The March on Washington was 59 years ago today. It’s popularly remembered as a moderate demonstration where MLK “had a dream” — but in fact, it was the decades-long culmination of a mass, working-class movement against racial and economic injustice.
Despite a mountain of evidence affirming the centrality of race in US politics, it is essentially ignored in almost all electoral analysis.
While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.
Throughout U.S. history, class has been bound up with other forms of oppression—so the disenfranchisement of Black men after Reconstruction decisively shifted class relations.
The goal isn’t merely eliminating barriers to ascending the strata, but rather flattening the hierarchy altogether. If “equity” is to be a worthwhile word, it will have to mean de-stratifying the systems that impose sexist and racist hierarchies.
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She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and radical politics. Who was she really?
bell hooks was a revolutionary...Like Ella Baker and Assata (and Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith and Angela Davis, etc) she has her share of "daughters." Literally thousands of amazing young Black women leading radical movements and making radical art
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Reluctant Reformers addresses what I think of as the tripwire of U.S. politics: race. But it does so by examining how several social movements, including abolition, women’s suffrage, populism, progressivism, labor, the socialist and communist left..
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