The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism

Rebecca talks to Jeremie Greer of Liberation in a Generation, Maurice BP Weeks of ACRE, and Tara Raghuveer of KC Tenants and People’s Action about the latest issue of The Forge, “The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism.” Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

**Editor’s note: Off-Kilter produced this episode in collaboration with The Forge organizing journal, as part of a new monthly series featuring each new issue as it comes out.

“Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous people collectively have had a proverbial boot on our neck since the “founding” of this country. Recent images of police murder and violence are graphic depictions of racist systems and institutions. This is to say nothing of the disproportionate number of coronavirus cases and deaths within communities of color. But deep inequalities were there long before the pandemic or the economic destruction left in its wake. All of our nation’s racial disparities have economic underpinnings. The confluence of our health crisis, our impending depression, and our upcoming election means that we cannot look away from the system of racial capitalism that brought us to this moment. As Arundhati Roy suggests, this pandemic is a portal moment, and we must ask ourselves: What are we taking into this next phase? Our answer: a Liberation Economy.

So write Jeremie Greer and Solana Rice in the opening article of The Forge’s recent issue on The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism, which was guest edited by Liberation in a Generation, a national movement support organization building the power of people of color to totally transform the economy — who controls it, how it works, and for whom.

As part of what Off-Kilter is excited will be a monthly collaboration with The Forge, Rebecca sat down virtually with Jeremie Greer, one of the guest editors of “The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism”; and Maurice BP Weeks of ACRE and Tara Raghuveer of KC Tenants and People’s Action, two of the issue’s contributors.

This week’s guests:

• Jeremie Greer, co-founder, Liberation in a Generation
• Tara Raghuveer, director, KC Tenants and director of the Homes Guarantee campaign at People’s Action
• Maurice BP Weeks, co-director, ACRE

Read: The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism

TRANSCRIPT:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

“Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous people collectively have had a proverbial boot on our necks since the “founding” of this country. Recent images of police murder and violence are graphic depictions of racist systems and institutions. This is to say nothing of the disproportionate number of coronavirus cases and deaths within communities of color. But deep inequalities were there long before the pandemic or the economic destruction left in its wake. All of our nation’s racial disparities have economic underpinnings. The confluence of our health crisis, our impending depression, and our upcoming election means that we cannot look away from this system of racial capitalism that brought us to this moment. As Arundhati Roy suggests, this pandemic is a portal moment, and we must ask ourselves: what are we taking into this next phase? Our answer: a liberation economy.”

So write Jeremie Greer and Solana Rice in the opening article of The Forge’s recent issue on The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism, which was guest edited by Liberation in a Generation, a national movement support organization building the power of people of color to totally transform the economy, who controls it, how it works, and for whom.

As part of what we’re excited will be a monthly collaboration between Off-Kilter and The Forge organizing journal, I’m thrilled to get to sit down virtually with Jeremie Greer, one of the guest editors of this issue of The Forge on The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism, Tara Raghuveer, and Maurice BP-Weeks, two of the issue’s contributors as well. Thanks to you all for joining the show and for taking the time.

JEREMIE GREER: Thanks.

MAURICE BP-WEEKS: Yeah, it’s great to be here.

TARA RAGHUVEER: Thanks.

VALLAS: I would love to start off by reading just another quick passage from your opening essay, Jeremie, that I was just quoting from in my opening. You write, “Yes, white supremacy is alive and well, and it will not end unless basic truths about our economy are recognized: that racism is profitable, that racism creates wealth for the elite, and that racism is to blame for the difficult economic conditions of people of color. The framework of racial capitalism captures this undeniable truth by exposing the ways that the economic systems of the United States have been racialized by design since their inception.” Your essay then goes on to reference what you term an “oppression economy.” I would love just to sort of do some table settings for this conversation about this issue all focused on racial capitalism. Talk about this framework of racial capitalism and why Liberation in a Generation teamed up with The Forge to do this issue.

