Rev Left Radio - Still Laundering Black Rage: DEI as Counterinsurgency

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

In this incisive conversation, Breht welcomes poet, scholar, and organizer, filmmaker, and host of the Black Myths Podcast Too Black back to the podcast to critically examine the recent attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Anchored by the penetrating analysis in Too Black and Rasul Mowatt’s article, "Bootleg Rehab: Still Laundering Black Rage," this episode dissects DEI as a capitalist pacification strategy, historically rooted in reaction to radical Black movements and inherently limited in delivering meaningful change. Too Black articulates how DEI serves capitalist interests by redirecting genuine Black rage into symbolic, surface-level victories that do little to alter the underlying structures of oppression. Together, they explore DEI’s historical development, its market-friendly evolution under Nixon, and its role in creating internal class contradictions within oppressed communities. Through the powerful analogy of a "bootleg rehab," Too Black vividly illustrates how superficial reforms pacify demands for revolutionary change without addressing systemic injustices like police violence, economic deprivation, and racialized exploitation. They also unpack the dialectical relationship between DEI initiatives and reactionary anti-DEI backlash, showing how both reinforce capitalist stability and deepen racial and class divides. Finally, Too Black outlines practical approaches for organizers to bypass capitalist traps, emphasizing the need for movements grounded in materialist analysis and authentic community needs. This essential discussion equips listeners with critical insights to recognize, resist, and transcend the limitations of DEI, advancing a revolutionary politics that refuses to settle for symbolic concessions in the face of real suffering. Check out Black Myths Podcast HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show for the third time, I believe, to Black, a poet, author, activist, organizer, thinker to discuss a new article that he wrote with Razul Mowat entitled Bootleg Rehab, Still Laundering Black Rage. He's been on the episode before to talk about the broader book that, that advanced that concept of laundering black rage called laundering black rage, the washing of black death, people, property, and profits. And he's also engaged in organizing around the Pendleton, too.

So he's been on Rev Left in the past to discuss that as well. I'll link to those episodes in the show notes if you're interested. But this is a really deep dive and a principled historical and dialectical materialist analysis of racial capitalism through the lens of DEI and affirmative action before. that. We dive into how this is a good example of the functioning of the process of conversion that is laundering black rage. And in the process, we touch on imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, capitalism, the political moment, the two-party system. And so, so, so much more. This is a really in-depth and I think incredibly engaging as well as informative conversation. I think a lot of you

will appreciate. So without further ado, here's my discussion with Two Black on his recent article with Razul Mowat entitled Bootleg Rehab, Still Laundering Black Rage. Yeah, I go by the name Two Black. I'm a poet, organizer, filmmaker, a podcast, That's the host of the Black Myths podcast. That is the Black Myths podcast. I'm here to talk about the piece I co-wrote with Russell Mawatt entitled Bootleg Rehab, Still Laundering Black Rage. And I'm also the co-author of the book with the same author,

Rasul Mawat, Laundering Black Rage. Well, awesome. It's great to have you back. I think this is the third time you've been on Rev Left, and it's always an eye-opening experience to have you on. I really appreciate all the work that you do. Highly recommend Black Myths podcast, link to that in the show notes, of course. We're going to talk about this specific article, as you mentioned, bootleg rehab, still laundering black rage.

But you mentioned the book that we had you wanted to discuss a few years ago, laundering black rage, the washing of black death, people, property, and profits. You use the concept of laundering black rage in this article, so I think it would be good to start with that. Can you kind of just remind listeners what the concept of laundering. Black Rage is and kind of elaborate on how people can even recognize it in our broader society. Yeah, so the basic premise of that book, I mean, there's obviously a longer version, I would say obviously go listen to the episode we did last time. But the shorter version of that is we're trying to understand, as we say, I guess a process of conversion. So we start in 2020 as a kind of flashpoint, but the book moves out, moves back in history to try to understand this

process of conversion and when we say conversion talking talking about using 2020 and george floyd as an example which is actually coming up on the fifth anniversary on may 25th we use the example of george floyd getting killed by the by the police derrick chauvin with the knee on his neck for roughly 10 minutes and the rays that follows that specifically the black rage and the other rage that it inspires and how that rage is converted from, you know, a threat to the state, a threat to capital into something that becomes an asset for it and how it's done and how that process is done in ways that people often aren't even noticing when it's happening, right? So we looked at, we looked at 2020 and we're noticing that trend, but then

it spawned a deeper study that originally came in a form of essays called Laundering, Black rage that then became the book later on laundering black rage the washing of black death people property and profits so what so laundering becomes a way of understanding that conversion where the state is converting things that threaten it particularly in this case rage and turning those things into commodities that can be used in in their in to their benefit so for instance George Floyd's neck gets stepped on and a police precinct burns down and people are raging in the streets

and then suddenly we start seeing how to get to the piece today we start seeing the rise of DEI jobs popping up even more not that they began here but there was a DEI jobs went up 55% in 2020 when we looked at racial equity funding for instance

it went from 5.9 billion This is in the nonprofit world to $16.5 billion in 2020. The Democrats broke their fundraising record online a week the month after George Floyd was killed in 2020. And then we start seeing things like buy black and black capitalism. And then we also see on the other side the Republicans broke their fundraising record that year. Or it was the most they had raised that year in the same month, June of 2020. And we see the rise of more repressive bills. more anti-protest bills, anti-CRT bills, and then we actually were able to track,

there was a study market response to racial uprisings that actually tracks how, from 2012 to 2020, the companies that make police, the firms that make police equipment see a rise in their profits following every high-profile killing by the police and or a white vigilante. So that's from basically from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd, and they made the most money, these firms that make police equipment in 2020. So somehow the rage that follows the death of a black man at the hands of a police, and I should say a poor black man, because that's important to note not just any black man, but a poor black man who had drug problems in this case. And statistically, most of the time, the people who are murdered by the police or killed by the police are poor, usually. disabled and usually are male and obviously black that's the that that's the general population so

we're trying to understand how does that population are those are the people who get killed by the police and then somehow there's things that have nothing to do with that right like diversity statements will not address that um you know buying black will not when you can't buy your way out of a chokehold as we say in the book these things just do not simply address that but those are just examples of 2020 so then we try to understand And historically, how is this process played out? How can we see laundering and we see it as something that comes at the beginning of capitalism and its primitive accumulates a stage?

Laundering is described as a idea in which you take something that is dirty and it's an attempt to make it look clean or to make it appear clean. Nothing is ever actually cleaned. It's important to note, but you make it look clean. So the, you know, usually people understand this to somebody who, I'm a criminal of some form, quote unquote criminal, who wants to make their drug money legitimate. They want to legitimize it so they can spend it in the economy and things of that nature. So there's a process of doing that. There's like a three-step process placement layering integration.

But we say that a definition should be applied much more broadly. And we say, for instance, at the founding of capitalism, at the founding of the United States specifically, or at least as an example, and just your. European colonialism in general. There was crime being done. There was theft of people, theft of resources, theft of land, and there had to be a conversion of those crimes and the money that came from that, and there had to be a means of legitimizing it.

So the fronts that were set up become the state, and our definition of the state is not simply just the government. It's more in a Gramscian sense, thinking about both public and private entities and how they play a role in the kind of regulation of capital and it's in the interest of the ruling class. And so through business, through government, through schooling, et cetera,

these become the fronts that convert the crimes of capital over, convert the conquest of people over. So we'd say this is not abstract. This is something you can see materially. So we say, you know, the slaves were the dirty money and the cotton was the cling, right? So you enslaved, you enslaved, you enslave the slaves and you can buy and you put them to work and then they produce

products and you know you can use cotton sugar et cetera tobacco and these things are then sold on a market that can finance other projects and you've now legitimized what was once the theft of a person into an entire economy um but in doing that you obviously are going to spark rage from those people in which you've oppressed because oppression breeds rage so then it becomes the process of how do you convert the rage that comes out of your oppression think this is from the perspective of the state from the perspective of white capital

how do you take that rage and convert it into an asset for you as well because you don't just own the physical or material means of production like Mark says you own the mental means of production you own the spaces that people come to find consciousness in and if you can

discipline that rage in a way that inspires people to demand things that don't actually get them out of their situation that don't resolve their contradictions, then that works to your benefit. So there's always a process set in place in doing that. And that's not necessarily conspiratorial or some kind of Illuminati shit.

It's just simply folks with capital, the ruling class, looking for ways to protect their interests and folks who work underneath them looking for ways to protect their interests as well. And that leads to a kind of gridlock that keeps this in motion. So I hope that gives some of a synopsis.

Again, there's a lot more to say. tried to knock that down as much. I just had to do two talks over the weekend, so I'm used to rambling about this. But that's a synopsis I hope. No, yeah, and I think it's a very powerful concept and just historical reality. I love your point about, you know, none of this is conspiratorial. It's the logic of the class system itself. And if you think back over the entirety of the history of the U.S. American racialized capitalist system since before America's founding, because slavery was going on before, and then, and so as primitive accumulation in general,

that obviously this system that is rooted in the brutal exploitation, specifically of black slaves from its very outset, needs to find a way to harness, co-op, and even put into its own service the rightful and righteous rage and revolt of its exploited and dominated black population. So you can see all throughout American history that this is a citizen,

systematic functioning that has to occur if the system is going to survive at all. It's a broad co-optive mechanism that doesn't just, as you said, diffuse the black rage, but co-ops it entirely and puts it into service of the system's maintenance and perpetuation, which I think is a really crucial aspect of this as well. You also mentioned the dialectic of backlash, which we'll get into like the co-optive mechanism that arose after the george floyd protests not only was a democratic co-optive thing that benefited the democrats and you know funding fundraising electoralism all that stuff without ever solving the material issues of black people or solving the root causes of what would lead to a derrick chauvin in the first place but it also massively benefited and infused a bunch

of energy into the reactionary backlash against black lives matter um and and and and and and the Republican Party broadly, which I think we can all agree, Trump continued to, and the whole Trump coalition continued to use to their advantage all the way up through this most recent election. Yeah, and a few things. So something me and Russell been working through, I'm going to work through all of what you said is even the idea of co-optation. I say sometimes I don't even know if that fully captures what's happening.

I think sometimes when we say co-optation, it's describing the end result, and it doesn't necessarily identify what's in place to set that in motion. And for us laundering is a question, is trying to answer that question, what sets co-optation and motion, what sets, what some people might call elite capture in motion, what is the infrastructure in place? So I was doing a talk over the weekend. I use a simple example. I said, if I came into this room and I came in the room is too black and I left the room as too white, then what happened? Right. Like, why would I change? What would occur? So if somebody was like, oh, they co-opening. He co-opted him, all right, but that doesn't explain why I left is too white.

Like what would happen in this room that when I walked out the door, I am now too white? Like, what was the process that led to that outcome? So laundering is trying to say, okay, there are infrastructures in place that bend the will of people and been the will of individuals and groups that leads to an outcome such as the co-optation. So we say Black Lives Matter was co-opted or this was co-opted or that was co-opted or Occupy was co-opted or Occupy was co-opted or whatever. We have to understand what's the process in which that occurred and not just

the strategies and tactics maybe that the state applied, but also just the infrastructure that's already in place that they can squeeze to get something out of, you know, to get something to their benefit, right? So much of you know, to continue

to use 2020 as an example, not as the entire obviously thing of explaining this. You know, 2020, there were already, there was already infrastructure in place that helps that helps set up some of the things that like that DEI was already a industry that had blown up a lot more since Trump I mean the eyes will get to later obviously goes way back before that but it had blown up a lot since Trump because that was the industry that got a lot of the funding is when people thought that oh we need to actually care

about race or something after 2016 like that was you know where a lot of white folks were and even a lot of black liberals unfortunately so that industry was our in place by time you get to 2020, you know, despite some of the changes. So that was the industry that was, you know, that, you know, that Milton Freeman quote that the idea is lying around to the ones that often get used. It was already in place. And that's because capital already controls certain, you know, certain outlets in which rage can even be expressed, right? So you have to look at all that, not just the, not just maybe the moment and time, but also the infrastructure that has a way to perpetuate itself

and maintain those interests. That is the when we talk about the fronts. Those fronts have the ability to evolve and shape based on the interests of that given moment. In terms of backlash, we make a point about in that piece in terms of even

when folks say the white backlash, there's a bit of a small pushback on that because, you know, normally when we talk about a white backlash, particularly we're talking about how you know black people made some kind of material progress

and from there there was a backlash materially to that right so reconstruction for instance is obviously an upgrade from slavery and then there was you know resurrection right that comes after that

that pools black people's rights down into the gutter into Jim Crow that's a material change for the majority of the people. You could say the civil rights movement, you pass the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 64-65

and then, you know, there's this, the Southern strategy and law and order and stuff. Those are material like backlashes to it, but there were also material benefits to many of those people that lived in those times. In this case, after 2020,

there have not been any material benefits to backlash. or to lash, as we say. Like, police killings have continually went up since 2020. I think there was only a small break in 2021. It went down by like 12 people. And then it went back up. And in 2024, police killed more people than they'd ever killed in the recorded history in which we have.

