Joy James on the rise of the Black bourgeoisie

[Music] [Music] [Music] hello everyone and thank you for tuning in to another episode of this is revolution in conjunction with the real news network if you are enjoying what we are doing here on the real news and you want to see more of it the best thing to do is definitely hit like definitely hit subscribe don't forget to hit the bell so you are alerted every time the real news drops these videos also if you like what pascal and i do please go on over to this is revolution podcast or dot com or youtube.com backslash this is revolution podcast and subscribe to our channel as we do interviews like this tuesday through thursday 6 p.m pacific time and saturday morning for me 9 a.m pacific time that being said let me bring in my co-host my homie my dog he is the man of the mau mao hour journalist writer for newsweek he is the pascal robert peace ingredient to the audience peace and greetings to the real news network peace and greetings jason miles what's up man i'm you know what i wore a tie for the occasion and it is the only tie that i have it's okay i can't see it because your microphone is covering it damn it i spent all that time making sure that this was tied perfectly you can't even see it well at some point during the show you won't notice it because i can take myself off screen i'm going to make that microphone adjustment so you guys can see the work that got it that went into not just the tie but fitting into the shirt we have uh a very good guest today that we're talking to we hit you guys first with adolf reid then we came back with chris hedges then we had the giannis verifakas show and today who do we have pascal we have professor joy james yes we do in the 80s the creation of the black welfare queen was used as a scare tactic a tool to gut public goods programs that benefited the poor and working class bill clinton who was sold to the american people as a savior from 12 years of neoliberal rule in the form of ronald reagan and george bush clinton doubled down on the rights assault against public goods governance with the omnibus crime bill in 94 and poverty increasing welfare reform in 1996. what we call here at this is revolution the 50-plus year counter-revolution against the new deal on the great society programs how have we gone from the racist images of single mothers of color living fat off the system to black girl magic and a growing black bourgeoisie has the nixonian ideal of black capitalism finally replaced underclass ideology as a tool of containment for the ruling class we're going to discuss this with dr joy james dr james is a renowned scholar of american political philosophy her work analyzes the way race gender and class are rendered in american society today in the face of the current supreme court nomination of judge katanji brown jackson who was appointed by an administration holding the first black u.s vice president kamala harris we will discuss race gender and class in the current american context please welcome dr joy james i received applause twice so thank you for that [Laughter] that rarely happened like once is like rare in it but and maybe there's a metaphor here in terms of what we're talking about in terms of the rise of black women uh through empire yeah the 1980s with ronald reagan right those uh the two term president who would have um what i'm sorry i wasn't prepared for all this but there's i was thinking the two terms of ronald reagan right comes after two terms of richard nixon who has incredible racial animus against black people as well right so nixon is you know what 68 is the election you know 72 should have been 76 but there's the impeachment you have four years of jimmy carter who comes from the south and it looks like the same with bill clinton like i'm used to being around black people so i know how to talk to them and deal with them etc etc right but you still have no sustained gains where wealth becomes shared among the working class and the poor but there are these opportunities right to enter into government and i think nixon would have been one of the first right because of his position on um affirmative action so the larger context is that you have these movements you have the civil rights movement you have the black power movement you have the feminist movement you have the anti-war movements right that this is galvanizing thousands tens of thousands of people not just in the us but also across the globe in order to critique the us as a racist imperial project right so that these presidencies right that come in that follow this it's to tamp down that desire for struggle and also i would argue in some ways they had the capacity to tamp down the skills for struggle that once you start hiring black people once by people in white corporations or firms or in the government itself in the academy which is where i've worked for the last two three decades that once you start to absorb blacks into these structures then we become part of the infrastructure of the state itself and that project obviously wasn't just a personal pet project of nixon or of reagan again a four-year little gap here with uh jimmy carter or other presidents that followed including the disastrous presidency of um george bush h.w bush who got us into a bogus war in the middle east right but it's also the product or the project of barack obama who i see as the first black president but also as the first black imperial president so the the question of all these presidencies right or this legacy of the executive office is to maintain the state and to allow it to expand and to accrue we know that for centuries accumulations have come out of our labor and out of our laws i think the question that we're going to tangle with today has that been split into a kind of different gender formations where we no longer have the type of solidarity we used to in the 1960s in terms of identifying an opponent and being willing to move against it well i i want to ask this about what you mentioned about um the the black introduction into government roles um and this is even shown in pop culture at the time i can't remember the name of the movie with diane carroll and james earl jones talking about the oh um oh that's a very important movement claudine claudine where you know it actually gets into not that deep into the weeds of like you know you can't have a man in in your home and there were people that worked to get the men out of the homes right um and that's part of that story where they're hiding james earl jones like underwear or something like that and one of the very moynihan very very very moynihan asked but let's remember that these programs are born out of not wanting even women to work when they're rolled out uh in the 30s um that's what a lot of that that was for i can't remember the original name of of welfare but it was designed for non-working females and this is you know an era where go ahead yeah it was designed for white women right particularly white women who were widows correct so the whole notion of the family is a white project in a white supremacist nation i mean if the nation like you know was born out of genocide right an enslavement then part of what it disposes um or tries to kill is the very notion of family cohesion and community cohesion in indigenous and black communities or nations right so this is this is where it becomes really complicated for me when i try to see what the fulcrum is like on the seesaw how do you balance this the nation really works for white women but to some extent it had to include black women within the category of human to some extent right what do you say when people say i'm sorry sorry go ahead no i'm sorry i didn't mean to cut you out well if you were performing the duties of the state like you can entertain them but as eartha kidd found out you know in the johnson administration once she came out against the war in vietnam and confronted lady bird you know the first lady johnson's wife i mean according to some scholars president lyndon baines johnson who supported civil rights gave the pin you