The Language of the Unheard: Martin Luther King Jr.'s social democracy.

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

Slowed by white backlash and political exhaustion, civil-rights leaders hoped the Poor People’s Campaign might give new energy to the radical visions of emancipation they had helped popularize, but for many in the movement’s rank and file, it felt like a desperate last cry rather than the beginning of a new phase in the struggle for racial equality.


In her new book King and the Other America, historian Sylvie Laurent helps rescue the Poor People’s Campaign from this unfair reputation and makes a compelling case that it deserves to be not only better remembered but also more closely studied and emulated by the left today....

King and the Other America helps make another important argument. Situating the economic egalitarianism of the Poor People’s Campaign and Martin Luther King Jr.’s later years in a far longer history of black activism and social-democratic thinking, she helps map out the deeper intellectual and political roots of an entwined racial and economic egalitarianism that has been at the center of much of African-American politics for nearly a century.

To read more:

https://www.thenation.com/article/martin-luther-king-and-the-other-america-sylvie-laurent-book-review/


As much as I agree with the class based economic analysis articulated by Bernie Sanders, what he missed, and what many class based analyses miss, is the foundational role that racism played, and continues to play, in understanding US politics and US capitalism.

We cannot discuss economic injustice, and we cannot ask why white working class voters vote for the GOP, a vote that is against their class interests, if we do not acknowledge the crucial, the vital, role that slavery played in dividing workers by race.

[Dawson Leery]

1. Animals are tribal by nature.

Providing $$$$$ alone is not going to solve the problem.

Until tribalism is dealt with, we are getting nowhere.

LBJ once said if you tell the lowest white he is better than any black, the white man will give you the shirt off his back.

[guillaumeb]

2. True.

But the first step in dealing with the problem is recognizing exactly what the problem is.