#RaceClass

"Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law should be alarmed at what is happening--and be prepared to act." That call came from Professor Jafari Sinclaire Allen in a recent piece for The Nation that catalogued MAGA's ever-escalating assault on Black studies. Jon and Arnie use the piece as a jumping off point to discuss why home-grown authoritarians from Florida to...

Justice Clarence Thomas doesn't know what "diversity" means. UC Berkeley Law Professor David Oppenheimer does. David joined the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss his new book "The Diversity Principle." The book traces the diversity principle's long and circuitous (and often overlooked) history -- one that weaves through John and Harriet Mill, the legendary Pauli Murray, and fights for academic freedom...

SMU Law Professor Carliss Chatman joined the #RaceClass podcast to discuss DEI "rollbacks" and the rise of "reverse racism" lawsuits from private actors and the Trump administration. We do a deep dive into Section 1981 and the myth of "free markets" -- with a specific nod to "white economic comfort," a term Professor Chatman coined to capture a powerful dyanmic that continues to drive who can ente...

Jon and Arnie discuss the Justice Department's decision to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on fraud charges related to its use of informants to infiltrate extremist hate groups. The indictment turns the DOJ upside down; rather than prosecute the Klan, the DOJ is targeting organizations that help combat the Klan. It might sound absurd, but it is a predictable consequence of a federal...

In this special cross-posted episode, Jon joins Yvette Borja and the Radio Cachimbona podcast to discuss affirmative action. We spend much of the episode outlining the many many (did we say many?) ways that institutions may continue to intentionally build racially equitable, diverse and inclusion institutions -- all consistent with federal antidiscrimination law. Lots of the conversation draws on...

Chandra Taylor-Sawyer joined the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss the fight for environmental justice. Chandra is a Senior Attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and leads its Environmental Justice Initiative. For nearly two decades, she has worked to confront the disproportionate burden of pollution borne by communities of color and low-wealth neighborhoods across the South. We exp...

Jon and Arnie discuss the many segregationist and white supremacist dimensions of the Trump administration’s war on multiracial democracy. To map the assault on equality and democracy, we engage a recent report from the African American Policy Forum titled: “Antiblackness is the Point: Racism, Misogyny, and Donald Trump’s Assault on Equal Opportunity.” The AAPF report connects today’s racial fasci...

UC Davis Law Professor Brian Soucek joined the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss his new book: "The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education." Brian is one of the most thoughtful folks out there when it comes to grappling with - and injecting quite a bit of sense into - the most contentious and ongoing debates about academic freedom,...

Education Scholar Julie Park joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss her new book: "Race, Class and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era." It's hard to imagine a more timely book that takes on so many enduring questions regarding race and class in university admissions. We break down the good, bad, and oh so very ugly new frontier of college admissions following SFFA v. Harvard and...

Dr. Evelyn Carter joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss her new book: "Was That Racist? How to Detect, Interrupt and Unlearn Bias in Everyday Life." Dr. Carter is close friend of the Pod and one of the smartest folks out there when it comes to understanding how racism manifests and how institutions can cultivate equitable and inclusive environments. We explore a range of topics from the racial a...

Jon and Arnie chat about Ta-Nehisi Coate’s observation that “Trump has clarified an inconvenient fact—the culture war is an actual war.” The actual war manifests physically in ICE, the $85 billion entity that gleefully profiles, terrorizes and executes people across the United States. The actual war is also the anti-Black racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry that...

As part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress created the little-known Community Relations Service (CRS). CRS has since become known as "America's Peacemakers" -- a nod to this small federal agency's outsized role resolving conflicts and restoring peaceful relations in American communities struggling with civil rights violations and hate crimes. In this special episode, former CRS associate direc...

Boston University Law Professor Steven Dean joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss his new book: "Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: the Story of Global Jim Crow." Our conversation explores how international tax law was designed to serve white nations and harm Black nations following decolonization in the mid-20th century. Professor Dean also reflects on his experiences as a Black man i...

Fordham Law School professor Atinuke Adediran joins the #RaceClass Pod to discuss her new book "Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress." Against the backdrop of Trump's war on civil rights, Professor Adediran's book explores the brief tidal of wave of corporate commitments to antiracism that followed 2020's global protests for racial justice. We discuss what it means to be B...

Arnie and Jon discuss JD Vance’s white supremacist screed at last week’s Turning Point USA conference “AmericaFest.” Along with remarks defending racist speech, Vance proclaimed that “in the United States of America you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” As others have observed, this language invokes white supremacist talking points from the past century – including leading southern...

“Voting rights right now is precarious and leaves open the door for undoing the generations of work to protect our young and fragile multiracial democracy.” That's the upshot from my conversation with Professor Atiba Ellis, a national voting rights expert and law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. The conversation could not be more timely. This week in California, the Trum...

Washburn University law professor Rory Bahadur joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss his new book: A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity. We explore Professor Bahadur's own racial education, his approach to analyzing racism in America, how human nature reproduces racism and the myths that corrupt our collective ability to understand the American project.

Professor Charisse Burden-Stelly, aka Dr. CBS, joins #RaceClass for a wide ranging conversation about the election of Zohran Mamdani, the legacy of Black Studies, resistance in the age of Trump, and her new book Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States.

As Thanksgiving and its enduring mythologies approach, Jon and Arnie discuss the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign to evangelize white supremacy in the United States and abroad. Invoking Trump’s anti-DEI Executive Orders, federal officials purged a “report on missing and murdered Native Americans” while claiming “countries with diversity policies are infringing human rights.” The cooptation...

Dr. Jennifer Gomez, an Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Social Work, joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss her award winning book: "The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls." Dr. Gomez walks us through the genesis and evolution of her scholarship on cultural trauma and sexual violence -- specifically with reference to the subject position of Black women and girls. Join...

In this episode, Jon shares why he traveled to Washington, D.C. for a teach-in at the Smithsonian with fellow scholars, artists, activists, podcasters and others. The teach-in was a collaboration of two historical podcasts, This Day and The Memory Palace, and drew inspiration from the teach-ins that academics organized in the 1960s to deepen and support anti-war movements across the country. Jon &...

"Latine" or "Latinx"? Race or ethnicity? English Language Learner or Emergent Bilingual? UCLA Professor Laura Chavez-Moreno joins #RaceClass to discuss her new book "How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America." We explore how schools teach about race implicitly and explicitly; making Latinidad; and racialization's consequences. We also hit on the escalating ICE raids terrorizi...

We discuss Democratic leadership’s inexcusable failure to speak honestly about and to denounce the racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ bigotry and Christian Nationalism that animated Charlie Kirk’s ideology and continues to undergird the organizations he built. It should be easy to express empathy and denounce political violence without engaging in revisionist myth making that normalizes...

Arnie and Jon discuss how the Trump regime sees racism as both an end goal and a means to realize a whole slew of fascist desires. As to the end, we are witnessing an unrelenting campaign to entrench a racial order defined by white supremacist ideals that trace to antebellum America. The erection of confederate monuments, the erasure of Black history, the claim that “race is biological,” and the l...

In this episode, Jon and Arnie chat more about the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on Harvard University. We highlight some complexities to this dynamic. On the one hand, Harvard is the current bulwark against Trump’s authoritarian effort to control every aspect of every university in the country. For this reason, Harvard’s fight is everyone’s fight. On the other hand, Harvard enabled Trump...