Racism
27 May 2023
A sonic memorial to the Black women of the Peoples Temple.
10 Sep 2022
Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on racial capitalism, intergenerational organizing, internationalism, and a whole lot more. Dan’s live Dig interview from the Socialism 2022 conference in Chicago.
27 Aug 2022
Transcript of the interview with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò.
01 Jul 2022
Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on his essay “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” an interview first posted in December 2020. This pairs well with last week’s Jared Clemons interview on In This House We Believe...
24 Jun 2022
Political scientist Jared Clemons on feckless liberal anti-racism: how In This House We Believe racial liberalism leaves racial capitalism’s inequalities in place and why, drawing on Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph, the Black...
01 Apr 2021
Dan interviews the hosts of Time to Say Goodbye podcast on Asian American politics and identity.
08 Aug 2020
Dan interviews Kelly Lytle Hernández on
MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol.
31 Jul 2020
Dan’s 2018 interview with Matthew Frye Jacobson on
Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. With a new intro from Dan on the Columbus myth and the politics of white ethnicity.
10 Jul 2020
Dan talks to
@loggins__ and
@MuseWendi about why people are reading White Fragility and ten books about racism, capitalism, and Black radicalism that you should read instead.
25 Jun 2020
Mike Davis on his classic book about why the US has long lacked strong socialist and labor politics. One recurrent answer: racism.
28 Feb 2020
Dan interviews Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on her book
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.
14 Feb 2020
Racism on the right wing is changing in weird and important ways, and liberal anti-racism offers no viable solution. Dan interviews Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joe Lowndes, authors of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the...
17 Jan 2020
The wars at home and abroad have always been connected. Dan interviews Nikhil Pal Singh on US attacks on Iran and the politics, history, and culture of American warmaking.
20 Sep 2019
The history of suburbanite reactions to school integration in Atlanta and Charlotte reveal the class power underpinning both racism and the demolition of the New Deal order. Dan interviews Matt Lassiter, discussing suburbanite resistance to...
06 Sep 2019
Dan discusses the history of black politics in the US—left, nationalist, liberal, and neoliberal—with Michael Dawson.
02 Aug 2019
Dan interviews Lily Geismer, the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. While Boston whites fought school busing in the streets, suburban liberals along Route 128 maintained and...
26 Jul 2019
Dan is taking his first week off ever in Dig history to finish his book. Here’s a classic from deep in the archives: our first interview with Aziz Rana, on his book The Two Faces...
22 May 2019
Three interviews: historian Seth Rockman, scholars Crystal Eddins and Zachary Sell, and public historians Akeia Benard, Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, Elon Cook Lee and Marco McWilliams.
15 May 2019
Three interviews: historians Linford Fisher, Christy Clark-Pujara and Joanne Melish, and Emily Owens.
25 Nov 2018
Guns in general, and American gun culture in particular, have created a horrific bloodbath. But much of the liberal gun control movement has, in concert with the NRA and Republican Right, worked to make the...
21 Nov 2018
Black Lives Matter is a poignant slogan and a powerful force for social transformation. It’s also shorthand for a huge array of organizations, mostly led by people that you’ve never heard of, working the daily...
07 Nov 2018
The man who carried out the massacre in Pittsburgh was apparently motivated by a belief that Jewish people were conspiring to destroy the white race by way of orchestrating mass immigration. It’s a conspiracy theory...
28 Oct 2018
Recently, Dan spoke to Nikhil Pal Singh about the unfortunate and never-ending debate over whether it was economics or racism that got Trump elected. This is a sequel to that discussion: because what Malaika Jabali...
05 Sep 2018
Nikhil Pal Singh on the unfortunate obsession shared by certain pundits, journalists and social scientists: definitively proving that Trump won because of racism, and racism alone. What drives so many people to dedicate so much...
11 Aug 2018
That right-wing people in the US and Europe have made George Soros the answer to so many troubling questions is not very surprising: he’s a billionaire, he’s Jewish and, unlike most of his cohort, he...
18 Jul 2018
Checking your privilege. Invisible knapsacks. Intersectionality. In his new book from Verso, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, Asad Haider questions the terms and concepts that underpin much liberal and left...
27 Jun 2018
Everyone wants to know what’s wrong with Appalachia. But beginning in the 1960s, it was “white ethics”—Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews and other non-WASPs—who broke from the New Deal coalition, embracing their Ellis Island immigrant roots...
02 Jun 2018
Fifty years ago, a mainstream group of high-profile Americans declared the following: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and...
12 May 2018
Recent cases of horrific child abuse have elicited widespread media attention. What the media coverage often misses is what these incidents reveal about a two-tiered child protection system that systemically surveils, punishes and destroys poor...
21 Mar 2018
View Transcript
03 Feb 2018
The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As...
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”...
13 Dec 2017
View Transcript
08 Dec 2017
Journalist @ryanlcooper talks about the new paper he wrote with @MattBruenig, founder of the @PplPolicyProj, a new left-wing think tank founded by Bruenig and funded by the people. “Foreclosed: Destruction of Black Wealth During the...
31 Oct 2017
Rana overturns conventional accounts of American history, from settlement and Revolution to the Populists and the present day. In reality, settler-colonialism, empire, and a brutally exploitative economic system grounded in racial subjugation have always been...
17 Oct 2017
In his new book The End of Policing Brooklyn College sociologist @avitale makes the case that technocratic reforms won’t fix American policing. In reality, we can only fix policing by ending the carceral state and...
06 Oct 2017
Prevailing debate obscures the fact that we already have a form of gun control in the United States. As legal scholar Ben Levin explains, the problem is that it’s a form of gun control that...
04 Oct 2017
Here’s Dan’s full interview with civil rights attorney and Democratic nominee for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. You heard some of it yesterdayon the first in a four-part series on mass incarceration that we are...
03 Oct 2017
In the late 1960s, criminologists like Todd Clear predicted America would soon start closing its prisons. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Interviews with Clear, formerly incarcerated poet and legal scholar Dwayne Betts, and civil...
29 Sep 2017
Today’s Diglet is not really diminutive at all. Dan has two interviews with two separate guests because too much has happened over the past few weeks and there are too many smart people to analyze...
26 Sep 2017
Islamophobia is conventionally regarded as racist and bigoted views about Muslims expressed by ignorant individuals, including the one who somehow became president. But legal and critical race scholar @KhaledBeydoun explains that the reality is more...
12 Sep 2017
This two-hour episode is a look at inequality in Houston from slavery to the present. First, Dan talks to Tyina Steptoe, historian at the University of Arizona and author of “Houston Bound: Culture and Color...
25 Aug 2017
Dan talks to Splinter Politics Editor Alex Pareene about his recent piece “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party” and about why Phoenix is Trump’s happy place. This second weekly episode...
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
Read the transcript [here] (https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/black-lives-matter-baltimore-obama-racism-freddie-gray-election-whitelash)
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...
18 Apr 2017
Prisons don’t just keep inmates in; they keep the public out. Even at a moment when mass incarceration is under unprecedented criticism it is quite hard for people on the outside to empathize with people...
07 Mar 2017
Fighting for Black Lives Under Trump
28 Feb 2017
Mass incarceration should be central to any analysis of American political economy. It’s also a moral monstrosity. But before The New Jim Crow and anti-mass incarceration activists across the country loudly insisted this was the...
07 Feb 2017
George Cicariello-Maher is professor of political science at Drexel University and author of several books, including Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, published by Verso as part of the Jacobin Series. He recently drew...