From Future Hindsight: Strategic Racism is a Divide and Conquer Scam with Ian Haney López

Here's a preview of Future Hindsight, another podcast we enjoy that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action for everyday citizens. This episode features Ian Haney López, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in race and racism. His focus for the last decade has been on the use of racism in electoral politics, and how to respond. We discuss strategic racism and its antidote: race-class fusion politics. Strategic racism is a divide-and-conquer scam by elites that pushes us to hate each other while they rig the system for themselves. Race-class fusion politics is the antidote because it rejects the con and builds power with others across differences. Perhaps the real radicalism of race-class fusion politics today is the core radicalism of American democracy – a way of pushing power downward and outward to citizens. Hear more from Future Hindsight wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Push it. Hey, it's Khalil and Ben. We'll be back
with our regularly scheduled episode of Some of My Best
Friends Are in a few weeks. But today we wanted
to share with you a preview of another podcast we've
been enjoying. We think you're gonna enjoy it too. The

(00:35):
show's called Future Hindsight. Host Mila Atmost takes big ideas
about civic life and democracy and turns them into action
items for all of us. What you can do beyond
voting short of running for office. Turns out there are
so many possibilities. Mila has compelling conversations with public servants,

(00:57):
nonprofit leaders, lawyers, and experts like activists Cecil Richards, political
scientist Ian Bremer, and the executive director of Supermajority Amanda
Brown Lehman Man Khalil I am sold because together they
tell the story about your power and agency. You'll always
get a dose of hope and inspiration on how you

(01:18):
can get involved. The preview we're sharing with you today
features Ian Haney Lopez, the Chief Justice Earl Warren, Professor
of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley and
author of Merge Left. Haney Lopez focuses on what he
calls strategic racism. What if racism is a class weapon

(01:39):
that is rooted in making profit for elites? And if
that's the case, what are the possible solutions to end
racism and to win elections. Yeah? I really like this
episode because there's a part when he fully explains why
poor white people in this country have everything to gain
if they can get past the elite manipulation. That alone

(02:02):
is worth listening to. Let's listen in let's do it
as we tape this. Primaries in Ohio are heating up,
and I wanted to play you clips from a couple
of campaign ads and get your thoughts on them. We're
going to hear excerpts from ads from jd Vance and
Josh Mandel, who are among the candidates competing in the

(02:24):
GOP primary to run for Rob Portman's seat. Let's listen,
and I'd love to hear your reaction. Are you a racist?
Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racists for
wanting to build Truck's wall. They censor us, but it
doesn't change the truth. Joe Biden's open border is killing
Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring

(02:46):
into this country. This issue is personal. I nearly lost
my mother to the boys coming across our border. No
child should grow up an orphan. I'm JD. Vans, and
I approve this message because whatever they call us, we
will put America first. Critical race theory is crap. Martin
Luther King marsh right here, so skin color wouldn't matter.

(03:09):
I didn't do two tours and ombar province fighting alongside
marines of every color to come home and be called
a racist. There's nothing racist about stopping critical race theory
and loving America. Josh Mandel pro god, pro gun, pro Trump.
I'm Josh Mandel, and I approved this message. You want
a fighter sending the marine. So what do you think?

(03:33):
This is classic dog whistle politics in the sense that
it's using rhetoric design to trigger deeply rooted racist resentments
and anxieties, while allowing people to believe that they are
not in fact expressing or being stampeded by racist fears

(03:56):
or anxieties. There's something that's new here, and that is
the attacks on critical race theory from Mandel Knew. Also
in the sense of JD. Vance, are you a racist?
One of the primary messages from the right today is

(04:16):
that after the mass mobilizations to protest police killings and
police violence against African Americans in the wake of the
murder of George Floyd, there's an effort to say people
who are fighting for racial justice don't actually want justice,
they want revenge. Be afraid white people, be very very afraid.

(04:43):
They say they want justice, they don't. They want to
create a new racial hierarchy that flips the old one
on its head. And in fact, this is coming straight
out of the white supremacist movement and the alt right.
Now a sort of more sanitized version takes as an
article of faith that racial groups are inevitably in conflict

(05:05):
and that some racial group must be on top, that
they're will be a dominant racial group. And the question
is which racial group will be dominant? And so what
you here's people like Jade Vans and Josh Mondale using
that frame essentially to say when people of color talk
about racial justice, they're not actually interested in equality, they're

(05:29):
interested in being the new dominant group. Even hear it
in jd Vance saying Democrats want open borders to bring
an illegal aliens and to bring in democratic voters. This
is incredibly extreme to say, hey, this is the great replacement. Dangerous,
pathologically violent, inferior people are being brought across to replace

(05:55):
the silent, the hard working, the patriotic, the taxpayers, the responsible,
highly coded in terms of race. Now, the question is
what's the effect of response to that. And it's an
enormous challenge for progressives. If Vans and Mandel are saying, hey,

(06:17):
white people, they're calling you a racist, and progressives turn
around and say, hey, Jade Vans, you're a racist, and
so is anybody votes for you. Hey, Josh Mandel, you're
a racist. So is anybody who votes for you. Vans
and Mandel are just going to rub their hands in glee.
That's what they're hoping for. They want to be called
racist because it helps them say to their supporters, see,

(06:43):
I'm not racist, this is just common sense. Of Course
we should protect our borders. Of course crime is bad.
But as soon as I say those things, they call
me a racist, and by implication, they call you a racist.
Two and Trump actually said this and, responding to some
of Hillary Clinton's attacks, said she's not just calling me

