{"id":1616,"date":"2023-03-07T10:42:51","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T10:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/?page_id=1616"},"modified":"2024-05-01T10:41:43","modified_gmt":"2024-05-01T09:41:43","slug":"amia-srinivasan-november-2020","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/amia-srinivasan-november-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Amia Srinivasan, November 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What I am Reading Now\u2026
Amia Srinivasan<\/b>
November 2020<\/p>


Renewed media attention on the Black Lives Matter movement, and BLM-inspired uprisings around the world, has taken many on the socialist-Marxist left by surprise. Especially in the US, one sees leftists \u2014 especially, but not only, white male leftists \u2014 decrying BLM as a bourgeois, \u2018identitarian\u2019 movement, one that only seeks (as the most prominent advocate of this view, the political scientist Adolph Reed, puts it) racially \u2018proportional\u00a0inequality<\/span>\u2019 rather than genuine equality for all. While I think this view is misguided, it provides an occasion for articulating, once again, the complex interdependencies between contemporary race and class formations, and explaining the importance of \u2018identitarian\u2019 movements \u2014 anti-racism, feminism, LGBT rights \u2014 to the emergence of a broad and popular working class movement.<\/p>

In particular, it is important to understand why calls to \u2018defund the police\u2019 and \u2018abolish prisons\u2019 are working class demands: the anti-carceral tradition begins from the recognition not only that state violence is exercised prejudicially against black and brown people, but moreover, as Angela Davis wrote in 1971 that \u2018the necessity to resort to such repression is reflective of profound social crisis, of systemic disintegration\u2019. That crisis is a crisis of advanced racial capitalism. Abolitionism asks: what if this social crisis were addressed directly, through non-violent means? The answer, as the sociologists John Clegg and Adaner Usmani have put it recently, is that \u2018waging an all-out war on the root causes of crime is equivalent to the task of building a large, redistributive welfare state that takes from the rich to give to the poor\u2019. At the same time \u2013 as David Roediger traces in his now-classic\u00a0The Wages of Whiteness<\/span>\u00a0\u2013 race has had a large role to play in the failure of a broad working class movement to emerge in the US. In a letter to Angela Davis in jail in 1970, James Baldwin lamented that \u2018only a handful of the million of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you\u2026is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black ones\u2026the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.\u2019<\/p>

The question should thus not be: can the anti-racist movement ever be sufficiently anti-capitalist? But: can a working class movement afford not to be anti-racist?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Amia Srinivasan<\/strong>\u00a0is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. She works on feminist theory, epistemology and political philosophy. Her writing \u2013 on sex, animals, death, the university, technology, anger, politics and other topics \u2013 has been published in\u00a0<\/span>The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper\u2019s, The Nation<\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>The London Review of Books<\/span>, where she is a contributing editor. Her book of feminist theory,\u00a0<\/span>The Right to Sex<\/span>, will be published in 2021 with FSG.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Reading<\/span><\/p>

If They Come in the Morning\u2026Voices of Resistance<\/span>, Angela Davis (The Third Press, 1971)<\/p>

The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class<\/span>, David Roediger (Verso, 1991)<\/p>

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California<\/span>, Ruth Gilmore (University of California Press, 2007)<\/p>

Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America\u2019s Prison Nation<\/span>, Beth E. Richie (NYU Press, 2012)<\/p>

The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration<\/span>, John Clegg and Adaner Usmani (Catalyst vol 3 issue 3, 2019<\/a>)<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Please note the views published in <\/span>What I am Reading Now…<\/i> are personal reflections of the contributors.
These may not necessarily represent the views of the University of Dundee.
<\/span>\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Home<\/a><\/p>\n

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about projects What I am Reading Now\u2026Amia SrinivasanNovember 2020 Renewed media attention on the Black Lives Matter movement, and BLM-inspired uprisings around the world, has taken many on the socialist-Marxist left by surprise. Especially in the US, one sees leftists \u2014 especially, but not only, white male leftists \u2014 decrying BLM as a bourgeois, \u2018identitarian\u2019 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":525,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1616","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1616"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4007,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1616\/revisions\/4007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}