know to king signing voting rights civil rights act etc he used the cia to destroy earth a kid's career destroyed her career you're told if you can entertain and sing for us or dance for us or we like that movie or you know historically you know you nurse our kids literally on your breast right if you can reproduce our family integrity you are tolerable if you seek agency autonomy for civil rights and human rights your pain in the neck and maybe you should disappear in whatever way lose your job lose your housing lose your freedom go to prison or you know like malcolm and martin lose your lives right yeah so i i just want to add to that you know as as the those original aid packages were being rolled out as the new deal was getting rolled i think 1935 um divorced women could not get it um uh uh non non-widowed women with children couldn't get it so there definitely was uh caveats on who who could get aid and who who could not get aid but what i wanted to add with with your very very astute point about adding black people into the government apparatus is when these people were part of the system so to speak there was kind of a unified voting bloc with the people that were part of the system receiving the aid and now the people that have moved up into a new middle class and we definitely see this in the early 70s that are part of the same system so they're kind of voting in unison to keep these programs and you definitely see this in the more major metropolitan northern cities when you look at a place like atlanta when they have their first black mayor in maynard jackson one thing he does is increase the business sector and you turn atlanta you know coca-cola the massive airport which becomes a hub private capital is now hoisting these same black people into the middle class and they're not so aligned with their poor and working class black neighbors um i believe towards the end of the jackson administration we actually see the destruction of a lot of the uh housing the uh what would we call it government housing um in atlanta as well so there's there's an interesting you know juxtaposition we talk about like you know including black people into the government apparatus you know trying to protect the system if you will and then also when you have private capital and there's there's the demarcating line almost of class isn't it this is becomes a practical or pragmatic aspect right that once you're included into an apparatus or structure then the logic would be that you would protect it and so once you have black people protecting state accumulations corporate accumulations those who are left behind or are just seen as even more deficient i mean this is part of the reason i avoid the language that we've inherited today about it's not just black girl magic but black excellence right as if that everybody else is mediocre or substandard which which is so aligned with the language of white supremacy like how do you know you're excellent is because you got the corporate job or you got the degree or you know jd phd whatever how many d's you know doctorates or whatever is happening here but the larger picture is this is a capitalist society that was built on slavery rape and genocide and that the accumulations always accrue to the top so if you're ethical you would want to tinker with that machinery and not just be seduced by all the you know what's the glittery you know well the glittery could be a tesla back in the day might have been a cadillac or something i don't know but i think one of the questions we have to think about is what is our collective position on something that looks like a mixed economy or socialist economy and so how do we stop these buy-outs that turn those who remain in certain zip codes as disposable or vulnerable to poisoned water think of flint michigan poisoned air you know disproportionate exposure to police violence and civilian violence well you know it's really what i really appreciate in is in your discourse is that it's very much in alignment with the narrative that we try to expose on our show is that like any other people black people have class internal stratifications and conflicts like everyone else and unfortunately because of the way in which society portrays black life as a unified underclass phenomenon the stratification of class which has been a reality of black life going back to the days of free people of color societies is completely obscured to the majority of not only uh americans overall but also to many black black folk in america as well who are not necessarily connected to those within these communities who are more proximate to capitalist power or the gatekeepers or the venture racial ventriloquist if you will so the narrative that you are very eloquently exposing is very much in line what we try to do in terms of trying to complicate the notion of collective community we in other words and you may disagree with this and i will respect you to do is that it's very important for us to complicate the notion that black people work as a unified community because our argument is that that renders black people to a politics of containment in other words black politics is contained and used as a pawn of the ruling class because the ruling class will choose the racial ventriloquist who speaks for the masses undemocratically chosen while the masses have no say in the agenda and they're moved like a piece on a chess board so black politics becomes a politics of containment in the rendering of collective community in that fashion and it's it's something that we are sure try to challenge effectively i i like to make the argument that there are multiple black communities not just one black community yeah that's great and then and it's making me thinking there are multiple black feminisms in the plural not just one form of black feminism and that should also be stated for abolitionism plural not just one form of abolitionism right but yeah i totally agree with your analysis and then when you're speaking i'm starting to think about how we were warned about this right when malcolm was talking about the big house in the field right so the big house today could be you know deutsche bank bank of america you know um working for the state department and its foreign um projects are working for the doj you know so there was a moment in the 1990s i think it's 1993 or 94 when kathleen cleaver was the first woman to sit on the central committee of the black panther party and this is oakland before you know things went one way and you know cleaver left and and the party fractionated in part because of the violence the cointelpro but also the contradictions and the violence which based on my assessment largely started coming originated from oakland right but cleaver says in this interview and it's for me it's very curious because i believe she's being interviewed by henry lewis gates who's obviously in the big house called harvard um so cleaver is saying that the panthers had to pretend they were a unified front in terms of as black people because that had to be projected out so they thought as a political strategy but they clearly knew that the black middle class the petty bourgeoisie the bourgeoisie um blacks with means and money and ambition that they were going to be hostile to the black panther party as a revolutionary or proto-revolutionary formation but it wasn't even an eternal conflict right but also they would be hostile to you know supporting liberation movements in the so-called third world or global south so there's always been a sector of the black communities as you've said in plural that have been trained or prone or see it as an opportunistic you know imp portfolio whatever um to work for the state and to work for the corporation and it doesn't seem to have been really and impacted people that working in these um zones would be an extension of anti-black violence but this time with black faces i've got to plug in my oh no rascal do you want to add on to that no i think that i i appreciate that assessment and one of the things that we definitely see is with the with the rise of this