By Joe Lowndes “I’ve always been a populist,” Tom Turnipseed, once told me. “I just had the wrong idea of who I should be fighting for.” The political career of Turnipseed, who died last week at the age of 83, is an extraordinary one. He was the national director of Alabama Governor and segregationist George … Read more
By Joe Lowndes Roy Moore won’t be in Washington next year, after all. But the Republican Party isn’t anywhere near rid of his style of racialized right-wing rhetoric — or of politicians like him. Exit polls showed that 91 percent of Republicans who voted in Alabama’s special election Tuesday supported the controversial former judge, even as Doug … Read more
The originator of dub poetry talks about the role of culture in politics, antiracist and class struggle in the UK.
By Joe Lowndes The 2016 Republican National Convention began in the immediate shadow of a highly publicized death spiral involving police and black civilians in Dallas, Falcon Heights, and Baton Rouge. Against this backdrop, the Trump campaign seemed to choose the legacy of Richard Nixon rather than Ronald Reagan as the party’s patron saint. Indeed, … Read more
By Joe Lowndes When South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley called for the removal of the confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds this week, it signaled a political change. For the last half-century, the GOP’s Southern Strategy has steadily moved a majority of white southern voters into the Republican column. In keeping with that strategy, … Read more
In exploring the contemporary politics of whiteness, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes offer a powerful analysis of white precarity embedded in an antiracist critique of white supremacy in multicultural times. Producers, Parasites, Patriots is a necessary and welcome work.
— Cristina Beltrán, New York University
“This important volume places race at the center of political development in America. Leading lights and fresh voices in the field sweep across the history exploring new ways to think about the impact of racial division on the shape of the political order and the dynamics of its change. There is no better introduction to this subject, one of the massive facts of the American experience.”
—Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science, Yale University
“Evocative and analytical, this historical portrait shows how racial change in the South opened the door to conservative mobilization. Its powerful account of how a cross-regional alliance of white supremacists and business-oriented anti-New Dealers fundamentally reoriented American politics advances our understanding not just of pathways to the present, but of prospects for the future.”
Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White