Right. So the economic position of black people did not improve at all. It got worse in many ways. Inflation went up for all of us, right? And impacted black people. more. So the backlash is to a perceived progress that actually never happened. You know, it's to a perceived progress for a few people who might have been able to get a grant or to get a job or, and it's also just a backlash to even the idea of discussing race or the idea of

black people even maybe having the opportunity or other people of color, quote unquote, or colonized people even having opportunities. So a lot of us are being lashed for things that we never even benefited from in the first place, which means we go even further back than we once did. Now, we say capitalism has its own building backlash anyway, you know, because when profits tend to, when the rate of profit tends to fall, you know, a more fascist or at least repressive alignment is usually what capitalists have to rely upon to keep the people in place because the rage, not just of black people in this case, but of everyone is, is going to be heightened so you have to you have to rely more on a repressive aspect of it um to to maintain order

versus when profits are you know going higher you can you have more spoils to bribe people with right um so now that capitalism is is is always in crisis really but it's it's in this current phase of crisis where you know there's trump administration's worried about industrialization and all of that at least they claim to be um there's us and and china and other countries are out competing them you know when there's a fall of profits the the racial order of things is kind of the continuity gets messed up so there needs to be some kind of scapegoat that you can blame things on because you know the average population that has a perceived privilege or at least a perceived advantage relative to the people at the very bottom that advantage doesn't seem as high

So now you have to find scapegoats and things of that nature. But that's a backlash that's built into capitalism because it has to lash out at the workers, at the people when its ability to accumulate money is not, you know, to accumulate profit is not in the best in the best place. So I think it's more of that than this kind of generic racial backlash because when Dr. King talks about it in the other America speech, he's getting at a more material type of backlash. like black people got more rights, black people got more access to, to wealth and things of that nature, then it was taken from them. In the case of DEI, that's not actually what's happened. We can get into that more, but there hasn't been that kind of material progress. That's the saddest part, one of the saddest parts about this.

Yeah, well, yeah, really important clarifications there. Yeah, so in the past, there's been instances of a proper material backlash to genuine material progress, But in this last instance, and I'm sure there are many more examples of this as well, where there's only little, if any, there's no material progress, maybe rhetorical or merely symbolic assumed progress, and then that creates actual material backlash. In that case, you just drop the back and it's just being lashed, which I think is a really evocative way of saying that. And then to clarify that first point, the co-option part is just a moment in a much broader process of conversion. And so if you just think about it as a co-optive mechanism, you're thinking too acutely and too narrowly. This is a much broader process that's happening that requires, among other things, already existing institutional power centers to even begin the process that would eventually result in the moment of co-option, correct? Right, yeah. That's a great way of putting it, you better than I said it.

No, no, no, absolutely not, but I really appreciate that clarification. So let's go ahead and move forward. And before we dive into the details, this could be pretty brief. I think most people listening will have some sense of this. But maybe just quickly explain the recent news around DEI and why you felt it was an important moment to write about this topic. Yeah, so it's gotten in the news, obviously since Trump has gotten in office and they passed the executive order. that um and there was a they put out this this statement uh it was um ending racial and wasteful government d i programs and preferencing and they basically are saying that the supreme court

decision uh i believe in 2023 that struck down affirmative action and admissions there's a college admissions that was the that was the extra ruling but they're saying that that applies more broadly which you know is on weak legal grounds honestly but that's what they're saying. So once they put out that executive order, there were more corporations who started withdrawing their DEI programs and their DEI initiatives. And then this prompted a boycott led by Al Sharpton and Jamal Bryant, both ministers to boycott Target and other companies, but Target has become, I think, kind of the face of it and other, other corporations that have ended their DEI initiatives. That was, that's the, that's the, that's the mainstream

narrative. So we're, so then we've seen, we've seen that. And then we've also obviously seen Trump used DEI and the administration used DEI as a, I kind of attack on anything, honestly. So even like aviation, when a, when a plane crash, they said that was, that, that they, that was a DEI thing or, you know, government workers, all it is. And I've even talked to people who are working in these places where they have actual words they have to avoid in their, when they're turning in proposals because they can get flagged as, quote unquote, DEI. So DEI, and this even goes, this goes back further to, you know, Sanchez and Florida,

DeSantis and Florida and all that. But it's important to know that DEI has been on a decline, and this is part of our problem with the kind of outrage that's all of a sudden this kind of manufactured outrage is that DEI as I said earlier peaked in 2020 and then since then it's the jobs have been falling off and there was a there was a report that came out that um I can't remember the name of it that was in those notes that got lost but um there was a point that came out that DEI and this is in 2023 that DEI roles that is that is to say roles and companies that fall under the category of DEI had been had been laid off at twice as much as non-DEI roles and this is since

2021 um so much of what people are complaining about the i has been in decline for years um plenty of folks plenty of companies have been getting rid of them or they have downsized it uh absorbed it in the HR things of that nature and there were no boycotts then but as we know this is part the kind of laundering when talking about people have been taught in kind of position to when a Republican does something that a liberal does the whole time, then all of a sudden we get mad

about it. But it's been in decline since 2020, and it's important to know that these initiatives were put out, as I already said, to quell the rage in 2020. So you're defending a front, you're defending counterinsurgency anyway when you go out of your way to boycott for

DEI that is not having a material benefit on black people so that's um without going going on forever that's the kind of context in which we've in which we find ourselves in you know that now people are feel like it's this um it's this scourge against against justice and and things of that nature but as we'll get to the the history of the i just simply doesn't um doesn't meet the mark for anything that you know anything like that like fixing some kind of injustice or something of that nature. That's not the history it comes out of, unfortunately.

Yeah, because, I mean, ostensibly, you would think DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, if it's actually implemented throughout the economy, it would give people who have historically been, you know, refused from certain types of jobs and careers and opportunities. It would open up those opportunities and actually create, this is the liberal framing, right, actually create material prosperity for people, who have otherwise or historically been shut out. But in your article, you argue that DEI was never alive to begin with. You also highlight, as you were just kind of alluding to, the historical

roots of DEI in the civil rights era and in Nixon's presidency. So maybe we can go in that direction. Can you kind of just elaborate on the history of DEI and especially on why you see DEI as inherently incapable of achieving meaningful material change in the first place? yeah so the i really is a type of soft power uh people are familiar with that phrase um i'm gonna quote my um my co-author he talked about this in his book geographies of threat um he said while the capabilities of hard power force coercion and warfare we're always we're always um ready using we're always ready the use of soft power culture values ideals have become preferred method of moving forward So hard power is guns and tanks and the things that often bring folks together, right?

Because they're repressive and they create a type of a shared experience and they're more visible. But soft power is, you know, done through propaganda. It's done through a certain kind of values and taste. It's done through media. It's done through, you know, instead of the, they're being pressure from the outside. is done by the corporation having their own initiative to quote unquote clean up their act to be more socially responsible it that's that's the kind of idea to think about it it's also a way for the state to i think get ahead of problems in some ways or quell problems that they've they've created

themselves um so you know we didn't this isn't actually in the piece but i do want to know this is a that one of the books we pulled from minority rights revolution by john scretney he notes that you can go back as far as integration and um you know prior to like following like world war two and find some of these earlier initiatives and it's funny this is part of another this is a quick aside but part of the my part of my problem i think russell would agree with with um the way the left quote unquote or liberals deal with this issue is either that people you have folks who either go out of their way to defend the i and i think think they're making it in good heart because they're trying to defend people who they feel

are marginalized and I totally get that or they think it's just this kind of vapid identity politics so they think it should die and neither one of these approaches actually deals with the history of it so it's funny when you read one of the things we read and also talked about this on our black myths episode that will come out this week is um is is you read like the heritage foundation and this is not a a compliment but they actually go they do deal with this history. They don't, they cherry pick from it and they obviously distort it. But the Heritage Foundation for those who don't know wrote Project 2025 and has a long history

of, you know, putting forward a lot of right-wing ideas as a think tank. Yeah. They actually do go back to, you know, the 40s and stuff and look at these early integration programs. And they also put a lot of blame on the philanthropic foundations. But the left and DEI folks don't want to deal with that aspect of it. And so what ends up is you create a vacuum for the right to fill because people don't want to be honest about these programs. And I think that's a mistake. So we have to launch our own critiques as opposed to leaving that vacuum open for folks who have no good intentions whatsoever.

I just want to say that as an aside. But anyway, so when I say integration as a means of national security, it's to say that following World War II, two are really not even following World War II. Before the United States even enters World War II, you start seeing these initiatives like H.G. Wells, it's trying to promote this idea, this is an international declaration of human rights, and he's able to push this idea to Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt was the president at the time. And they try to say that this is where you start hearing about the United States being this, quote, as Roosevelt put, an arsenal of democracy. And, you know, we didn't

hear as much about this, human rights and stuff prior to World War II, it was pretty well understood that, you know, certain types of people were just less human, and that's just what it was, and white people were the, were the supreme, and that's just what it was. You don't really find a lot of literature from the mainstream. You'll find it, obviously, in some form from someone always, but you don't find a lot of literature or speeches from presidents or anybody pushing this kind of idea of a global human rights and respect for all people. that's just not what was happening so um do you think really really quickly start to interrupt but do you think that's just like the ideological dressing up of of a moment when the u.s. was taking

on and obviously authoritarian fascist regime like the Nazis and and their allies do you think that was like sort of ideological response to that it was certainly used in the cold war but uh in world war two where do you think that that shift comes from what's what scrutiny argues is that a lot of times i know we i know it's been talked about in this show and we talked about ours that we talk about how there there was soviet propaganda that the united states had to combat but even before that all of the nazis and and the fascists in japan were using some of the same propaganda against united states you know and that's kind of gets lost in the history in terms of the the racial inequality of the united states um apartheid jim crow they were

actually using that in their literature to talk about the united states so so so when they entered in the World War II, the United States had its own contradictions that, so since it took that position that to enter in where this arsenal of democracy were fighting, even though much of that was BS, it kind of, it put itself in a position where it had to defend a little bit of that to even, to even advance its own goals. And that's why integration becomes a form of national security, because if you're not integrating people somewhat into the system and black people became the main group that they targeted initially. If you're not, if you're allowing that to be a propaganda piece against you

around the world, then you can't enter into those new markets that you want to exploit. You can't get people to convert to democracy and capitalism. They might go to communism, right? Or they might even go to the fascist entities in some cases. So that was the, that was the, that was the, that was the, that was the kind of impetus for that. And he even talks about how part of why gender doesn't originally make it into the framework of what we now think of the i or this inclusion was because gender wasn't a the inclusion of gender wasn't a national security issue so that's why i didn't make it so race it's not that it wasn't just that patriarchy was just existing this kind of abstract it was they're looking at it is this is a this is a national security problem that we need to deal

with so there are he has quotes in the book that that that lay that out um truman wrote in his own diary propaganda seems to be our greatest foreign relations enemy. Russia distributes lies about us and then in the early 1950s the State Department estimated that nearly half of all Soviet propaganda was on racial equality, right?

