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It’s January 19, 2021, the day after the nation’s official sanction of a narrow understanding of the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the day before the country “swears in” a new president, the representative of one of only two parties allowed to compete for the style of window dressing in this House of White Supremacy. What has changed? What remains the same? Not just over the last several years of the Trump Presidency, but the last several centuries.

For our answer we offer “The Plantation Is Still Burning” - a repeat airing of our conversation with Yannick Marshall from August 11, 2020, “The Plantation On Fire.”

On MLK Marshall says that it’s “one of the heights of modern racism to expect that the only imagination of liberty and freedom must go through one person Martin Luther King, who has, as it happens, been entirely possessed...by white supremacists."

Our show today (8/11/20) focuses primarily on Liberalism as another version of White Supremacy. It has always instructed the oppressed to “go slow” to any so-called radical demands like equality. And while Conservatism is a nightmare of activist White Nationalism it has been a Liberal world order that courts the dichotomy of the good cop/bad cop racket, offering protection to the wretched of the earth but never allowing escape from the exploitative and abusive imaginary of the liberal state.

GUEST

Yannick Marshall is currently Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Knox College. He writes on police power, race, white settler culture, anti-blackness, nationalism and ideology, and indigeneity as anti-colonial anarchism before Anarchism.

Discussed in Segment One: Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native by Patrick Wolfe

RELATED by Yannick Marshall

The American media is an arm of the police state

“We’ll Hold The Police Accountable!”: The Useful Meaninglessnesses of Liberal-speak

An Appeal –Bring the Maroon to the Foreground in Black Intellectual History

To loot a revolution

There Is No ‘Relatively Benign’ Version of Settler-Colonialism

Re-shelve civil rights, we need something stronger today

MUSIC

"Colonial Mentality" by Fela Kuti

"400 Years" by Bob Marley & the Wailers

"Invasion" by Burning Spear

"Fire" by Rhapsody featuring Moonchild

“Gula para a libertação de África” (Hungry for African Liberation) by Carlos Lamartine

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Music: Rasul Mowatt

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Born in 1866 Art Young was the exact contemporary of W. E. B Du Bois though Du Bois would outlive him by 20 years, and he was about a decade younger than the great Indiana Socialist Eugene V. Debs. Young was the most widely recognized and beloved cartoonist of the golden age of American radicalism. Spanning the Age of Monopoly (1877-1929), the The Gilded Age giving way to the so-called Progressive Era, his images gave a visual design and humorous edge to a rising wave of socialist, labor and anti-capitalist mass movements. Together they organized to oppose the unchecked power of monopoly capitalism, Wall Street finance and militant nationalism.

Artist and activist, Art Young's work records his direct involvement in the political struggles that shaped his age. His career stretches between his jailhouse portraits of the Haymarket Anarchists, drawn just days before their execution in 1887, to a Fourth of July picnic in 1918 with John Reed at the home of Gene Debs, just a few days before his arrest for giving an anti-war speech. Nearly unique in the history of political cartooning and the American Left, as an artist Art Young was capable of leading a mass anti-capitalist movement while also reaching deep into the mainstream of American media.

Rarely have visual artists played such a prominent role in political organizing as they did in the Haymarket Generation. Young stood at the center of a large community of cartoonists, working class artists and bohemian modernists who forged a distinctive style of revolutionary art for the new century. ‘‘The true art of the untrammeled cartoonist is now being developed," wrote Debs in 1912, "and he will be one of the most inspiring factors in the propaganda of the revolution." As Debs insisted: "Cartooning capitalism is far more inspiring than capitalistic cartooning."

While Young was the unpaid cartoon editor of the Socialist magazines The Masses and The Liberator, he published everywhere, in newspapers next to the work of Thomas Nast or liberal magazines like Life or The Nation, and for his troubles, Art Young was sued, censored, banned from the mail, and nearly spent decades in prison, narrowly escaping in two federal trials for sedition and conspiracy in 1918.

