New Forum Title of Category

Contributors:

Aaron Stauffer; Francisco Garcia Jr.; Joerg Rieger

This inuagural forum for Interventions features reflections by Wendland-Cook staff on their recent interviews with Dr. Angela Coswer, Dr. Vincent Lloyd, and Rev. Dr. Altagracia Pérez-Bullard. Be sure to check out those interviews here.

By Aaron Stauffer

Naming our current economic and racial order in terms of “racial capitalism” is to align our words with our reality. Social movements seem to have outrun our dominant moral, political, economic, and even religious imaginations that purport to inspire visions of freedom. To speak of “racial capitalism” here is to honor part of the original insight of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. I say “part” because his argument includes much more than what this forums addresses. To assert racial capitalism as a hermeneutic is to say that race and class are crucial tools in building liberation movements. Only by thinking with an intersectional lens do we begin honor the multidimensional, overlapping, and interlocking nature of the constructed yet very real and embodied realities of race and class.

To think in terms of racial capitalism is also to think about the role of social movements and their deployment of art, poetry, song, dance, and the work of organizing itself as crucial activating forces that can “conjure” a new world. This is because neoliberal capitalism is much more than an economic system: its survival depends upon racial and cultural formations that starve our imaginations. The best and most powerful social movements in this country’s history know the power that culture and history of working people play in inspiring people-led movements for liberation.

Vincent Lloyd has written some about this—and that’s why I wanted to interview him for this series. He has dropped a sentence or two in recent articles, but the idea never takes center stage, so far as I can tell. He does this in a recent piece, Human Dignity is Black Dignity:

As we struggle, therefore, we conjure (in song, poetry, and images, not prose) a world wholly other than the present, where the humanity of each is recognized as God recognizes our humanity today.