So this was really hurting them around the world because as, you know, the British and they, Roosevelt was able to get the British and others to decolonize quote unquote, right, to at least like leave formal colonialism alone. Then

you can't have like foreign diplomats from those countries coming over here and they're getting arrested and fucked with by you know because they're in dc and if they went to maryland they had like literal jim crow down there so they had to like create um i guess spaces for those people to go and to tell and they had to they had to do this is mainly the state department the white house had to work with those like businesses and stuff to say when they come here leave us along leave them alone so this became an actual national security issue because if you're not integrating people into it, you can't really invent your imperialist goals. And I think that gets

left out of it when we talk about this. Now, again, when I said the Heritage Foundation deals with history, that's obviously not how they argue it, right? But they do at least acknowledge that the kind of inclusion of integrating the military, how the State Department used to

pressure Hollywood executives to put black people in more respectable roles so they weren't like at the bottom of it so they could project this to the world. like these are real things. They argued against racial covenants under the Truman administration. You know, the Justice Department argued against them and was able to actually effectively win. They obviously integrating the military, hiring more people in the State Department,

putting more black people into foreign, you know, foreign diplomatic roles. This was done intentionally to combat this idea that democracy and capitalism wasn't racial inclusive. So there's a earlier history that didn't even really make it in a piece that I think should be acknowledged. There's more to that, but I'll stop there just to not get too deep into it. So that's like Roosevelt and Truman. So we're in the 40s. The military isn't really fully integrated until the 50s. So even under a Republican administration with Eisenhower, that's when you see the military become more fully integrated, even though I think the executive order was done by Truman. So, you know, now it's important to know, as that's happening,

there's also this major repressive aspect that people call McCarthyism and the Red Scare is happening at the same time. And it's also Truman that, you know, kind of helps launch that into motion with his loyalty oaths, right? So, you know, that's why I'm saying is a type of national security because on one side they're saying we need to create a more racially inclusive United States, but then the other side, ideologically, they are totally cutting people off. And we make this case in our book, pulling from Gerald Horn, he calls it the, he calls 1954 the compromise in 1954. And that's when the Brown versus Board of Education, that's when that court case passes, basically

ending segregation in public schools, at least on paper, de facto segregation, or the jury's segregation, that's to say. So once that occurs, Horn argues that there's a retreat on the class front and there's, and it's basically a compromise with Black Alis to say we won't really deal with more of the imperialist aspects of the United States if we can get integrated into the more domestic aspects of it. and you see, and you've already wiped out the more radical, like the, the, the Paul Robertsons and the W.B. the boys, W.B. the boys, and the Vicki Garvins and the Claudia Jones. Like, a lot of those people have been deported since the prison. Their passports have been taken. They've been discredited. So that wing of black radicalism has been deadened. And so the only wing left was a more black liberal wing that maybe came out of some of those labor politics, but was, weakened, even to the point that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that was Dr. King's organization, actually added Christian in their organization so they wouldn't get tagged as communist. That's how deep it went. So there's also moving forward, there's also like a diverse, like a kind of language around

diversity from within like elite schools, so Wilbur Bender, who was Harvard's Dean of Admission, during the Eisenhower years. He talks about they're not being a single fact of admissions policy based on like this kind of strict criteria and he says, quote, in other words, my prejudice is for Harvard College

with a certain range and mixture of diversity in a student body at college of snobs and some Scandinavian farm boys who skate beautifully and some bright Bronx premeds with some students who are passionately

if unwisely, but who knows. So basically he's saying like we want a diverse population right so there's like these different wings of diversity that gets missed where there's a more market-friendly argument and that's how you get what we now I think called DEIs where we just need to all be we need a room that's inclusive and cares for everybody because that's that's going to inform us in the job market and it's going to make us better workers basically and better producers for capital it's not really a reparative form or anything so affirmative action which

you know, it's kind of a precursor to what I think DEI becomes. I would honestly say all this goes together, but affirmative action, the first kind of official I guess executive order where it's in writing was

signed by Kennedy in 1961 and it's just saying take affirmative action to ensure applicants are employed and that employees are treated during, treated during employment without regards to the race, creed, color, a national origin. But it doesn't really have any teeth.

It's just kind of an executive order. And then Johnson administration where it really like takes off as something that I think had a priority because they didn't just pass a, they didn't just have an executive order, but they also had like an office that checked on companies who did federal contracting that they were hiring fairly and that they were hiring black people.

And then actually affirmative action gets to it's Christian. It crescendos more than ever under Nixon, believe it or not. That's when it hits its peak. And so, again, we see Nixon's doing law and order and all of that. But he's also understanding that he can break away some of the more moderate elements of the black population if he can, you know, push these programs forward. You know, there's that famous article of Richard Nixon being the last liberal president. This is kind of an example of that.

So that had the most growth, but the difference was that Johnson, he had a speech at Howard University about a few months before he passed his affirmative action, talked about a kind of reparative justice where he says, quote, you do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, now you are free to go where you want and do as you desire and choose the leaders you please, basically to say, like, you can't just say, okay, it's been 400 years, now go about your way. you have to actually repair that. You have to do something about it. Nixon doesn't care at all about the past. He's just saying that black militants really just want a piece of the action. That's actually a quote that we want a piece of the action. And he says, where's the quote? Blackish streams are guaranteed headlines when they shout,

burn and get a gun. But much of the black militants talk these days in terms of close to the doctrines of free enterprise that those are the welfare's 30s terms of price. ownership, private enterprise, capital, self-assurance, self-respect, these same qualities, same characteristics, same ideals, the same methods that for two centuries have been the heart of American success, and America's been exploring, exporting to the world. And then he says, lastly, what most of the militants are asking is not separation, but to be included, not as sublocates, but as owners, as entrepreneurs, to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the

action. So he has a more market-friendly approach, which is what ends up winning out, because that's how it goes in capitalism now both of these are in response to racial riots that are happening in the 60s right so j that means documented johnson's looking at this and trying to figure out what to do um and there's different reports you know whether it's the um the current commission and things of that nature and johnson actually initiates i don't want to get too deep into all of this stuff he initiates his own black business thing too he actually expands the budget for the small business administration and then says let's give this money to black businesses and then richard nixon comes in and tries to do the same thing as well um and then

but you know because people are burning the cities down and then at the university level where most people are probably familiar with affirmative action the most um they start instituting these different policies and not just because out of good out of the goodness of their heart there's also universities that are getting rioted on too you look at san francis or san francis of State, Cornell University, how they got their black studies program was through armed struggle. People occupied a building armed to get their black studies program. So universities are trying to not deal with the black rage either. So they start coming up what we call quotas, and that was where if we're going to bring this many

people into our class, like not like, you know, in a Marxist's class, but our like actual school class like we have 100 students entering in we're going to have this many slots for black students and that's how you get the famous case of 1978 um that shoots down quotas so it was actually just to give a little history on that because i think that's a it's an interesting history um where you have the um what was it the regions of california versus uh bacque And it was, this is an interesting case in general, but, so that was in 1978, there was a, it was at the University of California, Davis, UC Davis. And they were, their medical program said out of the 100 slots that we have, we're going to have 16 that go to black students, or as they call it, I think, minority students, even though primarily black students, it would have went to, but it's going to go to those 16 slots are going to go to minority students. and Bakke sued the schools saying that that was racially discriminatory. What's funny is when I looked all this up, again, this isn't all in the piece because this would have been a book.

But Bakke was actually an older, he was a Marine vet, a Vietnam vet, and he was an engineer. And Bachet was actually older. He was like a non-traditional student. Back then, schools actually purposely discriminated against non-traditional students. And he probably would have just been better off. just sued based on his age and said he was to be discriminated for his age but instead he chose to you know sue based on race it's just an interesting little nugget and the idea was that he was he was white and so he was being reversed racism against by yeah yeah he said his he said my

test scores are better than those people so i should be let in but he got rejected from schools if you look it up because of his age prior to this interesting like he was rejected from medical schools but he went the racial route nonetheless so that part doesn't really make it to most even people get into this case but it was just a little interesting nugget that I found and then um so what ends up happening is that the Supreme court rules against us the quotas part of affirmative action like you can't have quotas but um Lewis Powell if anyone's familiar with the Powell memo just to look that up that was this very anti-labor like businesses need to get the shit together memo. I think Noam Chomsky is the one that put that out. But that's an aside. Louis

Powell, who was a Supreme Court justice, has a just comes up with an argument that says, okay, we can't do quotas because minority categories are nebulous and don't make sense. But what we can do is use race as a consideration in admissions to reflect a more harmonious or diverse classroom. right, like, or a diverse school or just diverse university space. And it's that kind of, um, it's that ruling that then slowly births what we now know is DEI because it was a diversity word that people started to build their structures around and less about the, um, the quota part. So that's what I mean by there being a reparative aspect of affirmative action.

Yeah. That gets dropped and then it just becomes diversity, which is, more market-friendly and the reparative part of dealing with what happened in history, even though some DEI programs will say that it's usually just more lip service than anything else, and it's not a direct affirmative action to make sure that this many people get hired. And that's the kind of emergence of that kind of program, you know. So then from there, universities start, because what happens is that the government will pass a law or the government will have an executive order

as we're even seeing today and then that's a kind of a cue to private companies on how they should go about their business to stay quote unquote compliant or it's just because we didn't really want to do it anyway so now they can just do what they always wanted to do which I think that's what's happening now

but nonetheless that that gave impetus to the rise of this more like market friendly approach to it. There was even a last one, and I'll shut up on this question, there was a thing that came out in the 80s called, and I actually found this in the Heritage Foundation report. It's called Workforce 2000,

and this is the Heritage Foundation. I can't believe I'm quoting these people, but they concluded that the number of white men in the workforce would decline in women, minorities, immigrants in the workforce would rise significantly as would be demanded for skilled workers. in order to prepare for this future, employers we need to reconcile the conflicting need of women, family, and integrate black and Hispanic workers fool into the economy and approve the educational preparation

of all workers. This is something that came out in the mid-80s called Workforce 2000. So this also informs you to kind of get a sense of where corporations we're at. They're looking at it like, oh, the workforce is changing. We need to just adapt to our workforce so we can continue to turn out profits. So as

I think this is clear to kind of conclude this without even dealing with the 90s or 2000s or even today, this doesn't come out of a history of struggle. This comes out of history of trying to quell, you know, international uprisings in terms of going all the way back to the 40s and liberation movements and anti-colonial movements. And then it comes out a way of trying to quell, you know, riots and rebellions in the streets, right? And then it becomes the means of trying to figure out how to work with the market of workers

that you have so you can continue to go on about your business and that's why they became this like jump to embrace it and obviously there's people who get caught in in that that can benefit from it and that's why they often defend these things so i want to say lastly this isn't i hope people aren't listening to this thinking that myself or my co-author are saying that the just kind of surface idea of DEI or just being diverse and caring about people being part of a any kind of coalition is a bad thing that's not it at all it's just that's not what this actually is Right, right. So, you know, we just need to call it for what it is.

Absolutely, yeah. So there's this element in which there's this transition during this time where there's the dropping of the idea that anything historically needs to be repaired, which, you know, that would, that would, we start talking about repair, you start talking about reparations, you start talking about material shifts of wealth transfers to historically oppressed people. That gets dropped very quickly. Nixon's framing even black militancy as really just a desire to want to integrate. into the capitalist system and have a spot in that capitalist hierarchy is very individualist because a DEI program doesn't uplift black people as a class, doesn't address historical wrongs of black people as a people, but is merely saying a few, you know, black people can now integrate into the broader economy or into the broader workplace or into the college

university, so it doesn't actually structurally change much. And it functions to sort of pacify resistance to the system as a whole by sort of letting historically marginalized people into the capitalist system, which actually has a function of stabilizing and making more robust the capitalist system, but does very little for black people as a whole. Is that more or less correct yeah yeah it says that we will let a few in and for letting you in you you pledge a loyalty to us now that's not a literal loyalty but that's the idea of it is if we um is if we can if we can get you to join our thing then you will become more like us and you won't be a problem and we can all win um that's that's effectively yeah i mean there's another quote this is from a duke

university admissions committee report and 62 this is in the piece because we believe that a policy should be established to enable admissions officers to seek out students from socioeconomic levels not presently very well represented in the student bodies of colleges and this is the last part I'm about to say is the part that I think really sticks to the point the sharp minds and determined spirits of such students should help leaven our mass of upper middle class suburban well-to-do groups like that is a stated goal of the admissions committee so that there's nothing in there says you know we want to radically transform the world right like that's a this is and this is at duke like elite colleges are the ones that were actually

at the forefront of talking about having diverse populations you don't see that at community colleges because they're already usually more diverse anyway right you saw that it like the yales and the dukes and the columbias and things like that so yeah that's the That's the impetus. And it has this international soft power dimension of conveying to the rest of the world that this thing that we're being hammered on, especially during the Cold War, about our rank hypocrisy and our own massive amounts of inequality and racial despair and injustice, we're actively addressing it. So you get that soft power international conveyance of progress, and you get the internal sense that something's being done.