GREER: Yeah. Thanks, Rebecca, for that great introduction. And I love Off-Kilter. I really love what you’ve been doing the last couple weeks since the uprisings after the murder of George Floyd. And this conversation is so germane to what we’re seeing as people of color today. And I want to acknowledge first before we get too deep, is that this theory around racial capitalism, this concept around racial capitalism, this framing really comes from Cedric Robinson, who was a professor at the University of California Berkeley. And it’s been carried even today by another professor, Robin Kelley from UCLA. And when I think about racial capitalism, it can sound like a misnomer to some people because it sounds like there’s another version of capitalism operating. But really, when I think about it, what we really should be thinking is capitalism is racial, and it is fundamentally at those truths that you identified from our piece that racism’s profitable, that it built the wealth of the elite, and it is the reason that people of color are struggling economically. And I stress the word it is the reason. It is not a lot of the reasons you hear: people don’t work hard enough, people aren’t morally responsible, people aren’t ethical. Like all of these reasons that have been given, are not it, but it is really profitability and the oppression of people of color that is driving that. And it has happened by design.

So, our current form of capitalism really came together in the founding of this country at the same time, a racial caste system was being developed. It was built on the removal and genocide of Indigenous people from their land. It was built upon a labor market that used the free labor of African slaves held in bondage to build the economy to be one of the largest the world has ever seen. It continues to exploit immigrant labor today, and it used systems of, our financial system to segregate people spatially so that they could extract wealth from people of color and really drive that wealth towards white elite individuals. And you mentioned it. It is what we at Liberation in a Generation would call an oppression economy. This is the economy that we live in today that really has four pillars: that it criminalizes people of color; that it has a dual financial system, which extracts wealth from people of color and then drives it to wealthy elite individuals; that it politically disenfranchises people of color, so that we don’t have a say in the democracy that we’re a part of; and it rewards runaway corporate power that further continues the oppression of people of color.

And then this addition of The Forge, we really wanted to explore the connections between this history of racial capitalism and a lot of the issues that people of color are struggling with on a day-to-day basis in their communities. And we wanted to connect that with the people who are organizing to make change in those communities, so that the partnership between us and CPD (the Center for Popular Democracy) and The Forge to bring this to life was really a match made in heaven. In the edition, we explore how capital moves, and Maurice is going to talk a lot about that. He talked about it in the piece. We talked about housing and explored housing and the way housing segregation has really driven racial capitalism and, of course, the labor market. But we even delved into some areas that people often don’t connect to capitalism, things like the prison industrial complex, immigration, environmental justice, marijuana legalization, sex work, and one of my favorites — no offense to Tara and Maurice — but this really, we’re seeing today this burgeoning abolitionist movement that were seeing. We talked with the Dream Defenders of Florida, who are really kind of on the front lines of exploring what police abolition and prison abolition really looks like. So, I really am excited about this edition and really implore your listeners to go ForgeOrganizing.org and check out the content.

VALLAS: And I love that as sort of the verbal table of contents in so many ways, because it gives, I think, our listeners a sense of how far-ranging the topics are, but also really the through line here. I find the oppression economy concept and framework to be so incredibly useful. And I want to particularly note that, because — this is a sort of a common refrain on this show — but I get so incredibly frustrated, and I know our friends at the Groundwork Collaborative do as well. I’ve got the Michael Linden in my head, as probably everyone should, that the stock market is not the economy. And yet that continues to be the narrative in so much of the mainstream media measuring our economy and the health and strength of our economy by the stock market. Which as our friend Michael Linden often describes the stock market as a mood ring for rich people. I think that’s a better way and an apt way to understand it. Or gross domestic product, right? As though these are the measures of an economy rather than how our people are doing. And I so appreciate, I think, that as sort of an added lens that you bring in kind of flipping the frame on its head for people to understand that an economy where about half of families are currently struggling to afford the basics like housing and food and healthcare could never be described as strong and must only be described as an oppression economy if we’re using anything that resembles common sense, rather than just the perspectives that the very top might bring, if they look at who is benefiting.

