New Dawn

In this episode, Michael Dawson chats with Charisse Burden-Stelly (Asst. Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College) about her research on W.E.B Du Bois, as well as lessons his scholarship has to offer as we think through building social movements today.

Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History

Suggested Readings:

Hannah Appel, The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea (2019)

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)

Megan Ming Francis, “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture” (2019)

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019)

Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (2016)

Claudia Jones, Beyond Containment (edited by Carole Boyce Davies) (2011)

Kelly Miller, “The Risk of Women’s Suffrage” (1915)

Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940 (2018)

This episode is a recording of a conversation between Michael Dawson, Rhea Boyd, Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, and Brandi Summers during an event titled "COVID-19 and Racial Inequities: Unpacking the Anti-Black Response," on June 25, 2020.

Rhea Boyd, MD, MPH, FAAP works clinically at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and teaches nationally on the relationship between structural racism, inequity and health, and has a decade of experience advancing community-based advocacy. She leads efforts to characterize and address the child and public health impacts of harmful policing practices and policies. She serves as the Chief Medical Officer of San Diego 211, working with navigators to address social needs of San Diegans impacted by chronic illness and poverty. And she is the Director of Equity and Justice for The California Children's Trust, an initiative to advance mental health access to children and youth across California.

Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, PhD is a public health researcher and Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research integrates theoretical perspectives from the social sciences with epidemiological methods in public health to examine how social inequality in the US shapes population health, with a particular focus on the health of racial/ethnic groups and immigrants. The majority of her work focuses on how race, migration, and class intersect to shape the the health of US-born and immigrant Latinxs across the life-course.

Brandi Summers, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines urban cultural landscapes and the political and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. She is also the author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, which explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C.

Suggested Links & Readings:

Learn more about Moms 4 Housing

Berwick, Don. “The Moral Determinants of Health.” JAMA. Published online June 12, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.11129

Laster Pirtle, Whitney N. “Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States.” Health Education & Behavior, (April 2020). doi:10.1177/1090198120922942.

Sewell, Abigail A., Kevin A. Jefferson, Hedwig Lee. “Living under surveillance: Gender, psychological distress, and stop-question-and-frisk policing in New York City.” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 159, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.024.

Deva Woodly, an Associate Professor of Politics at the New School, discusses the movement for black lives and how to create a kinder world with Michael Dawson.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," Audre Lorde (A Burst of Light" and Other Essays)

Suggested Readings and Links:

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinksy

Read more about these individuals:

Anna Julia Cooper

Patrisse Cullors

Asha Bandele

Mary Hooks – Southerners on New Ground

Septima Clark

Ella Baker

In this episode, Amna Akbar (Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University) discusses the imbrication of capitalism and social movements in legal studies today.

Akbar, Amna, Toward a Radical Imagination of Law (July 25, 2018). New York Law Review, Vol. 93, No. 3. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3061917 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3061917

McLeod, Allegra M., "Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice" (2015). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 1490.

Links to:

Law and Political Economy Project

Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles

Sunrise Movement

Movement for Black Lives

The Red Nation

Sylvie Laurent joins Michael Dawson in conversation about her recent publication, King and the Other America: The Poor People's Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality (University of California Press, 2019). 

Suggested Readings: 

Bobby Cervantes, "Revisiting the Poor People's Campaign and Its Legacy" (AAIHS)

Robert Greene II, "The Language of the Unheard" (The Nation)

Kirkus Reviews, "King and the Other America" 

Sylvie Laurent, "Martin Luther King fifty years on" (Le Monde diplomatique)

Sylvie Laurent,  La Couleur du marché, Racisme et néolibéralisme aux États-Unis, Le Seuil, Paris, 2017.

Patricia Posey is Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago and the Political Science Department’s junior faculty member for the Race and Capitalism Project. She specializes in race and American political economy. In this episode, Posey joins Michael Dawson to talk about payday loans and financial capitalism.

Related Readings:

Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops, and the Poor

Book by John P. Caskey

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy

Book by Howard Jacob Karger

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives

Book by Lisa Servon

Broke, USA: From Pawn Shops to Poverty, Inc. - How the Working Poor Became Big Business

Book by Gary Rivlin

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy

Book by Mehrsa Baradaran

Predatory Inclusion and Education Debt: Rethinking the Racial Wealth Gap

Written by Louise Seamster and Raphaël Charron-Chénier

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Book by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University) speaks with Michael Dawson about her new book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. She talks about how black urban identity is constructed, why she is against homeownership, and how the housing crisis isn't a crisis but a feature of society. 

Link to Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Further Reading:

David Theo Goldberg (2001), The Racial State

In this episode, Darrick Hamilton, the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, joins Michael Dawson to discuss neoliberal economics, inequality, an economic bill of rights, and reparations.

Links:

The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

Readings:

Dawson, Michael and Megan Francis, “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order”

Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity-Pay Gap”

Hamilton, Darrick in Democracy Journal, “Neoliberalism and Race”

Johnson, Walter, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmation Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

To commence Season 4, Michael Dawson invited Adom Getachew (University of Chicago) and Quinn Slobodian (Wellesley College) to speak about the discourse on nationalism. They discuss a recent issue of Dissent magazine, in which Getachew and Slobodian were both contributors, What is the Nation Good For? to start the conversation. They talk about the relationship between nationalism and populism; immigration politics; and more, including their recently published books Worldmaking After Empire (Getachew) and Globalists (Slobodian).

Works by the guests:

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

To continue the conversation, explore some of these suggested readings:

Dissent Summer 2019 Issue: What Is The Nation Good For?

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of Global Citizen

E. Tendayi Achiume, "The Postcolonial Case for Rethinking Borders"

Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx

Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race

Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain

Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing

Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South

Iyko Day, Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, joins Michael Dawson to discuss her research on the logics of settler colonialism and waste landing, in addition to her takeaway from the 2019 Racial Capitalism Conference held at UIC-Urbana Champagne. 

Note: The guest would like to clarify her comment on the Shepard/Byrd hate crime bill—it was accompanied by a $680 billion national defense budget, not an 8 billion dollar increase as she had stated in the recording.