But the system as a whole actually is just maintaining itself, responding to its material needs. Again, it's not coming out of the goodness of anybody's heart. It's coming out of this situation that they found themselves forced in, materially, domestically, and internationally. And they're responding to that in a way that doesn't challenge whatsoever the system as a whole. Yeah. And even if they, I would even say, even if people do mean well, it still plays into the very things that you just said. like that's the that's the that's the that's the the the quandary that people find themselves in like because there were black people working in some of the universities that use these opportunities to get more black students in right like they really were trying to do that and some of them

might have been successful in producing black students who didn't come who didn't go back home as robots or colonial subjects in the same way they entered in but that's usually an aside to the broader program that is trying to convert people into more into you be becoming further colonial subjects or further you know just human capital as they say right

so people use the tools that they use so I just want to say that for the sake of I know sometimes we can come off harsh people are using what they can use and we respect that but the actual perspective of the state is like no we're not that's not the point here we are trying to keep the wheels greased

and if we have to let a few of you in to do it we'll do it exactly that's all that is Yeah. Now, we mentioned earlier the sort of dialectical relationship between DEI initiatives and the backlash or just the lash in many instances. And I'm wondering if you could talk briefly about how these two forces kind of mutually reinforce capitalist stability because it could be seen on surface as maybe a destabilizing force where the two political parties are the two factions of the ruling class are at odds over this thing. And it's a real contradiction. But it actually is back and forth relationship. functions as you argue to reinforce overall stability. Can you touch on that? Yeah, I will read from the piece. We said, and then I'll answer it further, but it says both DEI and anti-D-EI are bootleg fronts that place us in a battle we are ill-equipped to win, neither address the problems. They could tend to pacify. Dei liberalism, no matter how well-intention, cannot overcome the bigotry anti-DEI inspires with more of the same tired appeals of power, just to be nice,

just to quote unquote be nice and then there's another quote here I think that gets at it even further it's a little further up in the piece here I want to read this because I think it speaks to the kind of relationship between liberals and conservatives

so yeah concurrently DEI allows liberals to herd vulnerable populations into quote unquote safe spaces only to abandon them when in need thereby passing the ammunition to the right wing firing squads as they fang shock at the horror that they enable.

Malcolm X warned us against his form of counterinsurgency, quote, the wolf and the fox belong to the same family, both are canines, and no matter which one of them the Negro places his trust, he never ends up in the White House, but always in the doghouse. That was Malcolm.

So it's to say that there's a way that the liberals will demobilize a more radical action, We have to look at this in the idea of organizing too, right? So if people are willing to do something where they're actually going to take control over their lives and they can demobilize you into symbols where only a few people benefit and you get to live through them, then it's not just that part of it that's the problem.

It's also that you're just, you're inactive. You're not doing anything. And then the people who might even want to be allies to that, the white folks think that that's the right thing to do. So they're demobilized or they just think that a few good jobs. or a few pandering, you know, gestures or enough. So when the right wing does come marching, you know, you don't have, you don't have any infrastructure in place to fight back because you've just been herded into things that

that are ineffective, for one, and that don't, they don't position you in a place to be able to fight back either. Right. Right. So that's the kind of like, I guess, a dialect to some extent is that DEI says, oh, we're just going to do things around the edges. we're not going to ultimately transform anything. And then when the rights, like, all right, we're just going to get rid of all of this.

So we can pander to our base like the liberals have been doing. Now they can just take, they can take over the same front and not really take care of their people either. They can just say, oh, look how many people we fired today. Or, you know, oh, look at all the jobs. We cut all these undeserving DEI people. And their base doesn't get any real material benefit. from that either, but, you know, we talk about there's a kind of surplus enjoyment there that they might get out of it. But other than that, like, you know, no one's material

conditions are really impacted. And I think that's the basis of our argument is that material conditions are not transformed at all. Material conditions are not dealt with through DEI for the most part. It's a lot of window dressing. So anti-DEI is kind of its own DEI. Like, it says it's anti-D-EI, but it's really DEI for different groups, right? So it's like, we're not going to let the black people get these jobs, so because they're taking them from you or whatever kind of like racial anxiety that, that white folks might have in those positions. So this is to preserve these jobs for the people who are deserving, even though those

people, the base of Trump, which is not just poor white, so I hate when people say that. But the base that belongs to Trump, including poor whites, but also even a lot of petty bourgeois whites, you know, you don't have to practice these policies anymore. You don't have to go through these trainings anymore. You don't have to, you know, if you're a business owner, I'm saying, you don't have to engage in this stuff. You don't have to sit through these things anymore. Like, it's a way of kind of pandering to their racial grievances, just like liberals falsely pander to, you know, blacks and other quote unquote. this is too while not really addressing the material conditions of most of those people right like you're obviously trying to use that as a front to just continue to raid the bank as they've all been doing like so that's how i think they play a part one demobilizes you know so the other can take over and then when we when trump inevitably in this right wing thing inevitably is pushed out um and this coalition of right wing folks fail as they probably will and they there's a liberal president in 2028 or 2032 or whenever, if there's still a country at that point, they won't rebuild much of what was knocked down. They'll run on that they will, but they'll probably replace 30% of it or something, if that. Right. Right.

And you'll be thinking, oh, they're bringing back DEI or they're bringing back the government jobs. Like, no, because they probably agree that half of this shit should be cut anyway. They just don't want to be able to do it. Right, exactly. So they can kind of just play off of each other. That's what I get out of it, is that it gives the facade of doing things on both ends, right? The liberals get to pretend that they're advancing progress for racial minorities. The reactionaries get to pretend that they're fighting back for traditional white values or whatever the fuck.

But the material system as a whole doesn't change at all. And people intuitively know this when they say things like, no matter who gets elected, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. You're goddamn right. but the spectacle on the stage is that there's this robust disagreement and there's these forces of progress and regression and it's this soap opera and the whole goddamn time a very small amount of people are extracting a massive amount of wealth and the system goes forward the whole time and in that sense it's stabilized it's a form of bread and circus political spectacle wherein people are investing emotionally in the idea that there is a real political struggle happening. But there's not a meaningful political struggle happening whatsoever. And the DEI issue is just, I think, a smaller part of the identity reductionism issue because in the last decade or so, and this is that backlash between the identities as well, because once you super stress one identity in lieu of any material politic, then the reactionaries pick up on that and then they hyperstress their counter identity. and you get this back and forth between this really anti-material politic. But that's the big innovation of the system in the last 10 to 20 years, really since 2008,

since it's been in a moment of material crisis. It has to ramp up and find something to fill the vacuum of material politics. And it's landed on both parties on the identity issue. And that plays into, I mean, Trump's whole rise. He came down the elevator and said, you know, the Mexicans are the problem. or whatever the fuck, and we're still living in that era. And so as long as you're trapped in the idea that this is real politics, that there's real material stakes with this identity ping pong game they're playing, we're going to continue

to be bamboozled. And I think that's crucial to understand. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think, and materially, it's, these are, you know, Trump's people are, this is a violent group of people. This isn't just people spouting rhetoric. like these are people that are willing to you know physically hurt folks and that's another thing that this this the i should it doesn't put it doesn't position people to when i say fight back i don't just mean that in a kind of abstract sense like people are not even positioned in many cases to deal with the violence that comes down the pipeline um so when we say they pass it the they passed the ammunition right wing firing squads the right has um like i was at a university last month somebody made a good point about the DACA program and they're under Obama and how that program

gives a group like ICE, like identification of groups because all your information is in there, right? So you create a program that's supposed to integrate people that fails. And then now you have the identification to go deport them. And the liberals will not be there to stop you from being deported. You know, like that's like quite literally, you gather information about people. people by using these very like state-based solutions and then now people's names are on things now people's faces are on things and it gives the right the ability to then go target those folks and the liberals will not be there to protect you they're playing with people's lives in this sense yeah that they're they're using people's identities as a pretty cynical maybe some of the

politicians kind of believe maybe some of them fully believe but as a systematic logic they're using people's identities as chess pieces to prevent material change. And in so doing, you are, you are creating this back and forth that increases resentment between identities and liberalism is completely abandoning the field of struggle when that finally comes home in the form of actual interpersonal or racial violence. And so you are, you're ratcheting up and exacerbating these identity issues, and then you're providing no protection. A real protection would come in the form of bottom-up mass movements integrated into working class, you know, organizations, multiracial organizations that when push comes to shove can actually have each

other's backs can meet the threat of violence in the streets. But insofar as you depend on these politicians who are using your struggles and your fears and your identity as a really a careerist advancing tool and as a system protective tool for their own interest and not in your interest then at the end of the day they're always going to leave you fully vulnerable to the inevitable reactionary assaults that come in the wake of that and in that way it's really quite cruel and deeply evil

yeah it's terrible because like you said it the folks that promote this stuff on the on the liberal side that gas up DEI as being this radical thing when it's not. They like to claim it when they can get style points for that. But then when you're taking seriously, like, okay, you're a radical. We're going to treat you like one. Then it's like, oh, no, it's just something simple.

But no, it's too late now. And then the people who are going to actually get treated like radicals, whether they actually believe in radical things or not, are going to be folks that aren't even involved in these DEI initiatives. This is going to be random black people, random, random migrants, right? It's just going to be random. people that aren't even necessarily a part of these things that often get targeted the worst right so the people i know we're going to get to internal class contradictions later but

there's a way that you know not just white liberals but you know we have a joke sometimes we say white liberals of color but they're able to kind of exploit you know these things too and then run away because they know that the people who are going to most likely catch the catch the hell or yeah going to be the folks at the bottom and you've lied and then on the right wing side you've lied to your base and told them that all of these people are radicals trying to take your shit and most these folks that are in these positions are not even remotely about their life right so you're yeah like you said it's just it's just excessively cruel because you're leaving people and you're putting people in harm's way for a ping pong game to you know to get a little bit

of you know to squeeze more out of the lemon you know as you as you steamroll over other people's lives like it's terrible exactly exactly and of course the only alternative to this horrific game is is real radical change in politics and that's obviously not going to be supported by the people and the parties and the classes that benefit from the system so that's that's at the bottom of this but you did mention internal class contradictions within oppressed communities and I think that's a really interesting dynamic here and and that's one of the key insights sites is how DEI kind of and other things like it create and reinforce this internal class contradictions within a press community. So can you kind of expand on that point and maybe give us

some examples? Yeah, so even when I was talking about our book, Lawner of Black Rage, there's a way that a lot of the initiatives that emerged in response to police killings. That's why I noted the people who are killed by the police are poor, disabled, black men primarily in terms of of black people that's usually who get in their young um so if that's the group that gets killed then it doesn't really mean anything if an already upwardly mobile black person gets a gets a executive job at a corporation that has no effect those people and again i'm not saying those people don't experience racism and i'm saying that they've somehow eclipsed it but i'm just saying obviously materially it's much different if you live in a poor black neighborhood that puts you

interactions with the police that you are just not going to be in if you live in some rich suburb it's just that's just true for anyone um so a lot of the times that's why we say the washing of black death people property and profits because black death plus black rage equals this surge of capital that comes in on the liberal side that then you know gets into the hands and the coffers of these of these kind of black elites who are not necessarily engaged in struggle who are not the most vulnerable within the struggles who don't face the worst

outcomes of white supremacy and racism. They just don't have to deal with it to the same extent but they're able to benefit the most from it at the same time. So it's a kind of an intracial upward transfer of wealth as well.