Maurice, I would really love to go to you next, because you contributed multiple pieces actually to this issue, one with Robert Reich. And in it, and Jeremie was just actually describing kind of parts of one of those pieces, so that’s really why I’d love to go to you next to describe it. You describe racialized financial systems that have given us, as you put it, “socialism for the rich and rugged capitalism for the poor.” Talk a little bit about those dual financial systems that Jeremie was referencing and that you explore in that piece with Robert Reich.

BP-WEEKS: Yeah, I mean, maybe the most helpful way to do that is connecting it to a topic of another piece that I submitted, which is about Amazon. So, if you look at the economy right now, folks are horribly struggling: 35 million people out of work, pending housing crisis, etc. If you look towards Amazon, you wouldn’t know that any of that was happening. So, their CEO has made somewhere between $35 and 40 billion since the pandemic started. They themselves posted about $80 billion of profit in the first quarter. So, we really see that — and I love that Michael Linden quote that — there are two different systems that are happening concurrently that feed off of one another: 0ne for the folks who are the wealthiest and usually whitest and usually most male, who are at the top, who are extracting as much money as possible from folks who are at the bottom, and the folks who are one paycheck away from really their lives being turned upside down. And even a major event like a pandemic or the beginnings of what appears to be a Great Depression won’t change that system for the rich. Companies like Amazon will continue to get more money.

And I like to talk about this not as a system that is stagnant and has to be this way. There is, I believe really deeply in organizing and campaigning. And if we’re ever going to change out of this system that is just so irreparably horrible for folks who are on the bottom, the first step of that is really getting folks together to challenge power directly. And, yeah, I’m just grateful that that’s one of the things that this issue of The Forge really looked at, of folks who are challenging the very nature of racial capitalism to try and set up a system that works better for really all peoples, but thinking specifically of those who it’s really been built on the backs of: so, black folks and immigrants and Native peoples.

VALLAS: And I want to bring you in next, Tara. You wrote a piece for this issue about housing. Housing is an issue that features prominently throughout this issue on The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism, and it effectively looks at the history of housing policy, which is a racist history. And you also look at the fight for housing as a right and how we move in that direction. Share some of that history and how that racist history of housing policy shows up today and is very much with us still today. I’d also love to talk about how we get to housing as a right, but I feel like there’s enough of the history that needs to be shared for anyone who isn’t already familiar with it, that that’s just a really, really necessary place to start.

RAGHUVEER: Absolutely. I think in housing, we have one of the clearest windows into the system of racial capitalism. And I would actually expand the category to be housing and land, because I think so much of the story of racial capitalism and its origins and its expression in the United States is actually a story about both things: housing and land. And of course, that story starts with the theft of native land from people who had been living on the land for centuries and had a totally different relationship to the land that, of course, was not based on what we now know as ownership. And that history continues as white property owners wrote laws that protected them and their interests. And back when they wrote the original property rights that would be the basis for property law as we know it now in the United States, they were writing based on the conception of property that included both land and buildings and people, right? So, that’s the basis of what we now know as property in the United States.

And fast forward multiple centuries. In 2020, it’s all about power and who has it and who does not. We take for granted this idea, within a system of racial capitalism in the United States, that housing is a commodity. It is, and it always has been. And it can be no other way. And within that system we that we exist within in 2020, tenants’ homes are someone else’s assets, right? A tenant’s life is merely a line item in their landlord’s balance sheets. And again, housing is a commodity. And I think in the last couple of months, we’ve seen the worst of what that creates, where housing is a commodity controlled by some. The basic needs of many are controlled by a small handful of the owning class, right? And during the pandemic, actually, housing became this prescription for public health, right? Everyone was told to stay at home, to shelter in place. And what we saw was the ultimate exploitation by the owning class of the idea that they control that commodity. The commodity became more precious. And we saw the owning class exploit even further their control of that commodity.

And I think the last thing that I want to say on this is connected to Maurice’s point. I think we, sometimes when we have these kind of ways of understanding systems, we think of them as static. But actually, Mo and I are both organizers and campaigners. And unfortunately, the power of racial capitalism and the power of the oppression economy is that ultimately, it limits our imagination about what’s possible. And we take for granted that housing is a commodity today, so it must always be a commodity into the future. It limits our ability to imagine that liberation economy. And that’s kind of the intervention that we hope to stage with organizing, and specifically tenant organizing, in my case.

