Great conversation. The usual suspects will misrepresent the message here, but they should be ignored. Reed and Michaels are a huge breath of fresh air.
58:55 "I think one of the problems that we have now, and this wasn't Sanders's fault... but people who came into politics through his election campaign often brought a Schoolhouse Rock kind of understanding of how electoral politics works... and the Justice Democrats approach, for instance, is very limited... You can't go very far like that. There's no way around connecting with working people who are actually hurting out there." Spoken like a true champion of the working class.
Nobody argues that under ancient Egyptian slavery, "justice" is defined by "whipping Israelites and non-Israelites equally". If you saw a Pharaoh whipping Israelites way more than other groups, and you said, "Hey, that's not fair. Whip them only as much as you whip the others", you're not doing *evil* per se, but you're not solving anybody's problems.
@ 11:42 he says du bois gave the best example of the social construction of race which only speaks to race in the context of the USA and totally dismisses race globally. That is an egregious error!
Race does not have global features, it's different in different places, who's defined as what by which means changes significantly and that's why you cannot have a universal construct of race it wouldn't make any sense.
Before capitalism ppl were born into certain professions, so you had long linages that were frozen in the same class, that's what perpetuated the existence of different races/ethnic groups, since the 1600s this started to break & ethnicity became little more than just tradition & memory where as before it had clear class charactet.
I see why he’s popular. He denies the centrality of race and racism in American life. Anyone who says it’s class not race is either naive or dishonest. Race is the master class. It is the class from which all others flow. It’s the single biggest determinant in one’s life in a race-based society.
Weird. Then how come race as a form of identity, a concept that is only 500 years old, didn't prelude class distinctions? Binding yourself to ideologies of ascriptive differences only further codifies the entrenched notions of conservatives and neoliberals; that race and culture is a folk knowledge of being biological and fact so. Enjoy your ahistorical analysis
Well, then explain the 100 million exploited "whites" who die in poverty, along with their black fellow workers. It's a capitalist society, btw. (Hint.)