(07:04):
a racist, she's calling you a racist too. That's the move.
That's the racial theater. But here's the important insight. That
all depends upon a conversation about racism that accepts a
basic frame of racism is just white people against people
of color. When you shift the frame, when you begin

(07:30):
to talk about the way in which race is a
class weapon used against all of us, then you can
respond to Vance by saying, Hey, where's your political support
coming from? Again? Isn't it coming from tech pro billionaires.
Aren't your policy proposals actually things like cutting social welfare

(07:53):
and cutting taxes for the very rich. Isn't it true
that you don't care about most average Ohioans. You really
care about winning power, And to win power, you are
willing to stoop these very low depths where you will
turn Americans against each other, push us to hate each other,

(08:15):
to fear each other, to fight each other, push racism
into public culture just so you can win power for
your dark money donors. That's despicable and same with Josh Mandel.
This isn't about taking care of the silent majority. This
is about duping average Americans into thinking that people from

(08:39):
different countries are the real threat in their lives when
it's the dark money donors who are rigging the system,
who are the real threat. It's a completely different political conversation.
That's the power of race class fusion politics. It allows
us to respond to Vans and to Mandel not by

(09:00):
calling them bigots, but by saying you're strategic racists. You're
running racism as a con and you're calling everybody. You're
calling people, whether they're black Ohioans or brown Ohioans or
white Ohioans, you are the sort of person who would

(09:23):
promote racial strife for your own profit. How low is that?
Where are the places or moments or the politicians who
communicate in this way where you see who really call
out the dog whistling as a con, where you see

(09:43):
race class fusion politics already at work and succeeding among politicians.
You could look at twenty eighteen in Minnesota. Minnesota had
a grassroots coalition of religious groups and labor groups who
very early on appreciated the power of a race class

(10:05):
fusion to deal with dog whistles a against immigrants and
African Americans in Minneapolis Saint Paul, but also to build
political power between those constituencies and rural Minnesota, which is
overwhelmingly white, they started using race class fusion. Really a

(10:25):
brilliant campaign that talked about Minnesota's being greater than fear,
and the brilliance there was one a very pithy statement,
right when politicians warn about dangerous immigrants or terrorists, that
they're pandering to fear, and we're greater than that. So
greater than fear really captured this idea like we're not

(10:46):
going to be fearful of each other. We are onto
the Khan by these politicians. That was one. The other
thing that was so clever about this was Greater Minnesota
was the phrase people used in Minnesota to distinguish rural
Minnesota from the cities, and so it was really a
way of saying this race class fusion, this is designed

(11:12):
to create a multiracial majority that includes white people. So
often when Democrats or progressives talk about a multiracial movement,
it's as if they mean a multiracial movement of communities
of color. And it's very important to remind white people
you're part of a multiracial society. You can be part

(11:34):
of a multiracial majority, and indeed, we will only have
an empowered multiracial majority when whites see themselves as equal
and welcome members of that multiracial movement. So that's one
place I think the other places you can see it. Increasingly,
labor unions like SCIU have moved to this intentional effort

(12:01):
to create multiracial worker solidarity by emphasizing to workers that
racism is a weapon of division used by bosses. So
one thing that labor has historically done is it says
racism is a weapon of the bosses. Therefore, let's focus
only on our shared class interests. Race class is doing

(12:23):
something different. It's saying racism is a weapon of the bosses. Therefore,
let's focus on racism and building cross racial solidarity so
that we can achieve our economic and racial justice interests.
One question I have is that you know, we have
been building up to this moment for over fifty years,
and now we're at a precipice of democracy, right we

(12:47):
are in danger of losing democracy itself. And it feels
as though, you know, the clock is really ticking down
pretty fast, and what you're saying is something that we
can use right now, but I feel like it's going
to take time. Nonetheless, can we speed this up, especially
in light of the twenty two minute term elections. I

(13:09):
think you're right that there's an immediate crisis looming the
twenty twenty two elections than the twenty twenty four elections.
I think we are on a precipice and we risk
losing democracy and collapsing into an authoritarianism from which we

(13:30):
might not recover for decades. In some ways, politicians, political consultants,
that whole consulting class, they're extremely cautious. They want to
get to fifty percent plus one. They want to do
whatever is safest that will get them there. That means

(13:51):
that they're going to do the same thing they've been
doing for the last fifty years. But that's insanity. We
are not in a steady state. Things are getting worse,
and they've gotten much much worse, very rapidly. And if
Democrats keep responding by saying, well, we'll do what we've

(14:12):
done for the last fifty years, we are going to
go off of that cliff. What's going to get them
to change. It's going to be their constituents. It's going
to be people organizing house parties and making calls and
making demands and organizing discussion groups. It's going to have

(14:32):
to come from people listening to this now, it's going
to have to come from folks who love democracy, who
love society, who look at their neighbors and right to
have a sense of like, I'm connected to these folks.
I want to make sure I live in a society
in which we respect each other, and people have dignity,

(14:53):
and we trust each other, and we take care of
each other, and we try and protect each other, especially
from the reactionary, powerful few who cynically try and turn
us against each other. And we have to talk about
the way in which division has been weaponized against us.
We have to talk about the class war that we

(15:16):
have been losing for decades. And we're going to insist
that we build power with our neighbors, and that we
go and grab our political representatives by the lapels and
say you need to talk about this too. You need
to help us build power with each other so that
government actually begins to work for the vast majority of

(15:37):
Americans and not simply for the ultra rich.