I guess the final thought that I would add in is, Jeremie referenced the prison and police abolition movement that is, of course, long in the making and having sort of a public reckoning right now around the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and many, many others. And there’s a connection that we need to draw out between policing and property that has everything to do with racial capitalism. That is to say that police and the nature of policing in the United States has always existed to protect private property, first and foremost, at the expense often of human lives. So, it’s not as though these issues are actually separate under a system of racial capitalism. They’re connected, and they’re connected to serve the interests of the profiteers.

VALLAS: And Maurice, I would love to bring you back in because it also, just connecting the conversation to the current moment and to the events of several recent weeks, a big part of the piece that you contributed, one of the pieces that you contributed to this issue, as you noted, is really kind of a case study of Amazon. And you look at many of the recent events, vis a vis Amazon and the choices it made in the wake of the pandemic and how it’s treated its workers. I’d love to delve a little bit more deeply into the Amazon case study because it does represent so much of sort of a microcosm of the larger issues that we’re talking about here.

BP-WEEKS: Sure. Yeah. I mean, so, after the uprisings began, we saw this, it was kind of like an arms race of corporations trying to prove that they were the most woke. So, Amazon, like a bunch of other corporations, released a statement that was a black background with white text saying how they stood with black people in this moment and that they’re here for everyone or whatever. You know, when you peel back the curtain on how Amazon actually both makes its money and treats its employees and even some of its core business practices, then the statement appears ridiculous on its face. So, not only that their CEO is the richest man in the world and their company is one of the wealthiest and they don’t pay their workers properly.

Especially in this moment, we, as part of the Athena coalition, which is this broad-based coalition to take on Amazon, we’ve heard stories from workers who were fired after leading walkouts or even just verbally protesting the lack of PPE or proper distancing measures in warehouses. We’ve heard of Somali workers in Minneapolis not being given proper time for religious prayers. We know that they sell Nazi or white supremacist merchandise on their website. Even though it’s explicitly against their policy to not do so, they haven’t set up any systems to stop it from happening. And we know that they collaborate with most law enforcement agencies in the country, including Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. So, through their connection with the Ring app, which is their doorbell application, which also serves as a surveillance tool for law enforcement, they’re able to help police departments track down lots of folks. And there are just countless stories of that leading to mistaken identity, horrible traumatic interactions with individual black people, etc. And then providing the technical underpinning for ICE this moment or really any moment, is just, it’s just totally indefensible.

And that leaves out even a huge part of how they move throughout the rest of the economy. So, folks will remember when they were looking for a place to build their second headquarters, part of how they did that was going from city to city, trying to figure out who will give them the most in tax breaks and loopholes and handouts. And they, of course, very well knew that their existence in the new place and bringing 50,000 of their employees would displace whatever poor population in almost all of the places they were looking, black population, within the city. Yet they were still trying to get more and more and more for their employees and for their company. So, I say in the title of the article, if you’re looking for a symbol of racial capitalism, this is really it: both all of the horrible things that I just outlined, but also the fact that for them, racial justice is just marketing, something that they handle in their marketing department. So, it’s totally fine to just release that statement with the black background on white lettering without changing any of their business practices at all. So, I really just think of it as one of the most egregious examples.

VALLAS: Well, and bringing you back in, Jeremie, another issue, as you actually mentioned as you were describing some of the pieces in this issue, but another sort of sub-issue within this racial capitalism conversation that this issue lifts up is the urgent need for a strong labor movement. Talk a little bit about how that fits in with this push for a liberation economy. And would love to actually start injecting that framework into our conversation. I’d love for you to kind of explain the framework because it is so core to the work of Liberation in a Generation and also kind of connects back to what we were talking about before in terms of how we define the economy in the first place, right? Is it the stock market and GDP, or is it how everyday families are doing? But I see that as very linked to the fate and the future of unions and of organizing, which is really a big part of what The Forge and this organizing journal is all about.

