Today it’s just me, Andy, talking with guest Adolph Reed, Prof. Emeritus at University of Pennsylvania, about his new book The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives. Drawing from personal experience, he argues that racial segregation cannot be fully explained through abstract ideas about white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It was a coherent social order animated by ruling class power.
We talk about what he calls “neoliberal race politics,” the charge against him of “class reductionism” (NYT), and the broader usefulness of this analysis to contexts across the US and the world. Also, a bit of NBA banter.
0:00: The premise of the book and its reception (The New Yorker, Common Dreams, Harper’s podcast). Adolph periodizes Jim Crow from the 1890s-1960s, and he speaks about his formative years in Louisiana, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Atlanta. He first drafted the book in the 2000s after realizing his would be the last generation with clear memories of the Jim Crow order. Jim Crow, he argues, has been conspicuously overlooked in contemporary discussions about race and slavery, which flatten history (“the bad old timey-times”).
20:20: An aside on Adolph’s polemic (2013) on Hollywood “race movies” such as Django Unchained and The Help.
28:30: Adolph describes the Jim Crow racial order as a practical and pragmatic strategy of class power over all workers, rather than an abstract hatred of one group. And why it is counterproductive to frame it as a binary story of all white versus all Black people.
It’s not like white people had a meeting around the campfire and said, “let’s go put some Jim Crow on some Black people”
36:30: Framing Jim Crow as unrelenting oppression in fact mirrors, ironically, the very vision laid out by segregationists themselves. This view, found today in liberal anti-racism discourses, attributes everything to an abstract “white supremacy” and “anti-Blackness.” Class is disavowed. The effect is to help sustain an elite stratum of racial spokespeople. But also, why does this race-first worldview have such broad appeal?
53:15: Adolph responds to charges that his argument is class reductionist. We reference an older exchange with the late political theorist Ellen Meiskins Wood (2002) to clarify the distinctions in Adolph’s arguments (see the original text here, esp. the “Rejoinder”). Race, he argues, is one of many ideologies to sustain accumulation and class power that rest on “ascriptive differences,” or, putative ideas about the natural differences between people: if not race, then sex, gender, religion, caste, tribe, mental and physical abilities, etc.
1:03:50: Wrestling with common objections, such as, “ethnocentrism predates capitalism, so race is autonomous from class”; or, “upper-class Black people are subject to police violence too, so class doesn’t explain racism.”
I wouldn’t say I’m the most cosmopolitan world traveler. But the thing I will say is that, in every place that I’ve been, what I’ve noticed is that most people are scuffling trying to work for a living. It doesn’t matter what kind of food they eat or the music they listen to. I mean that’s all interesting, more or less. But the basic human condition is that, right?
Our correspondent reports from towns around Kyiv, where Russian forces appear to have committed war crimes, including summary executions and random murders. The last instalment of a once-in-a-decade climate report suggests that meeting the more ambitious temperature goals set in Paris requires a “handbrake turn” on global emissions. And why Britain’s car washes are a rare example of “re-automation”. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
Bobby Gruenewald is a lifelong learner, and an activator. He majored in Finance, but was always interested in entrepreneurship. In 1995, he built a website for a car dealership for $100, and then went on to build hondaparts.com. The dealer he worked for committed to investing in his future projects right then and there. Post that, he built several companies and sold them, creating a successful track record. He has been married for 26 years, and has 4 children. His 16 year old just started driving, but he claims she is a great driver... way better than the self driving mode on his Tesla.
As a hobby - or addiction, as he confesses - he is a pilot but didn't stop with his pilots license. He can fly helicopters, seas planes, jets - over the past few years, he had flown 44 different types of planes. He's found it was very therapeutic to be up in the air... a great way to clear his head of all the things that occupy his thoughts.
In spite of being on staff at a church, Bobby found himself not reading the bible regularly. While standing in the security line in the airport, he thought up an idea to use technology to help him read the Bible more, and grow spiritually.
In which a French-only precursor to the World Wide Web appears in the late 1970s in a wave of Gallic futurist fervor, and John may have been making long distance calls from a Parisian prison. Certificate #23054.
Elon acquired 9% of Twitter, because the Technoking wants to rule the #technoworld. Shein is reportedly about to hit $100B private valuation because it knows you want a tank top before you know you want a tank top. And Russia’s ruble has shockingly rebounded because of one wild stat: 70% of the world is governed by dictators — so they’re siding with Putin’s economy.
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An interview with Jennifer Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and author most recently of The Candy House(Scribner, 2022), the story of the intersections across space and time of characters desperate to understand their interior lives. At the hub of these stories, a machine capable of capturing and sharing memories, and even offering the possibility of joining a collectivity of consciousness. Jennifer Egan, as always, balances perfectly the profound intellectual problems of existence with characters who feel deeply real by virtue of their uncommon minds. We get to talking about how her process is one of discovery through the unconscious practice of writing, and the ways in which certain ideas of what the reader should feel and experience guide her structure. We discuss her creation of the futuristic machine in The Candy House that, in the end, fashions what only the novel can produce: a window into the minds and memories of another. On the subject of movement back and forth through time and place, Jennifer credits a marvelous children’s novel for the concept of parallel worlds into which characters can dip in and out of. In an incredibly wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon Dungeons and Dragons, the longest and possibly best 18th century novel, the possibility of reading The Candy House as the predecessor to A Visit from the Goon Squad, and so much more.
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
We're talking about a global outcry over apparent war crimes in Ukraine: what new consequences are coming for Russia and Russian oligarchs.
Also, a new, major report about climate change with warnings and suggested solutions.
Plus, a compromise on Capitol Hill for more Covid-19 relief money, Elon Musk's bold move on social media, and why this year's March Madness victory was one for the history books.
Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York, voted to form the company’s first union in the U.S. last Friday, making a historic win for labor organizers everywhere. The union earned recognition in less than a year into its existence, and it overcame multiple arrests as well as millions that Amazon spent on anti-union consultants. Chris Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labor Union, joins us to discuss how it felt to win and what comes next.
And in headlines: Sacramento police arrested a suspect in connection to Sunday’s mass shooting in the city, the Senate reached a bipartisan $10 billion deal to fund COVID relief, and Elon Musk purchased about $2.9 billion worth of Twitter stock.
Show Notes:
Chris Smalls, President of the Amazon Labor Union – https://twitter.com/Shut_downAmazon
The Intercept: “New Amazon Worker Chat App Would Ban Words Like “Union,” “Restrooms,” “Pay Raise,” and “Plantation” – https://bit.ly/3NM8Qyy