It's not just how it happens in a broader capitalist sense because those are the groups that get to benefit from it. So for instance, we used, we talked, I know we talked the last time about Black Wall Street, which I don't want to get too down that rabbit hole because I could go off for it in an hour about that. But I was just say, listen to the episode to read the book. But Black Wall Street, as it's been popularly, for those who know about it, it was Tulsa, 1921, there was a massacre that occurred. And the popular narrative that there was this neighborhood of all these black businesses that got burned down and all these black people who lived in wealth that, always burned down and taken from that. That's not actually what happened. It was actually a small minority of rich black people. Most of the other folks were just poor and worked for white folks just like anyone else. But that has been used as a narrative to push this idea of black business, which inherently black business for whatever you feel about it, most people don't

own business. Most people work. Like that's true with any group. So the idea that you're going to focus on business as a solution to people getting killed by the police is that. Asinine anyway, but it's also like, why are you focusing on a minority of black people when most black people work? Why is the solution in black business when most black people work at all these different types of jobs, right? So that we already are lost, we've already lost the conversation right there. So there becomes this money that pours in for black businesses, that pours in for black banks, that pours in for hiring more executives on like hire petty bourgeois jobs and these are just not most black people just i mean there's a there's like

more explicit that are referenced in the piece but these are just not these are just mainly black people you know so or these excuse me these are just some of might cut off these are just mainly this is not the majority of black people so inherently you're going to be dealing with the black people who are better off and i don't think a lot of people know but when we talk about so-called wealth inequality or racial wealth gap, there's actually more of a gap between the top percent of black people and everyone else. There's a bigger gap than there is even amongst this the general population. Like there's actually more of a gap or like more of a wealth concentration at the top. Pascal Robert has written about this. So, you know,

there's a lot of folks who, it's not just white folks or liberal, white liberals who benefit. There's also black liberals and black elites who I think sometimes can be charlatans to white folks who even mean well and they can get their money from them and say and make white folks feel like they're doing something for you know black folks or whatever kind of colonized group and they're they're able to take that money and do things for themselves right for their class for their family and these things often just don't make their ways back to the general population of black people you know um like we know just to read some to give them some more concrete examples um in the piece uh this is a part that rossul wrote he says um i think we both wrote some this but anyway um malcolm's crucial

warning this is right after that quote i gave you about the the doghouse and the white house mcumum's crucial warning was never heated we some of us found sanctuary under the front of the liberal canine thinking that the fang candidate would never trespass our proverbial quote unquote seat at the table, this short-sided strategy steadily lowered our defenses and consequently produced some of our worst offspring. With these generation, the first black was a neocolonial class less incentivized a sacrifice for the collective. Instead, low-grade versions of the intent actualized the sort of social exchange for some home luxuries and trips to safari of Africa. For every first in the executive legislative and judiciary branch, like a judge, James P. Parsons,

upholding the tenant's rights bills, and sending, quote, executives to jails in 1960s, there was now black marriage exclusively using 26,000 in city funds for a single personal trip in South Fulton, being away from the office on a trip in the midst of a disaster, Los Angeles, taking 64 trips over the span of 42 months in St. Louis, amassing and using city purchase gift cards of personal use, Baltimore, taking bribes from other countries in exchange for real estate deals, New York, building a $90 million police Warfare Training Center while denying the Democratic will of the people, Atlanta, enclosing 34 public schools and cutting 560 million from public school systems in Detroit.

The diminishing a low-grade returns of DEI, which each subsequent generation, and with each subsequent generation, knew higher. But this is nothing new. The gloss and shine unless it's the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Conference of Black Mayors, and the Conference of National Black Churches endorsed a 1994 crime bill and founding members of what would become the congressional black caucus stood in the way of eliminate the United States electoral college in 1969 and 1970. And we can go on and on. Right. So a lot of these folks got in their position and they sold out their people or that was what they were probably

going to do anyway. And this is not to say every black person that gets in a high position that is bad or anything, but there is a pretty terrible record here of folks who get in these positions and speak like they're talking for the entirety of the community. and are not necessarily, you know, taking care of that community. Absolutely. Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, that's just a basic functioning from anybody that understands, you know, capitalist politics and how it works. And we see time and time again black elites of various types basically obscure their very specific and individualist class interests with the facade of racial solidarity or communion. And that happens again and again and again in popular culture, you know,

Jay Z comes to mind as a figure like that. Killer Mike is an interesting figure as well. I think his most recent record he had a line I'm not even sure if we talked about Killer Mike last time but he had a line where he's a landlord and one of his rap lines says like I'm a landlord bitch pay your rent. That's how the that's how the bar ends and it's just an interesting

shift from the left populist politics that he conveyed in his earlier work and with run the jewels and even in his earlier albums. But clearly he has a very specific class position that he is interested in maintaining and justifying, right? Because that has to be part of it too to use racial advancement as a justification

for your unequal class position. The alternative, of course, would be to critique the very system that got you rich in the first place and that's unthinkable to a lot of people. So, yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, and Killer Mike's an interesting example. I try not to call out individuals,

Killer Mike's interesting, even when we're talking about the Black Wall Street thing, he actually found him and Jesse Williams, who's an actor, found an app called the Greenwood Banking app, which is, again, playing off of this Black Wall Street thing. And raises $43 million, and $40 million of that money came from, like, Chase Bank in Wells Fargo. And I think Truist or another bank. and but he promotes it as a independent black banking app like so black people can bank because there's a whole thing about that like banking black but this is a bank that's literally

founded by like your money came from the same banks that exploit black people right like that's that's the kind of nonsense right that and that bank didn't have anything different and it used the the myth of black wall street to get its capital and to get people to sign up for it right so it's funny even someone like killer mike used to um i mean i grew up on that music so i've listened to killer mike before he was well known and you know he wasn't always like that right so it's interesting how you know things have evolved even back in 2016 he wasn't this bad exactly um but i think he's a kind of example what we're talking about not to single him out but he's a kind of example what we're talking about yeah yeah he's he's a he's a really good example and i think the shift is part of the

reason why we use him as an example because he was impactful for many of us on the left who enjoy rap and hip hop and have followed his work for many years. So to see that shift is an educational duel for us understanding individualism and ideology. But the last time we talked and you broke down the myth of Black Wall Street, that even I had, you know, I had bought into that that myth of Tulsa 1921 wholeheartedly, unthinkingly. Like that must have, that must have, that was the situation and so I remember that leaving a real indelible mark on on me after our last conversation and I encourage people to go check out not only the episode you did here but black myths podcast more broadly which tackles a lot of this stuff that leads into this this question

I have about this tension in in a community right because as you were talking about there are you know plenty of black people who see value in DEI who who want to defend affirmative action or even more broadly, the Obama administration, there's so much emotional investment in that for legitimate reasons. You know, you see a black person for the first time become president that has deep meaning and we can critique it from a Marxist perspective, and we will. But certainly there's a real human emotion there that is not to be dismissed or denigrated, and you don't do that.

But Obama is also another example of somebody who's class position has really insulated him from the class and racial aspects of actual American life. And he's been very silent in a lot of areas where, you know, his post-presidency, he could have taken a very different tact. He could have been more vociferous or whatever, but not that we expected that from him. But here's the thing I want to ask is how can people in these communities specifically that understand the stuff that you're saying, also are maybe surrounded by people who have real human connections to a figure like Obama and have real emotional investments in policies like DEI, how can they approach this topic? How have you done it in your own life with people in your community who see genuine value in representation, inclusion, figures like Obama, et cetera?

I think this is an interesting nuance to get at because there's one thing to have the analysis. It's another thing to try to communicate that to people who are, you know, rightfully. in some cases, or understandably, at least emotionally attached to these things? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question because you're right. I mean, you do have to go into the real world where things are much messier than they can be in an essay or anything, right? It's just

just not that simple. And people, some people, you know, are hired through these things. Some people get grants to do good work through this kind of initiatives. I mean, the left has always had to kind of, I don't say always, the left, the last 40, 50 years has had to

had to kind of supplant or put it, It's had to kind of sit itself underneath some of these liberal initiatives to get some funding or do some work. Like, that's just what it is. You know, I talk to, I've talked to people all the time that might work at these places and they will, they know what it is. But they're like, at least I get to pay my rent and I can also maybe do some decency in the world, right, compared to just working flat out at a, you know, at a corporation, working for Raytheon and sending bombs that, you know, Palestinians or something. Like maybe I can do something at least not that bad. Like that's the kind of logic. I think when I discuss these things or even when we just talk about the book in general, I always come back to just a point of material conditions because I just think

that at the end of the day it's that simple. Like this is not addressing the things that you say you want to address. So it lets me know if you're serious or not because we can just show you the stats like black people are getting killed by the police more than they used to since all these things really blew up and became a big deal you know um the conditions that we live under have not improved despite embracing these things so what why not try something different then you have to offer an alternative whether that's joining an organization um you know like like a like my organization like Black Alliance for Peace or, you know, getting involved in more revolutionary and radical politics or at least trying those things out because you're, these things are not addressing

in material conditions. If you care about your brother that's locked up, if you care about your, you know, sister that, you know, can't, that just got evicted, DEI just isn't fixing that shit. Just not. So, so there's no reason to cling to it like it is, you know, like it's just, it's just not it's not dealing with those problems like you might be deduced you might have some initiatives around the edges that can help here and there maybe you have something that pays people's rent or helps people get out of jail but most of these causes don't touch that kind of shit right so it's

so i'm just saying at the end of the day it does not deal with our conditions i i often use the analogy of um if someone's hungry this is usually to explain the book but it holds up even for this conversation. If someone's hungry and they are not able to obtain food, you don't make murals about how hungry they are, right? You don't, you don't, um, you don't write books to explain the unconscious bias of why people don't like hungry people. You find a way to get them food. Like, that's the ultimate contradiction there. If you don't, if that person's still hungry and you've done all this other stuff, if you arrest the person for being hungry, this does not resolve the fundamental contradiction.

So that's always my thing to people. Like, we're just not, it just isn't simply addressing the material conditions. And if we say we want to do that, then these are not things we should get behind. Like, you know, like, it doesn't mean that we don't defend things maybe in, in a tactical way because we understand that if we don't defend this, it can get possibly worse. So sometimes tactically, you defend more liberal things just because you know that if you don't stop the march of the of the people on the other side you're you're kind of lending yourself to a worse outcome sometimes that's true sometimes i'm not so sold in that argument but that's a

tactical thing but that should not mean that i should wholeheartedly defend the i and boycott it when there's so many things to be boycotting right now and you're going to boycott target or something because you you know they don't have enough black businesses when target actually has um 15 percent black people already working there. The only problem is most of them work at the bottom of the company because, as we say, DEI needs no initiatives for poor jobs anyway. So anyone who's ever worked

as an actual, you know, porridge job in a city that has any kind of diversity, you will meet the people. If you worked at Amazon on the ground floor, you will meet all the different kinds of people there. You know, if you've worked at McDonald's, you're going to meet all those people. Anyone has ever worked those jobs knows this.

And I've worked those jobs so I know this, right? So you're, you don't need diversity there. So you're trying to get a few people at the top. So I'm just saying this does not address the problem. So it forces people who, when I'm talking to more, you know, petty bourgeois audiences or, you know, middle class folks, they have to deal with their own issues in those cases. And if I'm talking to, like, I got, I had the opportunity to talk about this in a prison once, you know, like they just saw it. was pretty clear for them because they're they're in prison right you know so it's just like you know it just not address the issue like it's just like if we actually want to change things

then and then we have to we have to involve ourselves and initiatives that have the ability to do that and these milk toast liberal initiatives do not have the ability to ultimately do that maybe there was a time where some of these more reformist approaches like we were talking talking about affirmative action could give some material benefit at least lift some people out of poverty or stuff like but nowadays it's not even doing that you know so what's the point you know so that's kind of I just I just you try to get people to deal with the issue because the emotions are what they are and I understand those but you have to be grounded in something and if they're telling you oh they're trying to take away everything I'm like well honestly this stuff was being taken away before and Now, some people don't listen because some people are so caught up on the emotions of something, and emotions are totally valid, even if they're not accurate all the time. But sometimes people are not in the space to hear that, and you also have to accept that. Like, they're not in the space to hear it right now.