GREER: Yeah. No, thank you. It’s such a critical issue because the way that, so again, to invoke Michael Linden, the Groundwork Collaborative focuses a lot on us, like what are the stories we tell about the economy? And one of the stories that we tell is that entrepreneurs are going to move the economy, investments in the stock market. But the vast majority of people of color make money through their wages. They make the money that they have to support their families, to support the people they love through going to work every day. And our economy is built upon a system that exploits labor to the lowest denominator, to the cheapest level that it can in order to bring profits to the top. And how this connects to the liberation economy is, and it connects to a guest you had on last week, Darrick Hamilton from Ohio State, and I think soon to be at The New School, where he talked about a set of basic economic rights. And it connects to the framework that we talk about in the liberation economy, because that’s essentially what it is. What are the basic economic rights you have as a human being walking this earth to expect from your government and society to provide?

And for the way that we define it is, it’s basically a right to have your basic needs met. That poverty is something that we no longer see or experience in this country. That you have safety and security. That you have the right to a stable home to live in. You have the right to healthcare, and not just healthcare that you can have when you’re sick, but healthcare that’ll keep you well. That you have the right to be valued and be compensated for that value, which really gets to this labor conversation. But I think one point that we often lose track of is that you have a right to belong. You have a right to feel like you belong as part of the society, and not just as a person of color, but as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer person. You have a right as a person with a disability. You have a right as an immigrant, whether you’re documented or not. You have a right as someone that’s leaving the prison system and reentering society. And even you have a right as a person in prison to have basic economic rights. And labor is so critical and key to that.

We talked to Daniel Bustillo from SEIU and Rebecca Dixon from the National Employment Law Project. And what they talked about really, it comes down to the right to organize and the right for workers to have the power to be able to collectively bargain their wages, to determine the working conditions of which they work under, the type of work/life balance that they want to have, the ability to integrate the needs of their families into the things that they do at work, and that these are just basic, fundamental rights that have been withheld from people of color. Again, because the role of racial capitalism is to drive the cost of labor down as far as you can, which means the stripping away of a lot of those things. And that the racialization of that labor market makes it so disproportionately black, Latinx, immigrants are the people that are toiling in these jobs that are not providing that type of basic kind of need that people have.

VALLAS: And Tara, I can’t hear a discussion about low wages without then kind of reflexively thinking about how interlinked that is with the unaffordability of housing. In this country, I think often we have sort of one-sided conversation where people think a lot about how much housing costs, how high rents are skyrocketing, especially in urban areas. That is definitely part of the equation. But not often enough is the link made that a big part of why people can’t afford housing is also because wages are incredibly low. That’s part of why I’m grateful every single year for the National Low-Income Housing Coalition putting out a report that actually does sort of a housing/wage analysis and looks at, based on where the minimum wage is in various states — they do a 50-state analysis — whether someone would be able to afford to rent a modest two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. And year after year, they find that in no state in the country can you afford to rent a friggin’ apartment if you’re making minimum wage! And that is just such a, I think, missing part of this conversation. But it also then takes us kind of back to, okay, well, if that’s the market failure we’re seeing and we’re wanting to push to a conversation about housing as a right, I would love to hear you talk about how you think we get there, how we use this current moment to get there, and is there a role for a homes guarantee or some other kind of policy that would actually enshrine that right as really, in so many ways, functionally the opposite of the inadequate, means tested to death, underfunded housing assistance programs that we currently have and that serve just a fraction of people who are struggling to afford a safe place to live?

RAGHUVEER: Well, I’m glad you said the piece about market failure, because I think that’s the first place we need to start when we begin interrogating a path forward. We need to acknowledge that the market has failed. And, of course, the profiteers will continue telling us that this is working just fine the way we have it. But the numbers tell us a different story. And as you said, there is no state, there’s no county in the country, whether urban, suburban, or rural, where a person earning minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. And even that statistic needs to be interrogated because the way that we define affordability in this country is completely outdated and has been overdue for a reset in a long time. The way we think about it is that if you’re paying over 30 percent of your income in rent, that your property is unaffordable to you. But of course, there are all sorts of conditions related to the economy in 2020 that really mandate that we start to rethink how we measure affordability and how we measure it in a more dynamic way.

