Racial Capitalism with Robin D. G. Kelley

Before we begin, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the ongoing state violence unfolding both in Los Angeles and in Gaza. In LA, communities have taken to the streets in protest against ICE, against militarized policing, and against a government that continues to criminalize those whose labor has functioned as the backbone of the American economy, treating them as disposable. Meanwhile in Gaza, people are being starved, bombed, and silenced as humanitarian aid is not only being obstructed, but met with life-threatening attacks and seizure. These events differ greatly, but this thread is shared, authoritarian power using surveillance, force, and disposability to suppress resistance and uphold systems of control. This episode in conversation with historian Robin D. G. Kelly is about the way racism and capitalism intersect and the unrelenting struggle for liberation. And that struggle does not stop at borders. It's local, it's global, and it lives in the refusal to accept injustice. We stand in solidarity with all those resisting in all corners of the world. May their courage continue to guide our collective fight for justice. (upbeat music) Imagine what it felt like to be once an enslaved person with the mark of the lash on your back and suddenly becoming a citizen because you put on a uniform after escaping through swamps and through all kinds of things, and fought the master class, defeated them, won the right to vote. That conception of rewithal ones that freed us and you. That's the conception we're talking about. In other words, the broadest struggle of emancipation isn't just about black people freeing themselves, but freeing the nation. (upbeat music) - On June 19th, 1865, two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas declaring freedom to enslaved people, considered a symbolic end to slavery in the United States. By this dominant narrative, flattens a reality overlooked in history, the emancipation proclamation itself excluded some 450,000 enslaved people. It specifically targeted enslaved people in Confederate states that were in rebellion against the Union, leaving those in border states and Union occupied territories still enslaved. The emancipation proclamation was primarily a wartime tactic. Slavery did not become illegal until the 13th Amendment was officially ratified on December 6th, 1865. The piece that is often forgotten in dominant narratives is that freedom was not a gift. Instead, freedom was a result of collective resistance and agency. The decisive steps taken by enslaved people towards their own liberation through acts of resistance and escape. Texas, in fact, served as a last refuge for enslavers. June 10th, also referred to as Jubilee Day, symbolizes not merely the end of slavery, but the beginning of a continuous struggle for genuine freedom, an equality that demands reparations, decolonization, and solidarity with oppressed communities globally. Understanding the significance of June 10th today requires examining how the exploitative structures of slavery laid the groundwork of our modern labor systems. Slavery was fundamentally about capital accumulation through forced extractive labor. This legacy continues in contemporary capitalism where labor remains exploited and power is consolidated by dividing communities, a strategy deeply rooted in colonial practices. Our previous episode, "Dividend Rule" delves into colonial tactics of sowing divisions to secure power, which we'll discuss further today. The state sanctioned institutions of shadow slavery, which technically ended over 150 years ago, still influences exploitative labor practices, dispossession, and incarceration systems to this day. In this episode, we're joined by Professor Robin D. G. Kelly, a claimed historian, distinguished professor, and Gary B. Nash, Professor of US History at UCLA. That's a mouthful, I know. But that just means that I write histories, mostly about social movements, labor, radicalism, sometimes Marxist thought. Dr. Kelly is the author of influential works such as Freedom Dreams, Hammer and Ho, and many more. His groundbreaking scholarship has reshaped how we understand gendered racial capitalism, social movements, and the systemic forces shaping our world. The most important thing in terms of my work, though, I think has to do with the fact that I came to this work, really as an activist and as a poor person going up in America, where I kind of observed and learned from my sister, from my mother in movements and study groups, and at a state university with a tuition was $90 a semester. And this is important in terms of our conversation, because it was a time when we actually had something like a social wage, we had access to resources. And I think we're losing that. For a deeper exploration of Juneteenth's historical and symbolic origins, we recommend Dr. Robin Kelly's comprehensive discussion on the majority report, which we'll link to in the show notes. (upbeat music) - As we explored in our previous episode, throughout history, people have been divided against each other socially and structurally. Do you ever wonder why these divisions feel so entrenched? Because capitalism depends on it. It needs us fractured, and those fractures are anything but random. They're manufactured to ensure control and exploitation. Hierarchies rooted in race, gender, class, ability, and much more. These hierarchies aren't just social, they're