Black Politics
08 Jun 2025
Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Asha Ransby-Sporn on 2020’s summer of mass protest and rebellion sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. As Keeanga puts it: “The pressing question is how we went from twenty-six...
26 Apr 2025
Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the third in what is now a four-part series, looks at how black...
19 Apr 2025
Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the second in a three-part series, takes the story from World War I’s...
10 Apr 2025
Featuring Aziz Rana on the making of the American capitalist, imperialist project and its legitimation through popular worship of the US Constitution. This episode, the first in a three-part series, traces the foundation of the...
06 Jul 2023
Read the transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2023/07/black-radical-tradition-class-struggle-oppression-us-history-racism-freedom-dreams
27 Jan 2023
Featuring Robin D.G. Kelley on Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
15 May 2021
Dan interviews historian Robin D.G. Kelley on his classic book
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression.
11 Apr 2021
Dan interviews Charisse Burden-Stelly on racial capitalism, the history of the US Black left, and the US government’s Red Scare attacks on Black radicals.
22 Nov 2020
Dan interviews political scientist Megan Ming Francis about the NAACP’s struggle against racist violence in the teens and 20s and how it remade the criminal justice system and the civil rights movement alike.
06 Nov 2020
Dan interviews Cornel West on how to think about and act upon the world that this week presented to us.
06 Nov 2020
Listen to Episode
03 Sep 2020
Dan interviews historian Matthew Countryman on his book
Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia.
16 Jul 2020
This is an incredible moment to learn about the Young Lords from historian Johanna Fernández, the author of
The Young Lords: A Radical History.
04 Jun 2020
Dan interviews Cathy Cohen, Jasson Perez, and Malaika Jabali on this uprising, the conditions that made it possible, and where it might be headed.
27 Oct 2019
Adom Getachew explains how anticolonial leaders from across the black Atlantic tried to not only cast off European rule but also end empire by constructing an egalitarian global political and economic order in its place....
30 May 2019
Dan has in-depth discussion on Bernie’s approach to race and what he must do to win over Black voters with Malaika Jabali and Wendi Muse. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Sanders isn’t unpopular with Black voters....
16 Jan 2018
Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People’s Campaign alongside other organizers shortly before he was assassinated 50 years ago. Today, organizers nationwide are relaunching that movement as The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call...
09 Jan 2018
Chattel slavery made black women’s reproduction the source of private property—and in doing so invented race and American racism. Ever since, the denigration and regulation of black women’s childbearing has been central to the construction...
19 Dec 2017
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor returns to The Dig to discuss her new book How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Forty years ago, a group of black feminists coined the term “identity politics”...
20 Jun 2017
Mass incarceration controls poor people and populations that have been excluded from the labor market. Politically, tough-on-crime rhetoric has for decades been a tool for politicians to appeal to white voters’ racism. But what’s less...
25 Apr 2017
Putting “black faces in high places,” scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, has not only failed to benefit the working class and poor black majority; it has actually harmed them by legitimating an individualistic, meritocratic narrative that...