But all of that being said, even the statistics that we have today, as limited as they might be, tell us a story about market failure. Twelve million people, or excuse me, 12 million households, which is about 25 million people in the United States, spend over 50 percent of their income in rent every month. That is a story about market failure. Over 500,000 people sleep on the streets every night, which is not even the scale of homelessness, because, of course, so much homelessness does not look necessarily like sleeping on the streets every night. That is a market failure, right? Corporate landlords have taken over the communities in our neighborhoods across the country and are negligent and abusive and don’t respond to any of their tenants even if they are able to pay them the rent. That is a market failure. So, the system that we have has failed, and we need to acknowledge that. That’s the starting point for imagining a path forward.

In terms of that path forward, our vision, which comes from grassroots leaders across the country, people who’ve been on the front lines of these types of disparities and inequities, our vision is for a homes guarantee. And the idea is very simple. We live in the richest country in the history of the world, and we can and we must guarantee that everyone has a home. Actually, this idea that we must be stuck in this place of insecurity and displacement is a false one, right? The idea that we have homelessness in this country is a completely flawed and horrific reality to take for granted. We have to push ourselves to imagine a world in which, as the richest country in world history, we can actually guarantee that everyone has a home. And basically, what that looks like is moving housing from considered a commodity to housing delivered and guaranteed as a public good, right? The idea is that we need to strip the profit motive and the business motive. We need to strip the market out of the housing system and actually guarantee housing for all of those who need it.

Now in the United States, in this system of racial capitalism, in the oppression economy under which we’re all entrenched, that idea sounds really radical, but it’s not, right? That’s not a radical idea. That’s actually what our people are owed. And it’s an idea of taking responsibility for our neighbors. It’s an idea of standing up for one another as a society. And frankly, it’s an idea that, in many other places across the world, governments and people have taken very seriously. It’s only here that our imagination has been so limited, so much so, that today, we consider something like a homes guarantee radical. The good news is that we’ve been organizing around this idea for a couple of years now, and it’s starting to break through. And I think moments like the one that we’re in, that offer us this clarity, this incredible clarity about how badly this current system treats all of us and especially the most vulnerable among us, this is a moment of clarity, as you said. As Arundhati Roy said, this is a portal. And the question is where we go from here. So, there’s part of me that’s hopeful about the path forward. And then there’s another part of me that’s deeply skeptical that we will take seriously enough the opportunity that’s presented by this crisis, right?

I think, unfortunately, the best that we’ve seen come out of governments at every level throughout this crisis is some temporary eviction moratoriums, offers of assistance here and there, but no fundamental call to overhaul the system. And that is actually what we need. We need to cancel rents and mortgage payments. We need to take seriously the idea of constructing new public housing in this country and moving housing off of the speculative market and into public and community control. And I still retain some hope that those ideas, now that they’re out there, are ideas that we can organize around and win in the relatively short term. But time is really running out, and meanwhile, of course, people are literally dying. So, I feel a huge amount of urgency around winning a homes guarantee sooner than we ever thought was possible. But it’s not about what’s possible; it’s about what’s necessary.

VALLAS: Yeah, and I would love to actually just hear anyone’s and all of your thoughts on this panel in response to — and I’m going to ask this cynical question that some people listening may be wondering — which is I love that world you’re imagining; I want to come imagine that world with you. At the same time, here we are in this immediate moment watching Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and the Trump White House indicate that they’re not even comfortable extending the unemployment insurance $600 bump past July. And that that’s going to be some major extraction should Democrats be successful at “winning” something that is just absolutely unthinkable to allow to extend. It’s unthinkable to allow that to expire. I think Darrick Hamilton, who, Jeremie, you referenced was on this show last week as part of a special episode with the National Academy of Social Insurance… he described it as a neoliberal trick. And I think that’s exactly right. And yet that is the political reality of our current moment. Would love to hear any and all of you talk about how we get to the place where the movement is articulating this vision we’re hearing loud and clear in the streets, we’re hearing loud and clear from organizers and advocates like you all. How do we get there from here? And how does this current moment that we’re in fit into that generation-long framework that is imbued in the name of your organization, Jeremie?