100%. You know, and I just don't engage like that. Yeah. No, I think that's incredibly on point and really insightful, and just emphasizing that point that it's not solving the problems that you yourself admit you want to solve. A few individuals getting wealthy does not help our people as a whole. And not only a people of any community, but in capitalism more broadly, the people, the people that we care about, human beings, you know, a few members of any given identity group

or a press minority marginalized group getting theirs is not in any way helpful to all the rest, the majority, who are still in various ways, you know, being destroyed or emiserated by the system. So, and in your food analogy, you also don't get, you also don't feed that person by electing a millionaire who says that they were once hungry and they understand what is like to be hungry. And in four years, they'll fight for your right to get food sometime down the line. And so, yeah, I thought that was a great, that was a great analogy as well. So, yeah, I think that's really important. And I think that helps people who are listening that have to navigate these sort of conversations, not only within their community, but oftentimes within their own family. So I think, I think that's, that's well said, yeah.

Yeah, it's real. Yeah, it's real because, yeah, I mean, just work quickly, like, just, yeah, it is complicated because it's like sometimes I know we don't, I think a lot of us do with the podcast and stuff, we don't often, maybe we should talk more. I don't like to talk about my personal life, but it's like sometimes there is a challenge of how do you talk to people, like, in your families and about this stuff, you know. And sometimes it can't be a full, full court argument with them. Sometimes it's just a nudging.

Like, well, you know, you said you care about this and this isn't really doing that. So maybe you should try something else, huh? And sometimes I just leave it at that. I don't have to go full, you know, academic article. You know, I don't have to do all that. Exactly right. Sometimes just consider the contradiction, you know, just consider. And then maybe they do something with it, maybe they don't.

I think that's something that we can all relate to you. Like speaking to your family, one of the tactics or just your coworkers or your friends or whatever, like one of the tactics I'll use is I'll let I'll let them be heard so tell me what you care about and exactly what you were saying as they're telling me what they think or they care about even if I disagree with all of it I'll find some moral kernel some principle that they're implicitly or explicitly saying they support and then I'll work on that okay you you believe that well guess what I do too absolutely so we're already on common ground I'm not judging you I agree with you now how can I show you that that actually is antithetical to these sort of politics and these sort of politics are actually copacetic with it. Like, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, um, that's the dialectic of talking to people. That's the, the skill set of an organizer. And that's just the skill set of an emotionally intelligent human being operating in the world. So yeah.

Yeah. I think, um, as we say, unity struggle unity. Exactly right. Exactly right. So another kind of nuanced question here. And I, I, you know, don't know what to expect with your answer here, but I'd love to hear it. Is there a path through which genuine demands for, representation and inclusion could actually support rather than undermine revolutionary goals,

or do you believe that these demands are irretrievably compromised? That's a good question. I don't, I'm not totally against it because, again, I still, I'm not, like, I think one of your questions was about how not being a class reductionist or something like that. So I think you can't, you can't be in a world where, like, people, like, diversity actually is a good thing. It's just, it's just put in the wrong position as like something that's going to resolve hunger, like, or something that's going to resolve, like, you know, really deeply structural issues. Like, it's, it's actually a positive thing to see black people or whatever group you pick to just see them represented in media. Like, that's not a bad thing.

I actually don't, I don't have a problem with that. I just, I just wish people would just acknowledge it for what it was. So if you got a Black Panther movie I'm not a big fan of it But if you got a Black Panther movie You got a Black Panther movie That's what's up, whatever But let's just be real

That's what it was It wasn't revolutionary Like that's where people lose me Right Like I think it's important To for both Black kids You know who

Even when I was growing up Didn't see as much representation Or I think it's important In some cases I don't think Seeing yourself as the present or a CIA director is good. But I'm saying, like, but I think, but I think in some cases, it's, oh, it's good to

see other people doing things that aren't not just you or it's good to see your people who maybe have not been allowed to do certain things, see doing those things. I don't think that's an inherently bad thing. I think it's been helpful even in my own development, particularly when I was younger with like homophobia or something to see, you know, queer folk representative. in certain spaces. Like when I came up in the arts and I had to and there's a lot of them in that in those spaces and I had to reconcile with that. I think that was helpful for me. Like I'm grateful for that. You know, so it's important to meet people who are not like you. I think

all those things are totally fine. And I think, and I think when we're talking even about struggle, if you are trying to struggle and you think everybody needs to be like you or position like you, the struggle is not going to work. You know, like you're not going to be able to actually win if you can't understand where people are coming from beyond just your vantage point. And that often is included in their race and their sexual orientation, their gender. I think all of that's important. I think, but when you put that in the hands, like most things under capitalism, when you put that in the hands of capitalists, that's not what they're trying to achieve as we've laid out in this episode. They're not trying to achieve harmony so we can move forward towards, you know, a more equitable.

world or whatever or towards a socialist world like then that's not that's not the goal so i think i do think we need to be weary of the moment someone brings up identity or the moment someone brings up a certain antagonism we need to be weary of just like shutting that down and saying oh that's that's identity reductionism or oh that's identity politics which you know as erika kane's notes is not the same thing or you know that's a that's a bad thing like no there are times when you're in an organization you do need to have more empathy for said group. That is a real thing. And sometimes the lack of empathy

can screw up the entire campaign or initiative we're involved in because you're being an asshole to trans people or something. Like that's a real thing. So I don't, so in that sense, I don't think it's a problem. But I remember one time I was at a university, I was actually doing a, I was doing poetry

and somebody, some white girl did the proverbial, what can white people do question, which I'm never really a fan of. But, like, if anybody has ever watched Malcolm X, sometimes, it's just, like, nothing. Like, go, like, don't ask me that question. But, like, but, you know, I try to be respectful when I was just, but she was like, I don't want to talk over voices of color and all of this. And I'm just kind of like, I'm like, what are you involved in? Because I think, another thing about DEI is it talks to, it talks to us, like, we're just standing around in a room and we need to, like, hug the people who are colored or something.

Like, it's very, very infantile. But I'm like, are you involved in an actual struggle? Because if you are trying to figure out when you should talk over the voices of quote-unquote people of color or not, you are better likely to learn that when you are involved in a struggle to know when it's time to shut the fuck up and when it's time to say something because maybe the people will listen to you more because you're white. But you usually learn that better in struggle than you do just being in a comment section or just in casual life. You usually learn that when you're forced to do something where you have to sacrifice things. with other people.

Absolutely. And I think a lot of DEI stuff would be more helpful if we were doing it and struggle not just trying to make a cohesive work environment or some BS. But it's like,

oh, I need to understand trans people so I can help out the entire community. I need to be able to understand them. Like, to some extent. I don't have to fully get everything, but I need to have some level of empathy because that might actually inform

my ability to struggle through this problem. that we're facing right but often people are looking at it from the perspective of organizing or trying to get any power they're just trying to feel like they're good people and that's that kind of BS liberalism right but if you're actually trying to get something done you know like you the way you treat people actually does matter like that is an important thing and if you treat people like shit particularly because of whatever identity they come from or anything like that it's going to be hard to achieve whatever revolutionary thing people say they want to achieve So in that sense, I think it's important.

It's just, but in the hands of capitalists and the state, like, that's not, they're not trying to achieve things in that sense. So I think at their hands, I don't think there's much of anything good that can come from. In our hands, I think there are ways that we could be better in those things. And I think we do need to decouple how those initiatives are ruined by those people, as opposed to thinking about how maybe we could be more inclusive for the sake of getting things done, not just to feel like we're good people or take. the right line just to be like I'm on the right side of history but so I can actually like transform material conditions like those are very different things yeah I could not agree more and just from a human perspective there's there's that element of being human beings but from a marxist working class perspective we we take racism and homophobia and anti-trans sentiment seriously

again for the fact that every human being deserves dignity but also for the fact that the working class is made up of every nationality every gender every sexual orientation and the moment you start dividing off elements of human beings, you start dividing off elements of the working class and that serves the interest of anti-working people, you know, the forces of domination and exploitation. So that's just a practical point. But as well as like a deep moral one and being principled and all of that, I also love your point about the difference between identity reductionism and identity politics. And that's why I always use the term identity reductionism because I think it's more it's more it's more sharp it's it's very it's more precise than

saying identity politics because that that can mean different things there's a there's a revolutionary form that that can take there's a liberal moderate centrist form that can take there's a reactionary form that that can take and so it's imprecise to just use that as a as a catch-all term one of the things about being a communist is that you know we have representation and inclusion all day like every you know You know, men and women, every racial group, the whole world has struggled for dignity and decency against colonialism, against imperialism. And that right there is like a beautiful tradition of representation and inclusion where nobody is excluded. No group of people is excluded on the basis of their race or their gender.

So there's something beautiful there. And the very last point I want to make, because you said so many insightful things was like good diversity. Of course, diversity, I do too think it's like really important and beautiful because one of the most beautiful. things about struggle, about real meaningful struggle, whether in a working labor union or a tenant union or a community organization or whatever that's truly diverse, is that there's a genuine love and solidarity that emerges between people of different backgrounds, of different racial, ethnic, gendered backgrounds, different experiences in life who are all coming together across different identity experiences to fight for their shared future. And that is precisely.

what is missing in liberal politics that is present in socialist politics and that's what I would say is good and meaningful diversity and it's a beautiful thing to be found but it can only be found not through rhetoric or symbolism but through shared struggle for a shared future yeah yeah and I think that's important because again I I don't want us to get so cynical for all the criticism that we have of these things that we don't recognize those points like even if you're a nationalist or if you're a communist or if you're involved in these in these radical struggles like you have to you have to see because it's like whether it's whether it's whether it's across racial lines or even within your own racial group there's still diversity there that has

to be recognized and has to be acknowledged and has to be i think appreciated you know to to actually achieve the things that we say we want to achieve right like that's just what it is so that's trying to, you know, push the other direction is just not helpful because at the end of the day, like, we do need each other. And I think part of what the, when we talk about laundering, capitalism could also produce this kind of pessimism because you're like, man, that didn't even work. So we're not even going to, we're not going to care about people. But I'm like, if your response to DEI is to be more bigoted, like, that's not, like, that's not the point. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's not it. Like, You know, it's like, no, their, their ability to, or their inability to ever do anything to care about people because profits matter so much and power matters so much, that's their problem. That doesn't mean we have to take on that consciousness. That doesn't mean we have to take on that position. But that's, that's what I've been seeing happening. And that was another reason why we wanted to write this, because there needed to be a very harsh criticism of it.

But not in this light that I've seen from a lot of pieces that have been coming out where it reduced. rejects the fact that people are not just some hard hat or it wants everybody to just be some hard hat white male worker in a factory somewhere in the 1940s like that's just bullshit that's not even you know and that's why we lost the election and all like no that's that's that's not it you know and i've seen a lot of that cope from you know a lot of white left spaces and i'm not really in those spaces this is probably you know talking to you as a close as i'm going to get to those spaces. you know but it's just like I see that yeah so I'm saying that's the closest I get like so I don't really but I see the stuff pop up online

and I even see it in real life and I've even gotten questions about that where it's like well you know when you think identity politics it's like the problem with the identity thing is people make the differences in

identity the primary contradiction in all cases sometimes it actually is but it's just a flat thing in all cases is the primary problem so it's it's the primary problem is that we don't have enough of some group no matter what problem it is that we're actually facing yeah yeah you know i mean that doesn't actually that's not a scientific analysis of anything so that's that's a problem that i've ran into even in my own spaces people do that and i'm like that's not really what was

happening here you know like uh i was involved i won't say what it was but it was i won't say who it was but we did something and we had to do a part of something we were I'm promoting something and we had to do a roundtable and every organization that was involved had to do the roundtable and they sent a representative for that and everybody that sent a representative from every organization sent a male representative even though organizations have more than men in them so when we got on camera it looks like it's a bunch of men. running the thing and that's not really what it is but none of that happened because anybody was like you know we don't want black women in the space it was just a consequence of oh we all sent a

representative and I think everybody sent a representative for their own priorities of what their org needed to represent and they just didn't think about it and it was just like oh so we we corrected it we're like okay we're going to set up an interview for the women but we don't but we also were like we don't want this to be some kind of weird um tokenism where oh we didn't bring the women in now it's time it's like no we wanted to be clear that women are actually a part of the thing we're doing right not just as some kind of additive at some kind of just oh my bad type of thing you know but we also had to deal with our process like okay how do we when we need representatives this needs to be part of the process and also if

people sent if because in some cases it was women that sent men too right so it's like if people are sending people like that then we have to all deal with that process But we shouldn't just have women on the screen for the sake of having women on the screen. It's actually to say we are trying to reach all black people so we should send the people that represent all black people. That's not just black men, right? Like that was a very simple thing that got corrected. But it didn't require us to get into a bunch of bickering. You know, it was just like, okay, what was our process?