incorporation is that the more that becomes this incorporation into the apparatus of the ruling class by what we call the black political class over time the more and more the importance of symbolic representation becomes the focus of what is deemed black political aspiration and the less redistributive policy of trying to change the material condition of poor and working class black people becomes the focus so much to the point where i'm reading actually a book on black political history was cynically the democratic party recognizes in the 1980s that they literally can offer black people the symbolic representation of appointments and political candidates instead of actual policy that changes the material condition of poor and working class black people and what we find is the more we the further and further we get away from the civil rights movement the easier we find that black communities plural are intoxicated what that with that politics of symbolism and less willing to demand any kind of truly redistributive materialist agenda for working class and poor black folk who are the majority of black folk would you would you add to that that um there's something to be said about the civil rights movement movement really pivoting away from uh getting the communist and socialist out of the movement and really having the movement be about inclusion well you know it's a very good uh addendum to the point because if we read the preston smith's rate uh good ratio about racial democracy uh in chicago and he talks about how part of the problem of the civil rights movement is that the limitations of the cold war deny the capacity of the uh leaders of the civil rights movement to really put forth a materialist pro-working pro-working-class agenda and as a consequence they focus on what he uses the term as is racial democracy or racial inclusion and what his argument is is that whenever there's a policy or politics of black politics that is premised on racial democracy it basically becomes a wealth transfer to the black petit bourgeois or the black professional managerial class or the black elites because there's no risk redistributive agenda in racial democracy because racial democracy can mean that we literally have a ruling class that is 14 black 60 white and 18 latino then now that's democracy and everyone else can be basically be either a slave or a serf or a tenant farmer and it doesn't make a difference because as long as they're proportionally represented personally represented in every level and what he's arguing is that what we was needed was social democracy which was a redistributive materialist agenda that would have changed the actual material condition of poor and working-class black people's lives instead of just simply asking for racial inclusion and even dr king and beyond beyond rustin and a philip randolph in 1965 they realized that that direct the traditional civil rights movement is not going to do what is necessary to change the condition of working-class black people's lives and that's why they asked for the freedom budget for all in 1965 which the vietnam war denies denies the ability to really be funded well dr james is back she was having some technical difficulties should we start hitting her with the real questions now i know okay and sorry my phone is overheating or something so i'm just i'm back online here so you don't have my okay okay so what are the what are the real i thought what you just said was pretty real but okay what's more real than that oh those were the warm-up questions [Laughter] so professor james in preparation for this show we acquired your book transcending the talented 10th race leaders in american intellectualism one of the as we said earlier one of the persistent themes that we have on our show is the way class stratification amongst blacks facilitates a black political class that works as a racial ventriloquist for the majority of working class and poor blacks in exchange for their economic patronage and enrichment from the ruling class largely to the detriment of the black masses where do you see the contemporary black academic and act of black black academics in general in this particular hierarchy and particularly with the rise of the obama in the post-obama black political class are black academics more likely to challenge this class hierarchy or reify it okay thank you for that um power university professors i believe are on strike right now no and that is about the conditions under which they labor which means teach right um but the students had gone on strike quite a while before i think months before it may be been as late as last year and that was about the conditions under which they lived right mold lack of security i mean just substandard housing right and so the faculty are paid by howard the students are through tuition or grant money or contributing funds to howard but howard also is an expression of both state incorporation if we look at where we are today i would say we're just in a slog we're in a marsh i mean i could keep throwing things out like a mud or something like that i mean it's there's no solid stable ground in my opinion in the academy to speak with the integrity the honesty and just the the the brilliance of the people who were intellectuals in the open communities meaning lake again plural you know georgia you know mississippi where my mom's from texas where you know my father's um people are from etc etc because the academy is now an imposition upon intellectualism that is tied to freedom that means it its function is not to march or articulate even a clear agenda or strategy for curtailing an imperial racist project also known as u.s democracy there's been so much money flooded into the academy in terms of how the administrative strata which you know how many provosts do you need how many you know etc etc um have turned into a state or private corporation and for those of us who've come in like decades ago and i will include myself in it we've been able to secure certain types of monetary packages right with health benefits but the academy is also even without a union they're union busting right it's about extraction from the students their ideas their energy their tuition and extraction from faculty even the ones who are you know conservative and not really committed to social justice so i think if i were going to kind of wrap this up and what i'm trying to say don't look to academics for answers i would i wouldn't even you know read their books you know you have leisure time you can afford them hopefully libraries have some but we're not trained even if that were their case like in the 1960s you know or something when there was so-called thing as race people and that was more legible we're not trained to serve black communities we're trying to treat knowledge as a commodity and then put it on the shelf and hopefully get enough buyers so that it looks like our brand has you know some content behind it so and even i would argue and this is like this will get me in trouble whatever i would argue that even some of the writing that is about these movements right the writing for me sometimes it's not imaginative it doesn't take risk and it doesn't speak with the voice of the people who created the movements there when i think about erica garner for instance transitioning at 27 leaving a seven-year-old and a four-month-old behind and i didn't even i wasn't even aware i was living you know in in harlem and stuff so i thought you know when i can i'll you know make a donation or go to a march or something like that but i didn't understand her vulnerability to you know not having sufficient support or better doctors or better care or more alliances and i would say the academics could have been much more helpful i'm not saying we could have stopped the death but we could have been much more helpful in these movements but what we tend to do is to write about them package them that content in between two book covers and have um book tours and i'm not saying that's bad that is a form of knowledge but that is that is the reality and it's a very