GREER: Yeah, I can respond to that. I’m just, I really wish we were at a place where we could all be together because I’ve been just nodding viciously as Mo and Tara have been talking. And I want to send that positivity to them, knowing that that’s how I’m receiving their words. But to this question, I mean, so, I think the time has never been more appropriate. And what keeps coming to mind is the Audre Lorde quote, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And I feel like we have, as a progressive movement, developed an infrastructure that mirrors that of the power and elite, and we’ve invested in similar parallel structures. So, it’s like they create a think tank, we create a think tank. They create a association, we create association. And we’re essentially fighting a battle on their battlefield. And I think what that means is their audacious vision of the world gets actualized. They get a $2 trillion tax cut. They get to subjugate, create immigration policy that is actually threatening to throw entire populations of people out of the country. They get to create a police state that polices people of color, does not at all serve people of color. So, I think we have to understand that we are playing the game, and we are fighting a battle on their battlefield.

What, for me, that means is that we have to, as a progressive movement, to actualize this vision that we have, and we, as people of color, have to invest in our power. And our power is in the brilliance, wisdom, vision, energy of people in communities that know what their communities need. And that that is what our democracy is supposed to be built on, and that is what we have to double down on. So, Mo mentioned the millions of dollars that these companies are putting out into the street after the murder of George Floyd. And my litmus test for whether that money’s going to mean anything is, are you investing in organizations that are challenging the power that created a system in which a police officer could suffocate a man with his knee? And to me, the answer thus far has been no. And until we start to make the investments in the type of power-building work that is going to challenge the power that it’s created, the oppression economy that we see today, we will never be able to build the liberation economy that we envision until we double down and invest in the building of power that can actually bring that to be, which is in the communities where people of color live.

BP-WEEKS: Yeah.

VALLAS: Mo and Tara, I would love to give you — Yep, I was reading your mind and figured you would want to go next, Mo. Go ahead.

BP-WEEKS: [laughs] Yeah, I, first off, just underline everything that Jeremie said. And, you know, I also think that I tend towards the cynical as well, and I think a lot of folks on the left, especially organizers, do. But in this moment, I’ve really been challenged to look at sort of the other side of things. And these moments of chaos — and that truly is how I would describe what this moment is. It’s just true chaos, and really manmade chaos, along with sort of the virus that’s going around. Most of chaos itself is manmade. But these moments of chaos, they can lead in a couple of different directions. You can fall further into authoritarianism and corporatism and just sort of the worst of racial capitalism. But it also, you know, being in chaos gives people the opportunity to just really open up their imaginations and say, well, what do we really need, and what do we really want? And things change really, really quickly in these moments in ways that you might not have particularly known before.

So, I always think of this thing, which is a relatively small thing. But when I was a housing organizer during the last foreclosure crisis, I remember fighting and running campaigns to try and get HUD to enact some level of mortgage freeze or eviction moratorium or principal reduction for all of these people who were being unjustly foreclosed on. And they maintained that it was impossible and that they couldn’t do it. And in this moment, they did it as people were calling on them, and then they just did it, right? And that was like a thing that folks had fought for a really long time that just was a win all of a sudden. Or I think the organizers, my friends and comrades, in Minneapolis from Black Visions Collective that have been fighting as abolitionists for years and trying to get their City Council to disband the police department and saying, no, no, no, that’s ridiculous. You guys are just some ridiculous kids. And then it just happened. They just, they just did it.

So, I think that one thing I’ve been saying to folks a lot in this moment is that the time for nuance is dead. Neoliberalism really feeds off of the liberalism part. Like, we can just say what we mean and push for what we mean. And there’s no point in compromising the words before they come out of our mouth. We really need to state what we need. We need a homes guarantee, we need the abolition of police, and so many more things because more is possible than we think. And at the very least, we don’t want to compromise on an already compromised position.

