Author: Cedric Johnson

What’s Left for New Orleans? The People’s Reconstruction and the Limits of Anarcho-Liberalism (2019)

Why was the left so unsuccessful in crafting a powerful alternative to the agenda of the city’s business elite? A partial answer to this question can be found in the balance of class forces in the city after Katrina, where the very constituencies who might have written a different story of recovery—public workers, unionized teachers, and public housing residents—were banished from New Orleans.

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When the Investor Class Goes Marching In: Twenty Years of Real Estate Development, Privatization and Resiliency in New Orleans

What the storm and the sheer devastation wrought in its wake made possible was the consolidation of this ideological transformation virtually overnight—as city boosters, public officials, wealthy developers, private contractors, multinational hotel chains, anti-poverty researchers, entertainment conglomerates, and charter school advocates coalesced to promote a vision of wholesale privatization.

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Missing New Orleans: Twenty Years Since Hurricane Katrina – Editorial Note

We still find it hard to believe that twenty years have passed and that there are many New Orleanians and Americans, for that matter, with little or no recollection of the disaster. This collection is intended as a primer for those unfamiliar with this catastrophic historic event and its manifold social and political impacts on the city and American life more generally.

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Revisiting Race, Politics, and Culture: A Symposium

Scholarship and popular memory has far too often taken on the role of hagiography or sought a pure and true 1960s spirit, “uncaptured” by elites and reflective of real, authentic radicalism. Rather than being critically analyzed as key nodes of causation in the defeat of an effective egalitarian politics and the subsequent turn toward reaction—as the contributors to Race, Politics, and Culture do, befitting the seriousness with which they took their charge as both scholars and political actors—the worst tendencies of sixties-era social movements are now almost religiously worshipped in nominally left organizing and thought.

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The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism

Instead, a race-essentialist understanding of epistemology lies at the heart of both Robinson’s notions of racial capitalism and the black radical tradition. In the former, we find racism intrinsic to “European” culture as early as antiquity and reaching maturation in the Iberian Peninsula on the eve of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, while he presents African medieval societies and black colonial subjects as innately peaceful and less violent. And in this regard, Robinson’s claims are consonant with a longer line of black nationalist thinking in the United States, which inverts the assumptions of white supremacy and holds that white domination is an endemic phenomenon.

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Betting on “The Greek”: How the NFL Is Banking on Biological Racism

With the Super Bowl set to kick off on Sunday and media-fueled football fanfare ramping up accordingly, it is worth revisiting the NFL’s preseason scandal that wasn’t—its apparent use of biological racism in denying the compensatory claims of black former players for traumatic brain injuries sustained while playing in the league. Here we interrogate this case, the impotence of disparitarian antiracism to confront it, and its implications for egalitarian politics.

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The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees.

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On the End(s) of Black Politics

A politics whose point of departure requires harmonizing the interests of the black poor and working class with those of the black professional-managerial class indicates the conceptual and political confusion that underwrites the very idea of a Black Freedom Movement. The prevalence of such confusion is lamentable; that it go unchecked and without criticism is unacceptable. The essays that appear in this section will critique this tendency and offer in its stead a vision of what we think ought to be.

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