kind of stark one when you think about it because i think one of the better books if we just take let's just take the eric gardner case was not an academic i think matt tybee one wrote one of the better books on the on the eric gardner situation really bringing broken windows policing to light for a lot of people but all that being said i mean sadly too we live in a world where a lot of this stuff is just easily digestible and how many people are actually even reading the books okay so then what's our function now i mean as academics i mean how do you see academic you can ask me i mean i work there but really you're the quote consumers i'm supposed to be a producer but i don't own the company right so i'm really a worker did you ever did you ever read barbara aaron reich's work in the in the 80s and late 80s and 90s about the professional managerial class or catholic whose newer work on it yes virtual quarters i think i think the the academy is definitely a part of the pmc and produce more people that go into the professional managerial class yeah but i wonder to what extent i understand like we're a factory we're churning out people with degrees they then become managers right i'm wondering to what extent we would own up that there's something much more nefarious about that this universities are not created to be counter-hegemonic institutions right i mean the purpose of the university is to reify a ruling class that maintains the status quo of a functioning capitalist empire which is the united states or the all western imperialism west the west overall you know no one is going no universities are not designed to build revolutionaries they're designed to create people to solve problems so that you don't have a revolution but okay so but when you get to this moment after the movements right where people want black studies women's studies lgbtq studies chicano studies ethnicity what it all looks like that this is or at least the right wing says it is an assault on the academy like corruption of its quote purity which is just its white supremacy right well why yeah but why do we believe or do we believe that because now we're writing about movements or writing about feminism or writing about you know fill in whatever the blink is you know all the good fights why do believe why do we believe that this knowledge from academic sites is trustworthy it's a very very very good provocation you put forth and i have a have a better provocation than i've asked before is that there was a time in which radical politics within black spaces demanded things like black studies or africana studies or african american history departments can we ev evaluate the efficacy of that demand if the quality of material life of black people is degrading as the existence of these institutions proliferate is it not fair to say that perhaps the utility of these institutions is counter indicative to the quality of life of black people over time and they're serving a purpose other than actually helping solve the problems of black people so they're like a trojan horse i i i think there's logic to that argument i mean commodifying education to me is also extremely frustrating like the fact that i just can't learn something to learn it it's kind of a waste of time like i have to spend my money learning something to be some sort of cog in the in the machine of capitalism that's kind of the reality for a lot of people and now we live in a world where we are the commodity and we're very well aware of this you know people know when they go google search something on their phone they know that they're going to get hit with a whole bunch of ads right either they ignore them or they succumb to them seems to mind that they are the commodity they you can turn that commodity now uh your yourself you know you can make some money off of it we have the rise of hustle culture and what you guys talking about the ineffectual nature of the academy kind of one and the same can we pose an alternative to it can we build an alternative to it can we create like we're doing covet right when they were having those pods i mean the you know wealthy people were having pods that were like thousands of dollars to buy in right it's like a poker game but other people like in brooklyn they were just you know i know you or nephew you know got your nieces whatever it's just you start understanding that education cannot belong to the state and it cannot belong to the corporation and that you know as i said before for me there's only two types of universities at least the upper tiers right they're the state universities like ut austin or you know um university california berkeley whatever and then they're the privates the ivy's like harvard yale princeton stanford et cetera and then the you know the private colleges whatever which you know which is also where i teach so how could we create an alternative zone of intellectualism and critical thinking knowing that the academy as you both rightly pointed out was never designed for that it was designed for elites and even as we said in you know the talented 10th spellman is named after a rockefeller laura spellman in more houses named after henry morehouse who is a white missionary philanthropist i mean even the creation of these schools were to create a managerial elite that's why it's only a tenth it's one tenth of y'all and du bois signed on to it in 1903 because he popularized the concept in the souls of black folks but then by the time this state was hunting him with mccarthyism and other stuff he said he said you can't trust this sector just as kathleen cleaver said in 1990s malcolm said 1960s this sector is engineered for betrayal but it still has credibility because it has all the shiny diplomas and degrees so how do we change the very meaning of education and wrestle it back from state incorporation first and foremost do we have to start thinking collectively and not so individually well i mean i think i want to go to a basic question is that a step i think is even more uh basic than that is that we have to come to the reality that most people in america black or otherwise really don't have counter-hegemonic thinking in other words most people don't organically see the system as a problem they see the fact that they can't participate in the system as the problem but they don't see the system as the problem well because we live in a country and and i want to get you and pascal i want to get you and dr james take on this would you say that we live in a country that is literally based off hero narratives that one good person can get into this system which isn't so much corrupt as it just has bad actors we see the judicial system that way all the time right that it's not a flawed system as much as it is there's just bad people inside there's bad judges there's bad prosecutors but the system itself was built on honor so i mean i think breaking through that line of thinking is is the really really hard part because it's kind of baked into the idea of american exceptionalism absolutely particularly jason you said something very very important when it comes to the law you know i studied law i practice law that's where my my academic training is in is that the the one of the most effective ways the charade of american exceptionalism is perpetuated is in the reverence of american law in the american legal system and when you challenge the efficacy of the american legal system what you will get from people trained in it is that there's no other system better in the world where else in the world do you have the protection of the rights that you have in the united states and my response to that is that america creates the illusion of those rights because america has the luxury of extraction to create the comfort that denies the capacity of other people in the world to have that justice because it siphons off so much of the global resources to create this level of deluded comfort amongst its citizens and it's no actual argument to say just because you're eating spam instead of dog food that you have the best meal in town so the comparative