VALLAS: Tara, I think you’re going to get the last word on this question.

RAGHUVEER: Well, I love everything that Jeremie and Mo have been saying, and I’m so honored that they invited me to be in conversation with them. Because I really think the two of them are the people that I’m looking to and following, especially Mo and I have worked together for a couple years now. And I’m just [chuckles] scribbling down notes: nuance is dead. Neoliberalism is propped up by liberalism. I love that, Mo. What I would add in here, I think, is the perspective of someone who’s organizing people on the ground every day. I run an organization called KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri. And I have the privilege of knowing people from a point of crisis, right? A lot of tenants reach out to us when they’re going through their moment of crisis. They’re facing an eviction. They’re facing landlord abuse. And when they come to our organization, our project is to identify their interest in this collective work and to help them transform what was private pain into public power. And that’s the magic of organizing. It’s actually, of course, not magic. It takes work. It takes time. Investing in grassroots organizing is really the only way that we will be able to build enough power to transform our society and our economy.

And then meanwhile, I think this goes hand in hand with doing the work on the ground, knocking on doors, having tenant meetings, that stuff that can feel unsexy and redundant. And it’s a lot, and it’s hard work. But the thing that goes hand-in-hand with that, that kind of keeps hope alive day-to-day is this kind of project of imagination that Mo was talking about. And I think about moments like the one we’re, in a moment of reckoning where, as Mo was saying, black organizers who’ve been leading the way for decades around this demand for prison and police abolition, there’s like an explosive public education for the masses that’s happening around their demand. And the only reason that’s possible right now is because of the decades of work that they put in, because of the decades of those meetings and their rolls of butcher paper and all the dry erase markers that have run out of ink, right? It takes that decades of organizing work and imagination work to get to a moment like this and be set up to actually win the big demands. So, I think that’s what it is. It’s grassroots organizing. And it’s never failing to imagine what is actually necessary for communities along the way. And, of course, listen to and center the experiences of the people who are the most directly impacted.

And as a final thought there, I think we do have so much hope and so many examples, even in the last couple of decades of leaps and bounds that have been achieved by the movement. You know, I was a pretty young person — I’m still a pretty young person, but I was even younger, of course — when the Occupy Movement was happening. And I think about seeing black women on the mic occupying public space in New York City and hearing them identify the perils of the current structure of our economy and defining it as an economy that serves the 1 percent and corporations and serves to uphold white supremacy. And then as someone who was politicized in part by that moment, and I’ve kind of grown up as an organizer in a post-Occupy moment, I know that my entire political analysis was founded based on that kind of breakthrough moment. So, I think that’s a relatively recent example in history that demonstrates that even if the Trump administration isn’t the administration under which we win a homes guarantee, it’s the organizing that happens during this particular political moment that will create the conditions for us to win that homes guarantee tomorrow.

VALLAS: That was the voice of Tara Raghuveer. She’s the founding director of KC Tenants, an organization of poor and working-class tenants in Kansas City. She’s also the homes guarantee campaign director at People’s Action, a national network of grassroots organizations committed to racial, economic, gender, and climate justice. And also have been talking in this episode with Maurice BP-Weeks, the co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, better known as ACRE, and Jeremie Greer, who is one of the guest editors of this issue. The title of this issue is The Rise and Fall of Racial Capitalism, was guest edited by Liberation in a Generation. And you can find it at TheForge.org. Excuse me, TheForgeOrganizing.org. Let me get the URL right: ForgeOrganizing.org. We’re also going to have a link on our nerdy syllabus page. And Jeremie, Mo, and Tara, I really appreciate all of you taking the time. This was a really just fun conversation. I’m so thrilled that this is going to be a monthly thing. So, listeners get excited to hear lots more from The Forge. But just a huge thanks to all of you for taking the time today.

GREER: Thanks for having us.

BP-WEEKS: Yeah, it’s my pleasure.

RAGHUVEER: Thank you so much.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Transcripts are courtesy of Cheryl Green. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.