The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the US launched the largest protest movement in the country’s history, growing to encompass an ever-larger confrontation with the institutions and symbols of white supremacy. The movement soon went global, with demonstrations from Senegal to Sweden, Brazil to South Korea. The largest protests after the US … Read more
When Trump threatened governors and mayors last month in a Rose Garden speech before using federal officers to attack demonstrators in Lafayette Park, it wasn’t merely a disturbing moment of fascist spectacle. It announced a nationwide campaign of state violence and repression. Acting as a kind of Praetorian Guard (or perhaps Schutzstaffel), Department of Homeland … Read more
There have been a number of left-leaning posts on social media today in surprised agreement with a piece by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about the trajectory of current protest movement, arguing that it abandons the class focus of Bernie Sanders for corporate multiculturalism. As he puts it: “And so far, as my … Read more
Professors Angela Addae, Judson Jeffries, Marisa Chappell and I spoke yesterday about police, protest, and white supremacy in a forum organized by the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon Jewish Museum. Here is a link to the program if you’re interested: https://ohs.org/events/racism-protest-and-law-enforcement.cfm
Liberal social media is in a lather today about Trump’s accusation that Martin Gugino, the 75 year-old longtime social justice activist brutally shoved to the ground by riot police in Buffalo, is an Antifa provocateur. The outraged on Twitter and elsewhere contrast the image of Gugino as an Antifa militant with the fact that he … Read more
In a little more than a week of mass protest and social upheaval of historic proportions, we are now moving in directions that were unthinkable a very short time ago. Not toward useless reforms, but toward the actual reduction of the power, size, and scope of the police and in some cases perhaps even its … 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