New Dawn

Inés Valdez, Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, joins the New Dawn Podcast and discusses the role of labor and migration as a form of racial politics. As a critical race and feminist theorist, Valdez's research agenda has engaged issues of migration, transnationalism, empire, and racial capitalism. Her first book, Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft, was published by Cambridge and makes the case that cosmopolitanism must be transnational. Valdez's numerous articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Citizenship Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Political Research Quarterly, Political Theory, and Theory & Event. (This episode was originally recorded in June 2021.)

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Professor Charles W. Mills. To celebrate his life, New Dawn is re-releasing the episode Michael recorded with Charles almost two years ago called, "Retheorizing (Racial) Justice." Please enjoy the conversation and help us say goodbye to a tremendous teacher, scholar, and racial justice advocate. 

Michael Dawson and Charles Mills discuss the relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, how philosophers can follow the examples set by political theorists, the manifestations of white supremacy in the academy, and more in this invigorating episode of New Dawn.

Suggested Links

For a biography on Charles Mills and more about his published work, click here.

John Rawls's Collected Papers

In this episode of New Dawn, Michael C. Dawson along with special guest host, Charisse Burden Stelly, invite Dr. Takiyah Harper-Shipman, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Professor Harper-Shipman is particularly interested in the ways in which discourse structures political economies of development, human rights, and-more recently-gender. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (Routledge), examined how development stakeholders in Burkina Faso and Kenya negotiate "owning development" in their local contexts. Professor Harper-Shipman is currently at work on another project that explores legacies of population control in human rights approaches to family planning.

In this special two-part series, the Race & Capitalism's Post-Graduate Fellow, Charisse Burden-Stelly, is in conversation with writer, rapper, director, and filmmaker, Boots Riley. Part II focuses on the new Biden administration, Riley's new show, "I'm a Virgo," being released by Amazon, and the future of labor organizing in the U.S. and around the world. 

In this special two-part series, the Race & Capitalism's Post-Graduate Fellow, Charisse Burden-Stelly, is in conversation with writer, rapper, director, and filmmaker, Boots Riley. Part I was produced and sponsored by the Claudia Jones School for Political Education. 

In this episode of New Dawn, Michael Dawson invites Brandi Thompson Summers to the show. Summers is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz. Her research engages theoretical themes that cut across multiple domains of social life. Summers builds epistemological and methodological insights from cultural and urban geography, urban sociology, African American studies, and media studies by examining the cultural, political, and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. Her first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press), explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map Blackness in Washington, D.C. Summers has published several articles and essays in both academic and popular publications, including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Funambulist.

K-Sue Park joins Michael Dawson to launch Season 5 of New Dawn. Park is an Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown University. She has written extensively on foreclosure, land, dispossession, and displacement. Her publications have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, The History of the Present, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, and the New York Times. (Due to some unavoidable technical issues, the beginning of the episode is a bit distorted. Thank you for your patience and for tuning in.)

“Anti-Black Violence and the Ongoing Fight for Freedom” was a live conversation held on July 7, 2020. Megan Ming Francis moderated the discussion between Barbara Ransby, Juliet Hooker, and Vesla Weaver. They discuss what the current moment reveals, the power of radical imagination in black struggle, and how to keep the momentum.

Selected Publications by these scholars:

Francis, Megan Ming. Civil Rights and the Making of the American Modern State (2014).

Hooker, Juliet. Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (2017)

— Race and the Politics of Solidarity (2009)

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2013)

— Making All Black Lives Matter: Re-imagining Freedom in the 21st Century (2018)

Weaver, Vesla. Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control (with Amy Lerman) (2014)

Suggested Readings:

Hanchard, Michael G. The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (2018)

Hannah-Jones, Nikkole. “It Is Time for Reparations” (June 2020)

Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2003)

In this episode, Michael Dawson chats with Charisse Burden-Stelly (Asst. Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College) about her research on W.E.B Du Bois, as well as lessons his scholarship has to offer as we think through building social movements today.

Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History

Suggested Readings:

Hannah Appel, The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea (2019)

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)

Megan Ming Francis, “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture” (2019)

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019)

Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (2016)

Claudia Jones, Beyond Containment (edited by Carole Boyce Davies) (2011)

Kelly Miller, “The Risk of Women’s Suffrage” (1915)

Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940 (2018)

This episode is a recording of a conversation between Michael Dawson, Rhea Boyd, Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, and Brandi Summers during an event titled "COVID-19 and Racial Inequities: Unpacking the Anti-Black Response," on June 25, 2020.

Rhea Boyd, MD, MPH, FAAP works clinically at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and teaches nationally on the relationship between structural racism, inequity and health, and has a decade of experience advancing community-based advocacy. She leads efforts to characterize and address the child and public health impacts of harmful policing practices and policies. She serves as the Chief Medical Officer of San Diego 211, working with navigators to address social needs of San Diegans impacted by chronic illness and poverty. And she is the Director of Equity and Justice for The California Children's Trust, an initiative to advance mental health access to children and youth across California.

Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, PhD is a public health researcher and Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research integrates theoretical perspectives from the social sciences with epidemiological methods in public health to examine how social inequality in the US shapes population health, with a particular focus on the health of racial/ethnic groups and immigrants. The majority of her work focuses on how race, migration, and class intersect to shape the the health of US-born and immigrant Latinxs across the life-course.