How do we fix it? And then we moved on. It didn't become the thing that ended the orgs and the coalition that we had going. Right. And that's where it gets bad. Like that sometimes upends an entire initiative because something like that happens when it wasn't really that big of a deal. It was an oversight. We fixed it.

We apologized. And that was the end of it. Yes. You know. And yeah, I think that right there is the perfect balance to strike because there's a sincere organic engagement. That was the product of it. Okay, we can analyze that. We can correct that going forward.

We can analyze the systems that gave rise to that. But we also don't have to participate in this performative gesture where we're, you know, you know, tokenizing certain elements that we feel were underrepresented, because then you're in the game of just performative symbolic representation and not real substance. So I think that's the exact right way to handle it. But, again, that is a problem that happens a lot, and it's mismanagement, you know, ends organizations. It creates huge amounts of turmoil.

So navigating those things sincerely and honestly with self-criticism and reflection without falling into liberal symbolic performativism, I think, is a really important balance to strike. And the whole point about aspects of the left, which I have, of course, seen and been critical of this whole time that are like identity politics are the problem. Like, you know, we got to like the, yeah, the mythical white worker who has shitty ideas about gay people. We got to actually trail that, that idea. And we got to be like anti-woke. I hate that shit.

But you do see it because these people are not rooted in organization and they're not rooted in community and they're not rooted in deep principles. They're being blown around by the political wins. So the wins during the Biden administration, they shifted rightward. But anybody that's been in this game for a long time, we know that those cultural wins go back and forth all the time. You've got to stay anchored despite the wins. But if you're going to be blown by the wins, then you're going to be blown into reaction or blown into liberal complicity or whatever.

And that's the exact opposite of being principled. And again, it's just, it's a lazy and simplistic stand-in for real scientific analysis, exactly as you said. And unfortunately, it's easier to be lazy and simplistic than it is to be in community and think scientifically. Yeah, and it's, it's annoying because, again, people aren't able to analyze what really went wrong. Like, that's why I use that example.

Our process just was more so. We just told every org to send somebody, and we didn't really think about what that would look like on the other side when we got on screen. we just didn't consider it um it wasn't really a bigotry issue in that case right so people respond to it as a bigotry issue on on one side it it you know if you're not a discipline organizer you can get defensive and then you react and then you know that blows up right um but then even when we think about on a broader scale like an election which i had no stake in that anyway but i'm just saying for people who did you know wanting to explain it through this one

lens because that's the issue they care about like you have to actually like analyze a thing and figure out what's the positives and negatives and how did it how did it become what it became and you know a lot of people aren't doing that because you know my opinion of it is a lot of folks want they they were tired of the so-called woke things which I don't even know what that means but they were tired of that and this was their opportunity to just kind of come out against it you know yeah and and I blame liberals for of all forms for kind of for tiring people out with some of this shit because they weren't they just wanted to virtue signal themselves so some people I think legitimately did get tired of it so that's what we're talking about earlier that kind

of dialectic between the two because it's it plays off on both sides but yeah this thing where you know economic populism or and it's like I'm like do people not read history or people not actually read the populist movement and part of why that fell apart was because of was white supremacy like no has no one ever read anything you know like I just like but you just throw that word around like it's just it's hilarious to me like you know if you can't acknowledge that like and I never hear people say these folks who say we need to go to the um to the the racist Trump voter or something this is their caricature and we need to convert them over I never hear people say we need to go to the hood and talk to the gang members or something. I've never

hear that one. You know, we need to we need to talk to the drug dealers. We need to talk to the strip clubs. I never hear nobody say that. You know, we need to talk to all the people in the hood that didn't vote. Never hear that one. It's always, let's go to the racist person and try to get them on our side and let's step on everybody else to do it. But there's all these other people that don't vote. There's all these other disaffected people that, you know, have their own contradictions as well, but you never want to talk to them. Right. And here's the punchline of that strategy. I'm going to go to the racist or the conservative or the reactionary, and I'm going to try to win them over. And yet, time and time again, they don't move leftward. You end up moving

rightward. You're just adopting social chauvinist, bigoted attitudes, and they're staying the exact same they've always been. So you're not moving the needle at all. So it's an abject failure as well. It doesn't. It's never worked. I don't know. I don't know what people be on it does it just doesn't work like i don't know this doesn't even work on a small level in real and just regular day-to-day life like you don't you know if you're trying to bring somebody in your friend group because you don't feel like you know you've treated somebody a certain way or you don't feel like they want to be around you and you try to force somebody who doesn't have the same values as your friends into your friend group you're probably going to get kicked out of that group

too and end up being friends with the bigot or they just aren't going to join your group like this never ends in the way people think it's going to end it's a certain kind of arrogance to it right Like, you know, I don't know, I don't know. It's a weird tendency that just, that really pops up even more when Trump is in office. You know, and it shows why liberals can't win anything. Yeah, and especially in those Biden years where there was real disgust and disdain about the Biden years and just like, you know, people were exhausted and nothing was changing. And then the cultural winds kind of moved rightward a little bit. The reactionaries had wind at their back because the problem with winning for reactionaries is that they don't solve any problems either and everything keeps getting shittier.

So they're actually at their best when they can play defense. When it can be a feckless Democrat in office, then they can act. They can puff themselves up and act like they have the answers and then they get in. And then the cultural winds shift back because they suck to and they solve nothing. And so that's what I mean by ping pong. We keep going back and forth. But, yeah, you really saw that sentiment gain a lot of steam during the Biden. years when the cultural winds were shifting

towards like quote unquote MAGA or whatever but now that MAGA is in office we're seeing how that actually looks and just give it a few more months you know but halfway through this administration a huge swast of those people are going to be disillusioned because none of the problems

can get solved by any of these parties or any of these politicians. No no yeah it yeah it just it's just it's a back and forth game and it becomes a kind of I don't know, it just becomes this thing where people never really have to be held to any account for anything

because like that's what I ate about the ping pong thing it's like, okay, in 2020 you were saying this now in 2025 you're saying this and you can just act like that never happened. Right. Right. So in 2020 you were like, yeah, Black Lives Matter and artists and in 2025 you're, I don't know about that anymore.

you know like that failed so and you just keep going and you got a following and all that and you're nothing you ever say is actually happens none of it's ever right and there's no there's no like there's no consequence for it yeah you know like you get to just be wrong and your people just keep acting like you didn't say it yeah it's so frustrating many such cases it is so frustrated oh it's crazy making all right i have i have one more question for you we're two hours do you have time for one more? Yeah, I got some. Okay. So this is only kind of tangentially related to the main focus of your article, but I think it does relate to the broader things we've been talking about in this interview, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. So this idea that's kind of been circulating lately

of a post-racial fascism in the United States, right? Traditionally, we think of fascism in the West, or in the U.S., given its obvious history, as going to be white supremacist, but particularly in the light of Trump's recent demographic gangs, which again, there's a risk of overstating all of that in and of itself. I think a lot was made out of that that is kind of petty and pathetic and not really as substantive as many of its advocates said it were. But in the light of that and other shifts, and just as an analysis of how fascism can adopt to any cultural and historical milieu, right? That's one of its benefits is it takes different forms, depending on the cultures that give rise to it. And given that the U.S. is a diverse culture, there's this idea of

a post-racial fascism, which puts pressure on different ideas that we've been discussing and the racial history of the United States. And there also does seem to be this dynamic, though, where non-white participants in reactionary movements, we can name many examples if we wanted to, still do have to bow to or make symbolic overtures to whiteness in order to be fully accepted in these reactionary movements so there's still that dynamic but just in general no concrete question what are your thoughts on this idea and the the set of ideas that orbit it yeah i don't i mean this is this is part of my issue even with fascism and it's using that descriptor sometimes i don't people aren't very precise about it so even that is a little bit nebulous but i would say one i don't

though there were there were snitches on plantations right you know when when there was about to be an uprising there was folks who snitched on plantations you know there were free blacks that snitched on slaves we can do this all throughout history you know there were there's always been a small contingent of any racialized you know colonized group that have had folks that ride for the other side that is not a new phenomenon so the fact that's the fact that that people treat that like there's something that's transpired that's new i don't i don't really see it like there's always been um you know if we go back to just to trying to think of other historical examples like the mao ma and kenya and part of their war wasn't just against

the british colonialists it was against the um as i think it was called the african loyalists who rocked with the british and they fought them too you know um you know you know I remember Malcolm X when he did his speech on the message of the grassroots and he talked about he's like when I was in prison I read about the Chinese revolution and there was a thing he said

nine year old girls with guns to their dad's head because the Chinese man was an uncle Tom like this is not a new phenomenon right so I think the idea that there is some kind of coalition that again I'm not trying to be

anachronistic and say that all those things are the same they are today either but but to act as if the the idea that there are reactionary black people also speaks to a lack of people's own understanding of black people or an idea that they're reactionary any group speaks of people's limited experience to that group that's to think that that could never happen right you know uh it's a human trait to be reactionary yeah yeah like that's that's always been there if you are involved in any struggles into these communities

if you talk to any of the the leaders, especially the revolutionary leaders, look at historically, we've always said that a struggle would have to be waged against folks like that too. Right? So I don't think that that really holds up in general, just like I

think sometimes people's descriptions of fascism are bit vague and not, and are just a way of saying that white people are getting meaner or something like i don't sometimes i don't know there's any other material analysis with some folks i don't think that's your position but i'm saying sometimes when i hear it i'm just like i don't i don't really hear any real base line for it other than that um but no i don't i don't think that there's any one like you said the demographic trends are

are are severely overstated we're still talking about um 80 80 80 plus percent of black people voting for for for for Democrats we're not talking about a major shift here yeah they understand all they need to do is get the margins of certain groups to shift and that's enough to win because white folks have voted majority for Republican since since 1968 actually since 1964 excuse me um that was the that was the last well no 1964 was the last time that um that was the last time that the majority of white people voted for a democrat and since then you know that was when nixon i think beat um very goldwater um not nixon excuse me johnson beat barry gold water and that was that was the extent that was the end of it and since

then white people as a majority have voted republican and you know everyone else says to varying majorities voted democrat and the fact that democrats have delivered nothing is probably more of an indictment than any kind of like post racial fascism postracial is also a terrible term anyway like that that should be retired so because in it you're saying that black people voted for Republicans but we're somehow in a post racial fascism at the same time but you're acknowledging that black people themselves voted for a different group so you're not like a postracial would mean that you know like it contradicts itself in its own state like when you say that it's an She's a moron.

