Category Archives: Liberalism

The Contested Politics of Racial Capitalism in Táíwò and Kendi

(Táíwò photo credit to Jared Rodriguez. Kendi photo credit to Stephen Voss.)

With the recent publication of his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò is becoming a leading thinker of the theory of racial capitalism. Since the publication of his two best-selling and award winning books, Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi has become the most prominent thinker on race in the US today. Kendi has also recently adopted the concept of racial capitalism to frame his social analysis.

Táíwò and Kendi share a commitment to careful investigation of the dynamics and interrelations of race and class, but in other ways they have sharply contrasting and even opposing politics. Not for the sake of labeling theorists as good and bad nor for trying to draw sharp lines around who belongs in contested political spaces, but for the sake of clearly defining political positions that shape efforts towards liberation, the contours of these contrasting and opposing politics are worth inquiring into.

The hotly debated tradition of racial capitalism theory and the renewed attention to race and class in contemporary social movements provide ample impetus for undertaking an investigative journey through the class politics of Táíwò and Kendi. Táíwò provides analytical tools for discerning the kind of class divides that Kendi tries to harmonize. Táíwò also happens to discuss many of the same historical figures that Kendi does, which enables an ideal opportunity to clearly compare and contrast their diverging class analyses. After briefly reviewing Táíwò’s book and then situating Táíwò’s class politics within the current political landscape, I use his work to pivot towards Kendi and then launch into a textual analysis of Kendi’s class politics.

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The Unbearable Emptiness of Voting

[This essay of mine was originally published at The Hampton Institute.]

Election season makes me feel like the kid who doesn’t have a stuffed animal on “bring your teddy bear to school” day. Everyone else has a favorite who they can tell good stories about and cuddle with, but I don’t so I feel left out. But then I remember that there are good reasons to resist getting pulled down by the undertow of elections.

Like cute stuffed animals, politicians make people feel good while having a marginal effect on positive social change. The main differences between stuffed animals and politicians are that 1) stuffed animals are actually cuddly, and 2) people don’t invest vast amounts of political hope and agency in stuffed animals. I recognize that arguing against what many people hold dear makes me kind of a grump, but I at least aspire to be one who is not stuck in idle criticism but is offering alternative ideas. The particular variety of grumpiness that I espouse is one grounded in grassroots social movements that focus on direct action independent of party politics.

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All You Need to Know about Liberalism: Capitalism and the State (Part II)

(See Part I here. While closely related, Part II is readable as a stand alone piece.)

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Economics. We know the economy mostly through the dollars we keep (or lack) in our pockets and the jobs we work (or suffer through) during a major portion of our waking lives. Outside of these more tangible ways we experience the economy, talk of the stocks, bonds, and securities, the federal reserve, supply-demand curves, etc… mostly seems arcane and safely ignored. And yet upon reflection, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that this topic doesn’t deeply determine our lives and social relationships.

How can we imagine a better world and then make one if we refuse to look economics in the eye? Avoiding the principles of economics shackles us to our more immediate impressions of the world and fogs our capacity for critically relating to ourselves and society as a whole. Economics isn’t just for bootlicking academics and the self-aggrandizing rich; it’s also for restless workers and the scheming masses. It may be an abyss, but it’s one that with a little encouragement and self-assurance we can get to the bottom of and weaponize in service of our own ideas of liberation.

This piece is Part II of a series on liberalism. As a refresher, liberalism as a political philosophy does not refer to the first part of the liberal/conservative dichotomy in US politics but is the more encompassing mainstream worldview “that holds that free market capitalism and limited representative government are the best way to organize society, protect human rights, and promote the freedom of people to choose how to live.” Part I focuses more abstractly on defining liberalism and showing how it ignores inequalities of power which then corrupt everything liberalism claims to stand for. Part II is a look at how this plays out more concretely through capitalism.

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What You Need to Know about Liberalism: What It’s Made of, What It’s Missing, and What It Means for Organizing (Part I)

(See Part II here.)

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It is of the utmost importance that we know our enemy. In the context of radical grassroots organizing, this means we must know liberalism.

Liberalism is the water we all swim in. It’s the institutional and ideological political-economic-social apparatus of the contemporary US and Western Europe and has spread to countries on every continent. It’s all too easy to forget it’s there at all because it’s what we all grew up in and is all most of us have ever known.

Naming and defining liberalism can be a small revelation to those who are starting to question the status quo but don’t have the vocabulary to understand what they find unsettling about it and what the alternatives are. To show what liberalism looks like today and to give it a past makes it appear less written in stone and more part of an ever-changing and thus contingent historical process. What can be built can be taken apart.

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