Brandi Summers, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines urban cultural landscapes and the political and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. She is also the author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, which explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C.

Suggested Links & Readings:

Learn more about Moms 4 Housing

Berwick, Don. “The Moral Determinants of Health.” JAMA. Published online June 12, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.11129

Laster Pirtle, Whitney N. “Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States.” Health Education & Behavior, (April 2020). doi:10.1177/1090198120922942.

Sewell, Abigail A., Kevin A. Jefferson, Hedwig Lee. “Living under surveillance: Gender, psychological distress, and stop-question-and-frisk policing in New York City.” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 159, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.024.

Deva Woodly, an Associate Professor of Politics at the New School, discusses the movement for black lives and how to create a kinder world with Michael Dawson.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," Audre Lorde (A Burst of Light" and Other Essays)

Suggested Readings and Links:

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinksy

Read more about these individuals:

Anna Julia Cooper

Patrisse Cullors

Asha Bandele

Mary Hooks – Southerners on New Ground

Septima Clark

Ella Baker

In this episode, Amna Akbar (Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University) discusses the imbrication of capitalism and social movements in legal studies today.

Akbar, Amna, Toward a Radical Imagination of Law (July 25, 2018). New York Law Review, Vol. 93, No. 3. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3061917 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3061917

McLeod, Allegra M., "Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice" (2015). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 1490.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1490

Links to:

Law and Political Economy Project

Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles

Sunrise Movement

Movement for Black Lives

The Red Nation

Sylvie Laurent joins Michael Dawson in conversation about her recent publication, King and the Other America: The Poor People's Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality (University of California Press, 2019). 

Suggested Readings: 

Bobby Cervantes, "Revisiting the Poor People's Campaign and Its Legacy" (AAIHS)

Robert Greene II, "The Language of the Unheard" (The Nation)

Kirkus Reviews, "King and the Other America" 

Sylvie Laurent, "Martin Luther King fifty years on" (Le Monde diplomatique)

Sylvie Laurent,  La Couleur du marché, Racisme et néolibéralisme aux États-Unis, Le Seuil, Paris, 2017.

Patricia Posey is Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago and the Political Science Department’s junior faculty member for the Race and Capitalism Project. She specializes in race and American political economy. In this episode, Posey joins Michael Dawson to talk about payday loans and financial capitalism.

Related Readings:

Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops, and the Poor

Book by John P. Caskey

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy

Book by Howard Jacob Karger

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives

Book by Lisa Servon

Broke, USA: From Pawn Shops to Poverty, Inc. - How the Working Poor Became Big Business

Book by Gary Rivlin

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy

Book by Mehrsa Baradaran

Predatory Inclusion and Education Debt: Rethinking the Racial Wealth Gap

Written by Louise Seamster and Raphaël Charron-Chénier

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Book by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University) speaks with Michael Dawson about her new book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. She talks about how black urban identity is constructed, why she is against homeownership, and how the housing crisis isn't a crisis but a feature of society. 

Link to Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Further Reading:

David Theo Goldberg (2001), The Racial State

In this episode, Darrick Hamilton, the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, joins Michael Dawson to discuss neoliberal economics, inequality, an economic bill of rights, and reparations.

Links:

The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

Readings:

Dawson, Michael and Megan Francis, “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order”

Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity-Pay Gap”

Hamilton, Darrick in Democracy Journal, “Neoliberalism and Race”

Johnson, Walter, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmation Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

To commence Season 4, Michael Dawson invited Adom Getachew (University of Chicago) and Quinn Slobodian (Wellesley College) to speak about the discourse on nationalism. They discuss a recent issue of Dissent magazine, in which Getachew and Slobodian were both contributors, What is the Nation Good For? to start the conversation. They talk about the relationship between nationalism and populism; immigration politics; and more, including their recently published books Worldmaking After Empire (Getachew) and Globalists (Slobodian).

Works by the guests:

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

To continue the conversation, explore some of these suggested readings:

Dissent Summer 2019 Issue: What Is The Nation Good For?

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of Global Citizen

E. Tendayi Achiume, "The Postcolonial Case for Rethinking Borders"

Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx

Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race

Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain

Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing

Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South

Iyko Day, Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, joins Michael Dawson to discuss her research on the logics of settler colonialism and waste landing, in addition to her takeaway from the 2019 Racial Capitalism Conference held at UIC-Urbana Champagne. 

Note: The guest would like to clarify her comment on the Shepard/Byrd hate crime bill—it was accompanied by a $680 billion national defense budget, not an 8 billion dollar increase as she had stated in the recording.

 Julia Ott, an associate professor of history at the New School, joins Michael Dawson to discuss the relationship between capital gains tax policy and Jim Crow, white wealth, the 1937 Conservative Movement Manifesto and financialization, and much more in a stimulating conversation in this episode. 

Wandia Njoya, Senior Lecturer at Daystar University in Kenya, joins Michael Dawson for a conversation about neoliberalism and the education system in Kenya. She also discusses her interest in environmental imperialism and racial capitalism as a useful perspective in her analyses and politics.