mediocrity of justice in the western world doesn't make america great it just means america is the best at masking its mediocrity because everyone else is so bad yeah i want to add to that it's the mediocrity is is just driven by predatory behavior it's like how many people can you kill i can't nobody can keep count it's too much right i mean even it's both on the international and the national and you're right you get this weird patriotism that's tied to consumerism is if you get to shop it must be a working democracy right and what it's doing is you're saying extracting from other countries other regions other continents right i mean the ukraine thing is is horrific but that's not the first war we've ever seen and when i think of nato i'm like oh yeah i teach a male car cabral you know return to the source and who assassinated him well portugal and the cia and nato because portugal was in nato so portugal is the first country to get into african enslavement in the 1400s and it's the last one that wants to get out in the 1970s and so i wonder if we would remember our losses if that would stop this fetish for this democracy which is really incredibly violent but as long as that violence doesn't personally touch us we seem like we can be compatible with it and you see that with the right-wing push against things like critical race theory right the idea that this law theory is being taught in public schools and it's being deduced to well slavery is not going to get taught anymore we're not really going to say bad things about about white people and damn it we're not even going to talk about the civil war reconstruction anymore that's all quote unquote critical race theory um yeah i wonder sorry pesco no i mean i i mean listen the forces of reaction my i you know i've come to a position largely as a product of not only doing the show but really just kind of reading a lot of american political history is that um the notion that america is a center-left country is a canard it's a charade america is a reactionary right-wing country and it always has been the problem and this i see this as a significant problem of all factions of america left right so and so forth people take the anomaly of the period between 1944 and 1971 i.e the new deal the bretton woods period the post world war ii the the massive expansion of american largesse the quality of middle eyes for white men because it was really white men who had the jobs the head leave it to beaver you know you know ozzy inherited narrative of the american family the standards of what normative patriarchy is the standards of what normal family is all of these things were an exception to the normal way american capitalism functioned since it's in its beginning largely to save capitalism from radicals who wanted something more revolutionary which brought forth the new deal but because that period of time night particularly 1944 to say 1971 is perpetuated through media as the example of america is great let's make america great again no one's talking about you know the lower east side in 1913 when they're saying let's make america great again what are they saying let's make america great again they talk about 1954 oz or 1952 ozzie and harriet yeah yeah but you know what donna reed comes to mind too right um but there we were always the problem we were always that like you know america's great and then it's like something's going on with black people right because you were talking about the 50s and what comes to mind pascal when you were speaking was what mimi uh till did with the child corpse like oh open casket funeral for me is a declaration of war against a state it's in and then the photos go out everywhere around the globe and so i think in some ways in relationship to us and i'm not sure i i just feel like we can't catch the hell the brunt it's not just from the cops i mean from everything right this is an anti-black um nation and zone but it seems to me that they're always looking for black people to prop up to prove that this is not as lethal as violent i mean 1963 you like you put a bomb in the women's bathroom of the church to blow up you know spike lee did the documentary for little girls right right after martin king does the i have a drew you know dream and then it's like and the clan is like it's going to be a nightmare right but we i still believe in us as black people as being the wild card and i think that's how the state sees us as well which is why you want a black president a new another black supreme court you want a black cop you want a black mare you want to you just want that here's one of y'all to police y'all moment and to show that we're not white supremacists to the core well i i i really want to respond to that it's a very you know we jason and i have an ongoing debate and we we i'm want to be very very honest with you we have a problem with the trope that exists on the left that black people are the vanguard of the revolution i'll tell you why because it denies the fact that number one what makes black people revolutionary is not the melon in the skin it's the material condition under which black people are forced to live in a capitalist society in america and in the world that renders them to surplus everywhere stemming from channel and number two when you position black people as the vanguard of revolution it denies the fact that large segments of institutional mechanisms in black societies plural are premised on reactionary politics ideology and worldviews that are sexist misogynistic uh are anti-poor pro-capitalist abusive whether they be schools universities churches membership societies you name them and that can black people be revolutionary absolutely do black people have revolutionary capacity absolutely but it's not because of the melanin in their skin it's because they are ground to dust disproportionately in capitalism because capitalism requires an n word and capitalism requires an n word so that unfortunately white poor people don't believe that they can be one i you know i don't disagree with that but i want to i want to trouble it or stir it in the pot right there's nothing inherently you're right about our color per se except for how people respond to it right meaning police forces vigilantes um white supremacists so on and so forth and i don't believe that all black people would mobilize in a freedom movement because that's not how it works it never quite worked that way it's not working that way now and it won't work that way in the future and i you're right i mean i appreciate your saying like don't project some romanticism like we have a unique role and we were anointed for whatever but i do believe that there's something about what we've accumulated in our consciousness in our memory that we remember like whatever your stories your grandparents told you about mississippi whatever like we understand lineage and inheritance and we also understand that the future could just shift and go either way not for like people who are colin powell right i mean he can work for reagan and all those people and you know still be happy about you know being an admiral sorry not ever a general and then um ending up you know secretary of state or at the u.n et cetera however his chur career trajectory goes after coming out of the bronx but there's still other people right who are political prisoners today other people who are young people who are just organizing walking away from the degree and from the academy in the corporation and disproportionately i feel the material conditions but also the the psychological and the emotional conditions under which we live like you know eight minutes to choke somebody out while he's crying for his mother that has an impact and that forms a consciousness it does but let's be honest about that okay that ain't affecting everybody the same way and this is where i take a little bit i don't want to say offense but it hits me a little in a personal place because i grew up in are you familiar with the bay area i lived in oakland for a short period i was born in oakland and i grew up in richmond california