Today much of the history of American radicalism, including the work of Art Young, languishes in obscurity just when it is needed most. But be cheered, along with Cohen’s website, there are now two collections of Young’s work in print, both out from Fantagraphics, To Laugh that We May Not Weep and Art Young’s Inferno.

GUEST

Michael Mark Cohen is an associate teaching professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly (UMass Press, 2019). He’s the creator of the website, Cartooning Capitalism: Art Young and the Cartoons of American Radicalism, from where I stole a lot of the above introduction.

RELATED

Cartooning Capitalism: Art Young and the Cartoons of American Radicalism

Radical Art: Art Young and the Cartoons of American Socialism by Michael Mark Cohen

Today’s episode looks at social reproduction on the margins of the state - where there is a vitalizing drive to create life beyond, against, and outside of imposing limitations, and a persistence of radical sociality -- a fundamental challenge to the normalized organization of life around degradation and exploitation.

This vitalizing drive is what our guest today, Laura Harris, calls the aesthetic sociality of blackness, taking an expansive notion of blackness to mean an “unruly creativity and disorderly sociality” - that is everything that isn’t allowed within the scope of citizenship.

Harris notes that even bare life can present an experimental outlook oriented toward developing new forms of assemblage with those around us. I

In her recent book, Experiments in Exile: C.L.R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (Fordham University Press), Harris examines the organizing work of the Trinidadian C.L.R. James and the aesthetic work of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and finds a way of living that is aesthetic in its orientation and inherently social and collaborative in its practice.

Born in Trinidad in 1901, C.L.R. James was a political activist who was dedicated to promoting revolutionary struggles all around the world, from anti-colonial movements in Africa and Latin America to labor movements in Europe to the independent Black struggles in the United States. Working largely as an historian and literary figure, James produced a number of important texts that continue to be popular, including The Black Jacobins, a history of the Haitian Revolution, and Beyond a Boundary, an autobiographical account of cricket and its political importance.

Hélio Oiticica, on the other hand, was a Brazilian installation artist whose radical aesthetics left a longstanding impact on the avant-garde scenes in both Brazil and the United States. Born in 1937, Oiticica developed his aesthetic sensibilities while living under a rigid dictatorship in Brazil, eventually going into self-induced exile in the United States to pursue his art. Through his work, Oiticica sought to open up the reception of his art to a process of collaborative engagement, compelling his audiences to interact with his work as well as with each other.

James and Oiticica never met and they worked at separate historical moments and occupied different productive spheres. But their work, when placed in dialogue, brings into relief the practices of a radical sociality that most interest Harris and suggest how blackness, as Harris engages it, can be something beyond the color of one’s skin.

Show producer Cole Nelson begins by asking how Harris conceives of blackness as a practice outside the frameworks of identity and biology.

GUEST

Laura Harris is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Art & Public Policy at New York University. She is the author of Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (Fordham University Press, 2019). She has also published in Social Text, Women & Performance, Criticism, The South Atlantic Quarterly and other journals.

RELATED

Interchange – The Legacy of C. L. R. James

Interchange – At the Crossroads of Commons and Closure with Historian Peter Linebaugh

MUSIC

“Mas Que Nada” by Sergio Mendes - this is the Justin Strauss remix from the 1989 release Arara. "Mas Que Nada," doesn’t really have a precise English translation...it might be thought of as a challenge to an assertion.

“Desafinado” by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd off of th...

It’s December 29th. For our last show of 2020 we’ll turn back to a program from July 2015 as an attempt to hit the reset button. While the book of Ecclesiastes laments there’s nothing new under the sun, the Middle Ages lights the way for the old to become new again. We need to find what works and put it to renewed use.

***

Popular models of innovation (including buzzwords such as “creative destruction” or “disruptive innovation”) prize getting rid of anything that’s old. But some folks are starting to reimagine innovation in different terms: as reusing, recycling, refurbishing, sampling, or updating the old. In her new book, The Medieval New, Patricia Ingham shows that creative models combining old and new have a long and interesting innovating history. Focusing on the period that gave us eye glasses, windmills, courtly love, and mechanical clocks, (not to mention falconry and the blast furnace), Ingham asks us to reconsider what we think we mean by calling something new.