Yeah, like Latinos voted for, but it's a, but so you're not only in the racial demographic shift while saying it's post-racial. Like, come on, man. So it's like that, that kind of, again, that goes back to that kind of economic populist sentiment. Like it doesn't, it's poor framing. And when I watch these shows or listen to these, some of these episodes of these folks who might even have good programming otherwise, like when you're just trying to understand

the news, they're not that bad. but their racial politics suck. So they don't, and they don't know any black people. They don't know any Latino folks other than maybe their servants or their janitors. You know, so they don't, they don't actually have an experience with these people to understand what they're talking about. And they think that positions are static. So like you said, there's a ping pong, people can switch back and forth, you know, fascism. I think part of my criticism of how people describe it, fascism is an inherently unstable position.

anyway if it historically that's why it usually doesn't hold oh in the long run because it's a way of stabilizing instability in a sense so so people's positions can change as well you know and so it's not it's not like oh this is what this is forever so now there's a coalition that trump can just call on and that whole right winning coalition call on for the next 50 years like that has not been bear it out. Now, if that happens, then maybe post-racial fascism still wouldn't explain whatever that means. But there is a there would be a certain phenomenon

to understand. I just think generally speaking, right-wing ideology has just creeped in more and more across the board. Even if you are voting liberal, I just think things have shifted to the right deeply over not just the last 40, 50 years,

but even over the last like five years, I think things have just shifted very deeply to the right, not just even in electoral politics, but just in how the kind of sentiments that people carry about things. I think capitalist ideology in the black community has penetrated us with, you know, the kind of entrepreneurial nonsense. And I think that's just a deeper problem, regardless of what people's voting patterns are. And I think that's more what's worth analyzing is how come there seems to be a trek towards the right in general. And how come groups that have historically

been more progressive, have individuals within it that are more likely to trek towards the right. That's more of an interesting study than post-racial fascism, which is, like you said, an oxymoron on its face. Yeah, I really, really resonate with that explanation, and I totally agree. And as you were pointing to, is you have to understand what fascism is, and it's often used in this very nebulous, liberal way. And in a lot of times, it's used by supporters of the Democratic Party to isolate the Democratic Party from fascism, but we understand that the Democratic Party participates in fascism. Exactly. Because of, yeah, because a materialist analysis of fascism roots it in capitalist crisis, right? It's a mode of capitalism fighting for its survival in a period

of crisis, often in response to either economic crisis or bottoms up working class, communist threat to its stability, often a combination of both. And it's, it's, it's, doing so in a way that drops the facade of liberal democracy, right? We talk about it as the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of the ruling class in a moment of crisis. And that's exactly to your point, why it's unstable. It's not meant to be a long-term solution to anything. It is the capitalism bearing its teeth and claws, taking off its friendly mask, fighting for its survival. It's an animal that's been cornered. And the moment it fights back and and can push back the crisis or can push back the forces of

revolution enough, then it dissolves back into liberal democracy. We saw that in Italy. We saw that in Germany. But the problem is if it can't go back, right? And that's, but that moment of fascism is also an interesting opportunity because it could also represent the death throes of capitalism. If fascism is defeated, then that would mean that socialism has succeeded and then now we've shifted beyond capitalism itself so it is like i think of it as yeah the the the cornered animal of capitalism doing everything it's can to to to survive and if it survives and it goes back to capitalism if it dies then we shift into socialism right right yeah it's it's again all of this is unstable i think that's part of the people's kind of stages conception of history

because again like even fascism's fact fascism since it's not a consistent thread there's there's different there's so many different expressions of it there you know what are we like like what what is what is fascism here has always been fascism somewhere else anyway right like and not just and I say well I mean let me say it differently fascism has always existed in some components in this country regardless like that's you know what do you call Jim Grope you know so I'm just saying like there are the kind of fascist march has been here for a while it's just it's often just called fascism when the the decision is made to unleash it on everyone that's just what that's when we call it fascism until then it's already

an aspect of liberal democracy it's just it's more controlled and it's more contrived maybe within certain aspects of society but I can't talk to people inside prisons knowing what I know that people go through and there and hear that you know fascism is something that that is just now arriving because the Trump administration got in office. Like, that's just hilarious to me, you know. So it's not to suggest that there's no differences or that everything is the same. And it's not to flatten everything. But it is to say that because it is such an unstable concept in it of itself

and it's an unstable policy or, I don't say policy, but unstable movement that has to ratchet up certain things, we shouldn't understand it in this linear way anyway. and I think sometimes by doing that it reduces it to nothing you know and then and then we're just we're just talking about mean white people or something we're just talking about um you know

the the some dude bros and some you know like that's all we get and then but what fascism also does as we know historically particularly in the European spaces is it it fills voice and that's what you're saying even with this DEI piece, like if you're not willing to make criticisms with things that are very obvious, what fascism will do is it will front for those criticisms. It will offer an explanation for things that liberals are scared to offer explanations for it. Even some so-called leftists

are scared to offer explanations for or they're offering poor explanations for. So the fact that the Heritage Foundation has more hard to criticize philanthropic foundations than any liberals do, it's pretty pathetic, even if they're doing it for their own interests. You know, the fact that I can learn more criticism about DEI reading a Heritage Foundation piece than I can't read in the New York Times, you know, kind of lets you know where we're at here. Right, right. So they feel the void of criticisms and understandings of society that no one, not only say no one, but that are not being explained at large.

So, yeah, they can come in and tell you that there's this elite cabal of radical left foundations that have um you know had of captured the left and that are you know forcing everybody into these radical communists when it's like the four foundation and and carnegie are not radical communist organizations at all they're counter insurgent really you know so it's just like they but they can feel that void if we can't provide those criticisms because we're caught up on arguing about identity politics yeah that's such that's such a good point yeah like blaming the failures of capitalism on wokeness or on DEI

or you even hear people on the right blame communism for the failures of the most capitalist system in the world and that's in part because the liberal so-called left establishment refuses to criticize capitalism as such so then you open up the field for fascism to give a non-answer it's a wrong answer but at least they filled the vacuum because to give it a right answer

would be to strike at the heart of the system itself and obviously liberals aren't willing to do that. Yeah, but you will find, I mean, I suggest people should read right-wing stuff not for entertainment and definitely not for quality reasons, but you should read it just to know what they're saying because some of the early criticisms of Black Lives Matter,

again, they were contrived and exaggerated because these people were not interested in actual solutions. But some of the earliest criticisms, again, start from the right. They exist on like in marginal, left spaces like if you read Black Agenda Report where this piece that we published was published those those crit we have those

criticisms there but I'm just saying outside of those kind of spaces the right which has more capital to make those louder those criticisms louder will fill these voids because liberals want to spend their time palm palming for things that have deep flaws to them and then

so coming back to your question about this whole post racial fascism thing obviously I don't agree with that framing but there are people within the you know these marginalized spaces that might be attracted to some of these right-wing ideas because there aren't enough spaces that could explain the crises that they're living through or why black lives matter doesn't seem to be effective right to in ways that they might have thought it was going to be so they might come across the right-wing thing that has way more

pub way more capital behind it because liberals aren't going to publish it until it's it's trendy to do so you know like that and that just has And you can just play this out with all other movements and other other weaknesses in society. Like, yeah. And then they're just and you're like, well, why are men so lonely or whatever articles keep coming out? You know, but you're not studying, you're not studying like, you know, the vacuums that are being filled because you don't want to fill them. You just want to publish more articles about, you know, these are a bunch of lonely guys or, you know, the right wing or the right wing turn of black people. all these, like, ridiculous articles because folks don't want to, again, they don't want

to address material conditions. Yeah. And the right seems actually understand that better than liberal left does, you know. Couldn't agree more. And the manosphere, what you're alluding to, I think, is an exact, a perfect example of that. Like, you know, young men with no opportunities, no future, they don't feel like they can provide for a family.

They're not having families. You can step in and offer a materialist analysis of why that is, and that involves a critique of capitalism imperialism as a system but in lieu of that you can step in and blame the feminists or blame the people that are woke you know blame the liberals and then and we see in societies now in western societies capitalist societies this divergence between young women's political ideology which tend to be more progressive in young men's which is shifting right word and that feeds into your other point which is the money behind the ability to produce this content constantly on the right, they have this huge money machines that pump out this fucking garbage to teenage and early 20-something young men who are disillusioned by a system that doesn't work for them but gives them all the wrong answers and they end up being bitter, angry, bigoted, you know, misogynistic assholes who just further their problems, you know, by being that way instead of solving them.

But yeah, that's precisely in the vacuum that a critique of capitalism could fill. And it is actually the proper analysis to have. And this is the social residue, the social backlash, the social consequences of precisely that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if people can't get, if people can't feel that void, if we can't feel that void more than the trends that, you know, people are poorly describing as right wing or not right way as a post racial fascism um like the actual trends that they're identifying even if the title is terrible the trends they're

identifying and noticing that will continue in that direction you know because you know I I go to stuff and I go to events and I mean like right now we're working on this um we're doing a conference in a few weeks the black the national black radical organizing conference here in Indianapolis and we're doing stuff like that because there has been an emergence of the a lot of right wing stuff in black communities that is not funded by black folks anyway you know the the the the the the the finance broshed and invest fast and you know stuff that maybe some of your listeners may not know about it honestly I would encourage them not even look some of that stuff up but but there has been a penetration so there has to be a kind of response to that stuff to there is a battle of ideas that

we do need to engage in like that is that part is true um because if not like you know our people do get caught up in these are the explanations you know like that's because no one else is saying anything so if it's just going to be hey um i'm i'm this way because of some kind of race science BS whatever like we have to be able to combat that kind of stuff and that requires us to organize ourselves even in our own communities where we see that most most often right that's that's a thing we have to do but if we're not filling those voids somebody's going to fill it for him i always say people have needs and they're going to find a way to get them met they're it can be done in a healthy way or a non-healthy way but they will find a way you know so people want to know things

they want to understand the world they're going to find a way to get that met and that can either be through joe rogan you know or or um you know or it can be through black miss or rev left right like it kind of depends on how we do it right but like they're going to find a way to get an explanation of the world absolutely like that's just that's just what it's going to be so we have to try our best to feel that for them when they're looking for it perfectly said and yeah and I appreciate all the work you do on exactly that front we try to do the same thing and yeah we just got to keep pushing forward keep organizing and out of organizing keep politically educating that's essential you mentioned listening to right-wing content and I really do think that's

important. Once you're established in your principles, once you know who you are and what you stand for, I think understanding and listening to reactionary and liberal, you know, media output, I think is essential to deepen your analysis so you never get caught in an echo chamber where you're not aware of what all other sections of the political spectrum think at any given time. I found a lot of benefit in my analysis by listening to people I completely disagree with on every single issue, but just to keep my finger on the pulse of where these different sections of the political spectrum are moving under conditions. And they're always shifting, always moving. So I think that's something that people can work toward in their analysis. And I think it is

helpful because, yeah, if you get isolated in your silo in your echo chamber, you lose a lot of your analytical abilities and capacities. So all that said, I really appreciate you so much, all your work you do, and for being so generous with your, time tonight i know it went a little long but i really do value uh not only your work but these conversations i love i love listening and learning from you so before i let you go can you just let my listeners know where they can find you and the work that you do including this article in your podcast yeah no thank you and i you know i appreciate this show i was literally just listening to i know i think your episodes got your episodes got deleted or something so i've been listening

to some of those bests have been popping back up nice um but yeah so I definitely appreciate this show. It's a good, always good to go to for understanding, like, theory and things of that nature. And I appreciate that you're, you know, open to myself and others that can come on. And it's not just repeating the same dead white guys and stuff like that. Like, I appreciate that. Absolutely. In terms of where that people can find me, I appreciate, they can find me at Black Mifs Podcast.

Again, that's Black Mifs Podcast. We take Mifs Related to or. and or about black people and debunk them myths of a materialist social political nature, so we're not going to just do anything. And then, you know, people obviously can look up the book, laundering black rage. The book is rather expensive. Not my fault. That's just the way

the publisher works. So if you want to just read things for free, I'm sure you can find it somewhere. And also you can just read the first, the essays that are basically chapter one and two are on Black Agenda Report for free. And we just got a open source for one of the chapters, Chapter 6. I know we talked about Black Wall Street. So if people want to read that chapter, you actually can read it legally on open source for free now.

So if you want to read that chapter. And, you know, people want to, I know I was on here. I think last time I talked about the Pendleton 2, we're still engaged in that struggle. So if people want to support that financially or any other kind of way, you can go to penitent 2.com and that's with number two and the Pendleton 2 are two political prisoners here in Indiana where I live who

got 200 plus years for saving the life of a fellow prisoner who was being beaten down by guards who we later found out we're in the Ku Klux Klan and they're still locked up today and we'll actually be doing an action here at the beginning of next month for their freedom. So

those are the things I'm engaged in. So people can find me there and if people want to find me on Twitter, I don't really tweet that much. I'm usually just laughing. Everybody else's tweets. You can find me on there. You can find me on Instagram in any of those sites as well. Cool. Yeah, and I'll link to all of that in the show notes

so people can find you as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible. And again, thank you so much for all the work you do. Keep it up and I hope that we continue to have conversations. This is the third time you've been on Rev. Left. Hopefully we'll have many, many more. Yeah, for so. Thank you. Thank you for listening.

RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash revleft radio or make a one-time donation at buy me a coffee.com forward slash rev left radio. Links will be in the show notes. You know,