okay so you're probably familiar mildly even with those areas and um i've lived a bit of an economically precarious life and i don't have felonies but i've spent a long time driving without a license because i couldn't afford like car insurance and my license i got suspended or i remember there was a time when i couldn't pay a ticket and i was driving without a license all told i think i drove seven years without a license if i get pulled over by the cops i'm gonna get left with i might even get my butt kicked because i don't live in a good area i'm driving a crappy car and i'm driving it without a license they might want to tune me up just because they can you know the prisons are filled with people that committed serious felonies didn't get tuned up on the way in cops know who to mess with and who not to mess with and i think what happens is and this is where i get kind of a little upset is there becomes this they're getting all of us thing and it's like not everybody is going to face police violence the same way this i want this is a statistical fact uh of professor james and i want to offer what jason's is saying at the exact time the rate of mass incarceration increases post-civil rights which starts in the 60s by the way before the end of the movement the mass incarceration increases for black males and eventually females without a high school diploma starts to increase precipitously the amount of carcerality or imprisonment of black males and eventually females with any level of college education drops like a rock so what happens is that the mass incarceration is not exclusively an issue of blackness it's an issue of black race and class because as james foreman eloquently demonstrates in his books locking up our own the likelihood of a college-educated black male having an interface adversely with a police officer compared to a black male with no high school diploma it's like a ten to one even in terms of the wealth of the zip code you live in over a hundred thousand thousand hundred thousand dollar of per capita income compared to those under 30. the chances of even having a police interaction skewed so one of the problems with the way in which we talk about we one of the things that i don't even like is even talking about we when we talk about black people i don't want to say we i won't say they are poor black people and working class people who are being ground to dust and their class enemies okay this is really helpful because now i understand better or will try to articulate better i ended up i'm not trying i'm not trying to be antagonistic if if i'm coming off that way no no please i have a 13 year old i know what antagonism looks like but i don't i don't want to come off that way i just kind of no this is really helpful because um you're both right and i've got to figure out like how my language can be more clear because look when you're talking i'm thinking oh yeah when henry lewis gates was arrested you know the inside of it he's on a beer summit on the white house lawn with obama and joe biden in the white cup and he traces the white cops genealogy he's like oh we might be relative i'm like this makes absolutely no sense to me like you saw what happens to everybody else and it's like oh yeah that was harvard because it's kind of like derek bell says like when he gets stopped when he's driving he's got a white judge's name you know he's driving through the south and derek bill is the architect of critical race theory but the radical form of critical race theory and he just talks about calling out the name of the white judge so the white cop knows that he belongs to a white person there are segments yes of in your right black communities in the plural who don't care about the working class who don't care about the poor who don't care about environmental devastation or anything else um that's not us but then i'm trying to figure out what is the language or should there not be us should it just be radical blocks and then what is what i don't we we had a show the other day uh dr james on our this is revolution channel that sadly youtube did pull down uh where we spoke with the man that was on the cutting edge of house music if you're familiar with house music that really comes out during the mid 80s and 90s and in our discussion we're trying to you know we're going back in the roots of house music which is of course disco and he had made an interesting point about culturally disco was supposed to be um the antithesis of funk in a way oh that makes sense if funk is their music right uh-huh it's it's ghetto it's not refined when you think of a band called like sheik and niall rogers um they are the progy funk they are the refined funk people right this is for an elevated class of individual here and you can see it in the in the way the shows looked how how different they were so i i think it's it is just kind of baked in we keep talking about like how and that's why i'm bringing up these kind of contradictions because we have to understand how baked in to even popular culture there is an other rising there's good black people and then there's always the bad and there's this disassociation um in that documentary on deutsche world about the burgeoning black bourgeoisie it starts off with i believe he's the richest black man in america right pascal not first not ve but one of one of them sorry one of the richest black men in america the real estate magnet and he's got aston martin's and multi-million dollar condos and he says i don't live like those rappers yeah because he's it would have been like a virgin like i guess among whites or europeans their version of old money aristocracy um in comparison to crass new money which is boorish and rough and has no culture so yeah i mean their money becomes their culture their students go to private elite schools um they don't socialize with the riffraff which you know probably people on this call so what is their radical project in the face of that and i guess that's what i'm saying about in terms of the betrayal because when i talk to black doctoral students and you know some of them they don't come out of means they come out of the bras like you know they grew up with cardi b or something right they're in the underground their families were into under underground economies and they keep saying that when i talk about a captive material instead of about black feminism because i'm trying to think of caretaking as a non-gendered function right um they they want to know if i'm willing to engage in the zones of betrayal and then they one of them actually say we should off the captive maternals who betray us and i'm like no because that could include me i have contradictions too so how do you see the politics right now that you've differentiated between the posh and the polish and they can be invited to the white house or get a medal or you know whatever in our some of our luminaries like you know tony morrison presidential medal from obama some other kind of medal from um clinton right from bill clinton but how do you see us or do you see us forming political alliances that will not be subverted by the rich and powerful i think that you have to have something that we have never had in this country which is a working-class black politics so now you're saying is that like from adolf reid too are you all in line or what are we talking about i think there were some people who would say that they would call us families just maybe just a little bit maybe have you been following what the young man chris smalls has been doing with amazon oh with the um wait a minute i've been following the union i find him fascinating and i interviewed him a few years ago when when he was first kind of the story had broke about it and what i found fascinating about chris was that we had kind of similar stories as far as how we came up and even where we were working and one thing that people don't really take into consideration and we we talked about this a little bit on our show is a lot of people on the left got very dejected and kind of confused about bessemer alabama not voting to