I. Rethinking “new” as opposed to the “old”: how the medieval question was organized differently (not old versus new but ingenium vs. consuetudo, so inborn, though idiosyncratic, talent vs. convention, or things generally agreed upon); “cultures of artistic copying”– creative works were not a completely “original” poem or story, but a work engaged with, updating, reworking, or repurposing stories or poems long admired; things “discovered” not made out of nothing; creativity as an engagement with tradition as well as “environment.”

II. Medieval ambivalence about “newness” on account of questions of Ethics: both in medieval literature and art where newfangledness is regularly used as an ambivalent term. Ambivalence and its definition: as simultaneously, or possibly, loved, but also possibly hated, etc. In contrast to today where too often people assume that anything “new” is, by definition, good, what we want, etc.; historians of science and technology who don’t all see the path of history as one of unrelenting “progress.”

III. Innovation and the University: We are said to be currently in an Age of Innovation–but we don’t always think too hard about what innovation entails. The University as an institution has long drawn together both strands of the “medieval new”: histories of re-reading, remaking, repurposing; but also ingenious solutions to long standing problems, concerns.

GUEST

Patricia Ingham, Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Indiana University and Editor of Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and author of The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation.

RELATED

Innovators are killing us by John Patrick Leary

The Disruption Machine by Jill Lepore

MUSIC

The Hilliard Ensemble, “O Livoris Feritas, M9″ (Guillaume de Machaut)

Nice & Smooth, “Old to the New”

Derek and the Dominoes, “Layla”

Us3, “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”–sample Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island”

Madlib, “Slim’s Return”–originally recorded by Gene Harris & The Three Sounds as “The Book of Slim”

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Studio Engineer: Joe Crawford

Executive Producer: Kade Young

It’s the holiday season, a time of encounter with religious traditions even for the most secular people. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of Black men and women by police has highlighted socio-economic inequity, the violence of the state, and the need for new forms of life that do not rely on police, prisons, and social violence. As we approach Christmas, we’re asking ourselves: what can we learn from the branches of Christianity that have imagined non-violent ways of living, ways of living that are based on community care and mutual aid?

From the Franciscan monastic tradition to the Christian Anabaptists, some Christian practices have charted ways of living together that emphasize responsibility and duty to each other and a collective exit from the violence of government and concentrated, sovereign power.

It would seem inevitable that we must repudiate one of the two, either Christianity with its love of God and one's neighbor, or the State with its armies and wars. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The work of Italian philosopher and political theologian Giorgio Agamben helps us think through the ways that the “rights” of some citizens are predicated on the exclusion of other people from access to those rights. Agamben invokes the concept of “bare life” to describe life that is managed by the state but not granted the full rights associated with citizenship. Bare life belongs to those who are most marginalized.

Agamben and the Christian anarchists ask fundamental questions: what does it mean to live together in a society? How do we form strong communities that are inclusive of the most marginalized people, when we live in a fragmented world? Is state enforcement of community ties the only way that diverse groups of people can co-exist? And if our current state is not up to this task, does this mean we need a revolution that will create one?

Christian anarchists and Agamben both say no. They not only critique the nation state paradigm, they also endeavor to imagine new forms of community that are not situated in relation to a state. They seek to imagine forms of communal belonging that go beyond the idea of being a citizen, beyond the conversation of state-granted rights.

Today, episode producer Nick Bergen talks with Katrina Kniss about her work on Agamben and the Christian anarchist tradition, exploring some of their common themes such as the need to think beyond revolution, and voluntary exile from the state through the abdication of rights. They also discuss how these ideas might help us think through the political turmoil that we have witnessed throughout the past year.

GUEST

Katrina Kniss is a graduate student at Wake Forest University, where she is working on a dual degree in divinity and law. She does research at the intersection of Christian anarchism and the work of Giorgio Agamben.

