Category: Articles

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.

Trump can meet the expectations of those looking for a hard line on immigration and can grant his corporate backers the tax cuts and deregulation they greedily seek. But it is the economy that will be decisive for his populist base, and on this measure, Trump is very unlikely to succeed. As for the business elite, they have always assumed Trump was not so mad as to start a tariff war that risked undermining the American empire itself. As that danger materializes, business will rebel. The question will then shift from what Trump intends to do to what he will he do as his plans go astray.

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.

Billingham’s desire to make something aesthetically rather than socially or politically moving can be understood not just as a form of complicity with individuals and their families but, in its commitment to structure, as the imagination of an alternative. For example, the question of the frame in the photo of Liz doing her puzzle is not reducible to the ethics of photographing your mother. Rather the photo ignores the questions of family ethics. More important, it doesn’t so much ignore as seek to overcome even the question of working-class identity. Liz’s dress, her tattoos, the couch she’s sitting on can all lend themselves to being read as the markers of such an identity.

Manet’s art is about challenging what we think we know about the world: about what makes a finished picture as well as about what constitutes a politics of class, gender, and race. And doesn’t the moral value of artworks lie in their resistance to our assumptions about the world, not how they reaffirm what we already think we know?