unionize and one fact that people didn't really take into consideration i felt people left and taken consideration is that job was more money than most of them people had ever made before right i spent time working in the south on oil rigs it's a non-union place the south historically is not a very unionized area and to think that you're going to get cats that a lot of them this this is unskilled labor this is the surplus labor we talk about so much when we love throwing around theory and surplus labor is getting 19 an hour in a place where 19 an hour can probably buy you not a house at least a nice double wide and i don't say that with any sort of disrespect i said as far as like people need shelter and that's affordable shelter and that's food on the table that's food on the table why would you why would you want to upset that apple cart i'm not saying it's justified to not vote for worker protections and some sort of labor power i just think that a lot of us are a little disconnected ideology ideology here [Laughter] from the idea that you know some of these people in these areas are making more money than they've ever made before and it's very risky to try to organize around that the one thing that got chris radicalized was covid and people literally dying on the shop floor right so the day marks if if the majority of black people are working class and working poor or poor right what senses that make them have a politics that's not rooted in the actual material condition of most white people when you say the material conditions of most white people you mean black people black people sorry no it makes no sense but but let's let me try to parse this out there's two you know because i'm wearing multiple hats here right like i'm like i got the academic hat on which it feels like i should take it off but then you know that would be dishonest because i get paid to go back into my cat so then there's this other thing like when was i last like a waitress or maybe you know i did those menial jobs at some point too right but those those years are way in the past you know decades in the past so from my setting now my lifestyle my employment sector i can read about the disposition or dispossession and disposability but i'm not on that shop floor right and i can see that during the first wave of covet in new york city and i've said before like i'm in my middle class apartment but on one side's multi-million dollar and the other side is nycha public housing but when the in new york city and they stopped giving the numbers when they went from losing 20 people a day dying in their apartments they went from that number to 200 a day and then they stopped telling you what the numbers were right until they could bring them down the body bags were only coming out on the right side of my apartment where nycha was and that radicalized me but i wasn't going to be in a body bag right because i was like well i'm late and this is the the middle class like we're the fulcrum on the seesaw we're just like we got one foot on either side and we're just gonna balance we don't have you know we're not multi-million like we're gonna jet out somewhere but we're also not in public housing and we're not forced to you know show up as a nanny or a babysitter or whatever just to keep food on the table so what is the role of the people who are balancing between the two zones they're never going to be millionaires but they're never going to be poor and unhoused well that's traitors you are the class you are a scholar of a middle class abroad i think cabral had the great great great formulation class suicide got it okay but but what you know what's the neutralizing factor in the idea of class suicide what hustle culture what culture hustle you're not working hard enough in other words if you're if you're a middle class and you're not a millionaire how come you're not selling bitcoin how come you're not driving uber at night to get those extra hours why aren't you doing overtime you mean you don't have your own business do you have more llc's even beyond the idea of everyone's a millionaire just the fact that you you being busy constantly busy is like a function of of kind not so much success but like every day at work you have to be working over 40 hours if you're not if you're working 40 hours you're not working hard enough right you know we're gonna we're gonna hit you up all the time and the moment that you stop and say um i need to take my kids somewhere i need nope there'll be someone else to replace you that will work twice as hard and that and that is very very prevalent in the in the pmc culture is and when i say hustle culture i think people just kind of automatically mean oh you mean like bitcoin and those guys no i mean the idea that you have to constantly be working and the moment you're not working you should feel shame right and the new york times picked this up with the supreme court nominee of a woman writer who said like oh she had to balance being a mother and how she's raising her daughter and feeling guilty and she's like how do you even make it to this level of a job offer right unless you are putting in more than eight hours a day over decades but then that is expected if you're to be worthy and then worthy of what is you know i've called this a predatory democracy so it's it's all around i mean unhealthy is an understatement right but there's corruption and self-deception that's built in so how do you disentangle your value from the state's metric i mean that's the hard part right go ahead pass calm sorry class suicide class traitorism got you got to uh i think it's a matter of pr of reorienting i mean for me you know i grew up in a kind of middle class family in queens and new york my you know my parents didn't have elite jobs but my parents also were haitian immigrants and they came from an upper middle class kind of haitian elite in haiti and they kind of had you know middle class jobs my mother was a nurse my father was a car mechanic yeah went a couple of repair shops but because of the time i grew up in new york city we had a nice kind of middle upper middle class lifestyle but at the same time the reality of the protect precarity of life does not obscure me from the fact that people can be ground to powder everyone can be ground to powder and that all of my education does not stop me from possibly literally being on the margins for reasons health reasons you know are personal reasons economic reasons and at the same time for me part of the process of realizing this is spending a lot of time with poor and working-class communities of black people who have been ground to dust you know i went to college and law school in a very i was in a black fraternity so i had black potential pmc career types throughout my teens and 20s and early 30s and then i joined the community i basically i converted to islam i became a muslim and i was dealing the same way i was dealing with those professional managerial class aspiring black men at 30 years old my social sphere were black men who had been ground to dust in prison for years who accepted islam as adults and what i found is that those men had more integrity and character than the career professional managerial type guys that had known my whole life and i started to realize that the politics of that first culture of men has a large role in determining the quality of life in that second culture of men and that was a radicalizing experience for me now i'm not saying that we should demand that of everyone to do it to to go through that but i think that there's got to be a process to indulge in that class suicide or that class traitorism to have people realize like listen this ain't working for most people well i don't think most people understand the statistics right there's there's a common statistic you hear people like richard wolff the economist talk about all the time that people are producing more now than we've ever produced before you're working more hours and making less money i think that's hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around especially people that are