RELATED

Beyond Revolution, Beyond the Law: Christian Anarchism in Conversation with Giorgio Agamben by Katrina Kniss (paywall)

Keeping the Devil’s Company (Interchange with Adam Kotsko on Political Theology)

Blessed Are the Peacemakers: The Radical Pacifism of A. J. Muste (Interchange)

MUSIC - David Bazan (The Passion of David Bazan)

“Hard to Be” (Curse Your Branches, 2009)

“Foregone Conclusions” (Pedro the Lion, Achilles’ Heel, 2004)

Our show today is "Patterns of Segregation and Alibis for Abandonment," Part 2 of our conversation with Walter Johnson about his book, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States published by Basic Books.

The opening song is the main theme from the 1944 musical film “Meet Me in St. Louis” which stars Judy Garland.

The film was adapted from a series of eight short vignettes published first as “5135 Kensington” in The New Yorker and then expanded to twelve for a book compilation with each chapter representing a month of a year from 1903 to 1904 - a year in St. Louis leading up to the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the St. Louis World's Fair.

The author was St. Louis native, Sally Benson who attended the Mary Institute until she moved with her family to New York. The Mary Institute was founded as a school for white girls in 1859. It’s named for the daughter of William Greenleaf Eliot, founder and chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. It is now located in Ladue, a suburb of St. Louis that has the highest median household income of any city in Missouri with a population over 1,000.

This is one footing upon which the structural racism in St. Louis is founded.

Brochure of the Philippine Exposition

Today’s show takes us from The Dawes Act of 1887 up through the 1954 decision to demolish the Black homes and businesses of Mill Creek Valley and replace them almost literally with nothing.

Along this time line we’ll find novelist and memoirist Theodore Dreiser. From 1892 to 1894 Dreiser was an essential ethnographer of white men seeking “sport” (or vice) with Black women in St. Louis during his time there as a reporter for two newspapers.

The 1904 World’s Fair follows, revealing the scientism of the white imperial project at home and abroad in conquest of the dark skinned barbarians through "education," put on display in an exhibit called the Human Zoo.

But the barbarism of civilization is forever revealed as we discuss the racial capitalism that fomented the white violence of The East St. Louis Riot of 1917. That violence finds its institutional bureaucratic counterpart in the practices of Harland Bartholomew, perhaps the most influential city planner in U.S. history.

We'll begin today’s program with a brief discussion of Carl Schurz, a German émigré “revolutionist” who was to become the U.S. Secretary of the Interior in 1877 where he was central in devising ways to rob native populations of their land, and through the Dawes Act turned them into liberal freeholders whose only possessions would be debt.

GUEST

Walter Johnson is the Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His recent books are River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom and Soul by Soul: Life Inside in the Antebellum Slave Market.

RELATED

St. Louis: Gateway to Genocide (Part One with Walter Johnson)

The Largest Human Zoo in World History by Walter Johnson

Mill Creek Valley Neighborhood Was Less Important Than An Expressway

The East St. Louis Race Riot Left Dozens Dead,

Today’s show is Part One of our conversation with Walter Johnson on his book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States published by Basic Books

We’ll open with “Skin Deep” from Duke Ellington’s "Black, Brown and Beige" performed here by Louie Bellson and His All-Star Orchestra featuring St. Louisan Clark Terry on flugelhorn.

Terry’s first album was released in 1955, performed with Ellington during his career-reviving Newport Jazz Festival appearance the very next year. Over 50 years later, In 2010, at age 89, he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor he shares with trumpeters Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, who he mentored.

