about James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own.
ames Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. In our own moment, when that confrontation feels more urgently needed than ever, what can we learn from his struggle?
We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama's presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others.
We have been here before: for James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.
In the story of Baldwin's crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude's endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a scholar who speaks to the black and blue in America. His most well-known books, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, take a wide look at black communities and reveal complexities, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for hope. He is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Cornel R. West is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School. He is best known for his classics Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He is the host with Tricia Rose of a new podcast, The Tight Rope.
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To order Glaude’s Begin Again from Labyrinth Books, please visit labyrinthbooks.com and enter the discount code Baldwin at checkout to receive free shipment on your order.
Order a copy of Cornel West's memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Outloud: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781401921903
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/RdHlORnIqT0
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 2, 2021
Abolish Policing, Not Just the Police with Mariame Kaba, Maya Schenwar, and Victoria Law (7-2-20)
Join us for a discussion on abolishing the police and policing with Mariame Kaba, Maya Schenwar, and Victoria Law.
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Recent Black Lives Matter protests have already gained some significant victories, reaching further toward abolition than many may have thought possible in this lifetime.
As we stand on the precipice of so much potential change, there’s an understandable impulse to reach for “replacements” -- institutions to fill in for police and prisons. Yet we can’t simply call for social workers to replace police.
As we fight to defund or abolish police and imprisonment, we need to be wary of ways that strengthen other forms of surveillance and control. Drug courts, mandatory psychiatric treatment, and sex worker “rescue” programs might seem like better alternatives to our current system but they still disproportionately target Black, Brown and marginalized people, keeping them under coercive systems. Meanwhile, social workers, teachers and medical professionals--while vital to a flourishing society--can’t be called upon to simply “replace” police, thus drafting them into roles of surveillance and punishment. We must also beware of the ways in which “community”-based forms of policing, including neighborhood watch programs and the expansion of the child welfare system’s mandated reporting, replicate many of the same oppressive dynamics as traditional policing.
A just society will not be achieved until we stop looking for ways to make policing and prisons more humane and focus on building the society we actually want to live in.
Join abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba and journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law, authors of the forthcoming book Prison By Any Other Name, for a discussion of the urgent need to use this moment for transformative change.
Many thanks to Sarah Waltcher for the transcription of this video, which facilitated accurate captions.
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To get a copy of Prison By Any Other Name: https://thenewpress.com/books/prison-by-any-other-name
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/qt-JDtL0OnE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 2, 2021
Racial Capitalism and Crisis with Robin D.G. Kelley, Grace Blakeley (Socialism 2020) (7-4-20)
Join Robin D.G. Kelley, Grace Blakeley, and Brian Jones for the opening plenary of Socialism 2020 Virtual. Register for the conference at www.socialismconference.org.
We open the conference with a panorama of our present political landscape: a global pandemic, racialized health disparities backed by racist police violence, and the likelihood of a major economic crisis. This panel will situate our moment and prepare us for what is to come by explaining the contours of the new world we are entering, and how it has been shaped by the racialized capitalist system we still have with us. The conference will open with a performance of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Socialism 2020 is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Jacobin, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Learn more at socialismconference.org.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/L0sAiaJf-A8
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 2, 2021
Reparations for Slavery and Settler Colonialism (Socialism 2020) (7-4-20)
Join Bill Fletcher Jr., Dina Gilio-Whitaker, and Symone Baptiste to discuss reparations for slavery and settler colonialism, a part of the Socialism 2020 Virtual conference. Register for the conference at www.socialismconference.org.
The past few years has seen passionate political debate over what the United States government owes to the descendants of slaves as well as demands from Indigenous communities for rights to land that has been and continue to be taken from them by American settler colonialism. This discussion centers the voices of those most impacted by racism and settler colonialism in the conversation about what is owed and how we can repair the harm that has been done.
Socialism 2020 is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Jacobin, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/uwuvF7c2PrA
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 2, 2021
From Rebellion to Revolution w/ Khury Petersen-Smith & more (Socialism 2020) (7-4-20)
Join Jesse Hagopian, Amelia Blair-Smith, and Khury Petersen-Smith for a discussion of this summer’s uprising and how we can envision and build a revolutionary future. This event is part of the Socialism 2020 Virtual conference. Register for the conference at www.socialismconference.org.
The racist police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others have catalyzed a massive nationwide rebellion like nothing experienced in many of our lifetimes. The rebellions of this summer have achieved immediate wins and also faced harsh repression. We know these upsurges are not going away, though, because the causes of oppression and police violence have not gone away. This panel will discuss how we build on the mass anger and mobilizations of the present rebellion to carry out a full-scale, revolutionary transformation of our society.
Socialism 2020 is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Jacobin, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/AWm3KS3tLd8
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 3, 2021
Policing Without the Police- Race, Technology and the New Jim Code (7-8-20)
Join us for a virtual teach in on police, surveillance, and technology with Ruha Benjamin and Dorothy Roberts
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With calls for “defunding police” on the rise, invisible, tech-mediated surveillance continues to penetrate every area of our lives – workplaces, schools, hospitals, and of course policing itself.
How does this relate to a longer history of surveilling Black life and how are people mobilizing against this New Jim Code?
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era.
In this conversation, Dorothy Roberts and Ruha Benjamin explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. They take us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provide conceptual tools to resist the New Jim Code with historically and sociologically-informed skepticism. In doing so, they challenge us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.
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Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founder of the Just Data Lab, and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013) and Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) among other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. Professor Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. For more info visit www.ruhabenjamin.com
Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and biopolitics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.
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Get a copy of Ruha Benjamin's book Race After Technology: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781509526406
Order Dorothy Roberts' book Fatal Invention: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781595588340
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/tf0nEQTLw04
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