in the salaried world because they took that job knowing like i'm going to be probably working a lot more but i'm making six figures i am part of and i'm i'm working my way up to elite status and there's a ladder that they can see that includes those hundred hour weeks how do you get those people to see that those 100 hour weeks is a sham i i think in part they already know it i think it's the people are miserable and like they can you know shop and be entertained like how many netflix series can you watch right but if to go back to what pasquale was saying if if like the people who are captive find a spirituality an acceptance of themselves that it is not dependent upon like running around a hamster will right and working for a predatory structure then that opportunity is open to everybody it's just would be if you're willing to let go of the propaganda or the internalization of you know values right that are built on a capitalist economy if you're willing to let go of those and so what would be the incentive i mean one would be your misery two would be your compassion because you see how the world is being devastated but three i actually think it would take a certain kind of courage yes because you it's not like people just say oh here's the door have a nice day i mean they tend to track and punish i mean the point is there's not supposed to be an out and when you start like creating you know these avenues or crevices to get out of you know a kind of machinery it's not like people celebrate that i mean the people who are receiving you do the people who are looking at your back as you're departing my experience in the academy is that they're going to want to destabilize um and delegitimize you because once you turn your back on the edifice it's kind of like the emperor has no clothes and that's not a narrative that's you're supposed to be publicizing right i totally agree i'm just trying to be honest about uh i don't know maybe there aren't any contradictions and i'm just letting my head get in the way but let's go back to black women the way we're trained right is to compensate like even the leadership is a compensation package in some ways like the way i always looked at it whenever we got a promotion and stuff it was another form of domestic labor you were there to clean up somebody's mess they put you on a grant you're there to clean up they want you to build africana studies it's because they don't you know the institutions like we're looking a little racist here come you know fix and tape something together you're never actually in control even though you're giving given these positions that look like you have power but the fact is no you have like you say you have more labor and more grind well we've been talking for almost an hour and a half and we do want to close with the final question pascal are you ready to ask that final question uh i actually have there's so many questions that we had so many questions and and this conversation has been so wonderful we got away i'm pc around the office like what do i think what's going on i have a question bracelet legit judge katanji brown jackson is currently being nominated to the supreme court though judge brown jackson has surpassed the rather low bar of having some progressive elements to her judicial record there is a certain danger to the way neo-liberal identity politics was used to advance her nomination when asked by her senate questioners as to what value there was to having diversity on the bend on the bench she stated diversity lends and bolsters public confidence in our system can you problematize how that assertion further illustrates the class nature of the black political project in terms of what the system means for most black people who are on the margin yeah i would say kind of obama already promoted when he said he was a black pres you know he's a president for black people he's the president for everybody i mean for me it's it's the uh dictative absorption that you have to absorb be absorbed by the state and capital and then you have to um perform functions of maintenance for it i mean when it's r i mean this you know this happened to michelle obama too right she wrote that thesis at princeton that just was critical a bit of racism in america and then she spent the next eight years apologizing for it right being like the the mom of the nation as if this is like this is should be balkanized that's my position like you know i would say let the white supremacists have idaho but it belongs to indigenous so you can't do that so you still have to fight them but there's a way in which our desire to belong as if we thought that was an insurance policy right there's a way in which we articulate that constantly that we're safe black people that we have no autonomy and we don't even want it no matter how much the white supremacist underground starts to play around above ground i think that becomes the moment when we cut our own achilles heels and the logic is that you can't expect anything from black officials because they work for the state and the state has already indicated that it is about accumulation through force and it is not about distribution of equity or goods or material um sustenance for for the people for the mass right and so i've tried to stop being disillusioned every time a black woman assumes some level of power at a corporation within the state i mean condoleezza rice should have cured everybody of that right decades ago or even in academia or in one of these movements i mean i've like made little maybe they weren't snarky but queries about movement millionaires how do you monetize black suffering and end up like a millionaire i mean how does that even oh it's like oh that's what the state and corporations and whites have been doing for centuries so of course there's a template so the way you don't want to romanticize black unity or black community i will not romanticize black women just because they belong to the democratic party or you know they go to church or their kind or whatever you know just put the descriptors out there the only subject that has a true autonomous persona and independent thinking would be those people who understand the state must be not only critiqued but also opposed and once you take a job within it then you become the opposition to freedom movements that emanate from the base whether they're environmental right whether about labor whether about the right to be trans or the right to have an abortion there's like a lot of different issues you know that we have to deal with so i mean i really appreciate you both because like if i had a tendency to romanticize black people you definitely killed it i just have to meditate figure out where i go from here um yeah don't that whole thing about black women are gonna lead you somewhere no just the way you've negated the false concept that black people as black people are going to lead you somewhere no people who theorize who will engage in material conditions and materials struggle and who will be accountable to the people they say they represent that becomes the collective leadership that we can contribute to awesome well thank you very much dr james for taking the time to talk with us today um we really appreciate uh you working with us through all these technical hurdles uh thank you guys very much for checking us out on the real news if you like what you hear please go to youtube.com this is revolution podcast and you can see more interviews conversations like this that pascal and i have with the rest of the tir crew yes there's even more of us and on that note thank you real news thank you dr james we are out [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: The Real News Network

Views: 75,111

Keywords: Neoliberalism, New Deal, Welfare Queen, Black Politics, Racism, Reagan, Clinton, Black Girl Magic, Bourgeoisie, Class War, This Is Revolution, Joy James, real news, the real news, real news network, realnews, the real news network, therealnews, trnn

Id: yHyHZPOrJgo

Length: 83min 28sec (5008 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022