Clark Terry was born in St. Louis, Missouri on December 14, 1920 and attended Vashon High School (that’s important information in St. Louis, trust me). Vashon opened in 1927 and was the second high school for Black students after Sumner High School which was established in 1875. Vashon is located on Laclede Avenue: Laclede Avenue which runs from east to west starting in Midtown, through the Central West End, and stopping at Forest Park, demarcates the official division line between north and south St. Louis. Named in honor of Pierre Laclede, a French fur trader who founded St. Louis in 1764, in what was then Spanish Upper Louisiana. Or rather in what was then territory inhabited by multiple indigenous tribes like the Osage, the Miami, and the Sioux. There are currently no federally recognized tribes in the state of Missouri. Most of the indigenous people who once inhabited land in Missouri were forced to leave and resettle in Indian Territory (present day-Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Kansas) during the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

And as Ishmael says in Chapter 1 of Moby Dick, “Loomings”...this is the key to it all.

Jefferson Barracks during the Civil War

St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion where many of the so-called great generals of the Civil War were trained in Indian-killing, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America’s most radical city, home to Communist soldiers and newspaper editors, site of the Civil War’s first general emancipation, and the nation’s first general strike, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877...where we’ll end part one of our conversation.

We begin with Lewis & Clark, romanticized explorers opening the path to manifest destiny and the great white way of violence and debt peonage.

GUEST

Walter Johnson, the Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, grew up in Columbia, Missouri, about 100 miles west of St. Louis. His recent books are River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom and Soul by Soul: Life Inside in the Antebellum Slave Market.

RELATED

Racism and Capitalism in St. Louis by David Roediger

To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice (Boston Review Forum)

No Rights Which the White Man Is Bound to Respect by Walter Johnson

MUSIC

“Skin Deep” from Duke Ellington’s "Black Brown and Beige" performed by Louie Bellson and His All-Star Orchestra featuring St. Louisan Clark Terry on flugelhorn

“Market Street Stomp” by Charles Creath (Jazz-O-Maniacs)

“Terry’s Mood” - off of the album Louie and Clark Ex...

Once again we’re joined by Kimberley Brownlee to talk about the necessity of Social Rights being a rock-bottom human right. We need each other and we need to be needed so that we might become fully human.

Last week we discussed how Social Rights should have priority as human rights in the same way that food and water do, and how the right to be recognized and supported as humans in communities of care should trump individual rights of association. Which is to say the duty to care has priority over the right to be free. And further, that social deprivation - most obvious perhaps in the case of solitary confinement in prisons - is not only a moral wrong but a deep violation of our human rights.

Today’s conversation ranges from permissible forms of exclusion to morally wrong associations which may still be necessary for our well-being, to the ways prison, immigration policy, and healthcare in the U.S. share the same kinds of degrading language and institutional trappings - and what that says about this society.

GUEST

Kimberley Brownlee is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent book is Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms and she’s also the author of Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience, both published by Oxford University Press.

RELATED

On Being Against “Freedom”: Recognizing Social Needs (Part I) with Kimberley Brownlee

You Can't Say You Can't Play

MUSIC

The Call - “Us” from To Heaven and Back (1997)

Free - "Little Bit of Love" from Free at Last (1972)

Frazey Ford - "You’re Not Free" from Indian Ocean (2014)

Grant-Lee Phillips - "Humankind" from Mobilize (2001)

ID Break: Will Johnson - "Rosanky" from Scorpion (2012)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

This is the first of two conversations I had with Kimberley Brownlee about her recent book Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms.

Brownlee writes that our social needs are so fundamental, basic, and universal, that they lead us necessarily into the territory of human rights. Meeting our social needs – for decent human contact, acceptance within a community, companionship, loving relations, and interdependent care – is more important than meeting almost every other need we have.

She writes further:

Human rights protect the brute moral minimum, i.e. the least that we owe each other as human beings. We must have, at the very least, a human right against social deprivation, or rather a right to have access to decent human contact, to try to form and keep good social connections, to be protected in our connections once they exist, to be put into supportive connections when we’re unable to make social overtures, and to have the social resources we need to sustain the people we care about.

