The Next Move - Season 1
Episode 4: Merging Race and Class with Ian Haney Lopez
Episode Summary
Dog whistle politics is a long held strategy of American politics. George talks to Ian Haney Lopez, Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley, about how the rich and powerful use racism as a weapon to sow a divide between race and class. This divide has only been made clearer during the pandemic and the weeks of uprisings around racial justice. But if we name this strategy, perhaps we can merge race and class and build the country we want. A multiracial democracy that works for all of us.
Guest Bios
Ian Haney Lopez
Ian Haney Lopez is Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley and Director of the Racial Politics Project at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. His latest book is Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America.
George Goehl
At age 21, George Goehl walked into a soup kitchen to eat. Over time, he became an employee – first washing dishes and eventually helping run the place. Three years later, he was struck by seeing the same people in line as when he first arrived. He began to organize.
Today, George is the director of People’s Action, a multiracial poor and working class people’s organization. He leads one of the largest race-conscious rural progressive organizing efforts in the United States.
Following the financial crisis, George and National People’s Action mobilized more people into the streets than any other organization to demand accountability, help win Financial Reform, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and secure mortgage relief.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC and others have covered George’s organizing work.
Learn More
Learn More
- The Combahee River Collective Statement, written by Black feminist lesbians in 1977, remains vital to the work of ensuring that all Black lives matter.
- In The New Yorker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes that “the quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.”
- Ta-Nehisi Coates elaborates on his own hope in this moment — and why 2020 is different from 1968.