Social rights might be called rights that constrain what we like to call freedom. Brownlee makes these claims primarily against freedom of association - which means, in the main, freedom to exclude - and what seems a common assumption that it’s not only permissible to ignore other humans but that it’s okay, even a larger social good, to put people in prisons and remove their social networks of care. And more than that, to deprive them of all human contact. This has been widely agreed to be torture. And yet, the United States makes it common practice.

But this social deprivation is not only a moral wrong but a deep violation of those human rights - and really just makes us sad and mean.

GUEST

Kimberley Brownlee is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Her current research focuses on sociability, social rights, loneliness, and freedom of association. Her previous book, also published by Oxford, is Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience.

RELATED

Social needs are a human right by Kimberley Brownlee

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Explained

The self-reliant individual is a myth that needs updating by Kimberley Brownlee

MUSIC

The Police - "So Lonely"

Neil Young - "Out On the Weekend"

Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band - "Abandonitis"

Wilco - "How to Fight Loneliness"

Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell - "Stay a Little Longer"

(Recorded on December 24,1975 at the home of Guy and Susanna Clark; exerpt from the documentary "Heartworn Highways.")

ID Break - "Lonely" by Makaya McCraven

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today we’re stalking the middle class - from Marx to Middletown (Muncie, IN) to Macomb County, Michigan - to reveal what it’s hiding.

Our conversation with historian David Roediger took place about a month ago on October 14th and in between then and now fell November 3rd, Election Day in the U.S., and we have a new President-Elect - Joe Biden. I asked Roediger for a quick thought on the election. He said this via email:

The rejoicing in the US--and it is worth noting in the world--at the rejection of Donald Trump by US voters is palpable, even as the proportions of his defeat were far less than polling and reason predicted. Data on voter behavior remains inadequate but it appears that high school educated white voters, dubiously labelled the "white working class" and blamed for Trump's 2016 victory, shifted significantly away from Trump especially among males, falling from 48 to 42%. On the other hand, the election, and not only its 70 million-plus Trump votes, shows once again how the political grammar of "saving the middle class" and "paying attention to the white working class" constricts our political choices, even as impressive organizing occurs. 150 million voters, whether Trump backers or supporters of "Middle Class Joe" Biden, voted for candidates explicitly opposed to Medicare for All, for example, despite the popularity of that basic demand.

Another historian, Mike Davis, said recently in a Mother Jones interview something which might boil down to the phrase, “we are the 60%."

In the elections, over the past hundred years where Democratic presidential candidates have had the largest margin of victory, still, the Republicans are able to count on 37 to 41 percent of the vote. Alf Landon in 1936, at 37 percent of the vote. Barry Goldwater got almost 39 percent of the vote. Trump’s popularity ratings are still about 40 percent. But you need to ask yourself—why this constant percentage in American political history? What does it say, particularly about the upper middle class, the local country club elites? Today the hedge funds and private equity people are a very large base in this country for conservative politics. This was true in the 1930s. It was true to some extent in the ’60s with the Goldwater–massive white resistance brigade. And it’s true today. So when we talk about bringing people together, we shouldn’t be talking about it in some vague populist sense, believing that there is this great basis of unity. It’s the 60 percent that we’re talking about and creating a class unity that is based on full recognition of structural racism and systemic discrimination.

At the end of Roediger’s new book, The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History, he writes that in 2016 "among whites, Trump won not one particular income category but all income categories. The voting patterns of white workers were far more like those of whites in other class positions than like those of other groups of workers."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, his book about the mythic middle class centers on the politics, specifically the electoral politics, of whiteness.

In the book's "Afterword" he notes a truly forgotten aspect of the white working class - that polling done by the AFL-CIO (The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the largest federation of unions in the United States with approximately 12 and half million members) shows nearly 40% of white non-college-educated electorate as Democrat or leaning Democrat with 80% or more of those approving of Black Lives Matter and not wanting a border wall.

There is a space of unity in these numbers and these numbers beg the question - Is “the middle class” a chimera manufactured to promote class confusion, prompting white resistance brigades to go on marching while we all walk upon Du Bois’s color line?

GUEST