structural, deliberately built into the economy itself. Dr. Kelly breaks it down for us with precision. - Race, gender, these are not incidental features or accidental features of capitalism. They are foundational, not just to the US, but to global capitalism. And what is capitalism? It seeks to maximize profits while reducing labor costs, you know? But it did so, it merged as such within a racial and gendered regime. That is to say, if we think of Europe as kind of the original space, it was already divided by difference, you know? And by difference, not difference for the sake of hierarchies. And so capitalism extracts well, instructures value by assigning differential value to human life and labor. And which is differential value. Differential value determines like who's targeted for what? Who's gonna be targeted for dispossession? Who's gonna be targeted for slavery? Who will get lower wages? Who's targeted for predatory lending, disfranchisement? I mean, even determines like who holds the status as migrant labor, you know? It's something we're just dealing with right now, property values. So in other words, think of it as, you know, a system in which capitalism is thoroughly racialized and gendered because our society is racialized and gendered and colonized. And so the way it often works is, you know, race, racism subsidizes white wealth accumulation and partly by taxing people, you know? Intaxing needs a lot of things. The last thing I wanna say about what is racial capitalism is that you can't separate the question of capital accumulation from the state. So, you know, listeners know this that capitalism is not a kind of free floating, free market system, but the state legalizes and institutionalizes the creation and maintenance of this differential value. We see it with the Federal Housing Administration determining what a neighbor has done. racial makeup is and how it connects to value. We'll talk about Jim Crow, for example, being upheld by federal courts, not southern courts. The way that I'm going to talk about how the state supports capitalism, you know, through tax breaks, bailouts, subsidies, deregulation, regressive taxation, the beginning of labor laws, you know, putting money into police and national guard that go into crushing strikes and labor protests. So you see, that's how capitalism works through these racialized and gendered and ableist processes. Understanding gendered racial capitalism, ie capitalism means recognizing the isms as a structural necessity, deliberately designed to reinforce economic hierarchies and maintain control. Race is a social construct, a classification created to reinforce arbitrary value assignments to human lives and maintain social hierarchy. Colonialism gave race its modern shape in the 17th and 18th centuries, as European powers sought to reconcile a fundamental contradiction. How to champion enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality while building empires on slavery and exploitation. Race became the ideological solution constructed not to describe difference, but to justify domination. By categorizing human beings into fixed hierarchies, colonial systems made race appear natural, immutable and scientific. When in truth, it was always political. The arbitrary and constructed nature of race is sharply illustrated by a case we discussed in our episode on immigration with Anthony Enriquez, United States V. Bugget Singh Tind. Tind, Ipanjabi Sik immigrant and World War I veteran, petitioned for U.S. citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906, claiming whiteness by identifying as Aryan and of Caucasian descent, the court denied his claim ruling that he was not white as understood by the "common man". In other words, whiteness wasn't scientific. It was subjective, flexible and rooted in power, just like race itself. Early in colonial America, poor whites, Africans and native peoples worked together, rebelled together. That's all a dirty thread in the planter elite. So the past laws, permanent slavery for Africans, bans on interracial marriage, harsher punishments by race, these weren't random, they were designed to divide. And in that division, racism became the scaffolding of American democracy, a system where liberty meant the right to own property, including people. Race, the colonial invention is about control. And until we understand it as a political tool, not a biological truth, we risk mistaking the symptoms for the system. Dr. Kelly often cites his mentor and a claimed author of milestone works, such as black Marxism and forgeries of memory and meaning, the late Cedric Robinson, whose profoundly impactful scholarship includes deconstructing racial capitalism and black radical tradition. So Cedric was fond of quoting a colleague of his, named Otis Madison, political scientist, he would always say, and I quote from Otis, the purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people, not black people, for blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient. It's just a great quote. In other words, what he's saying is that the durability of racial capitalism rests really with the capacity of capital in the state to kind of capture the white working class or white working people, not all of them, but as many as they can. And then tie a white working class identity to not just race, that is whiteness, but to masculinity as well. And so to me, you know, we could talk about how this works. One, something's just obvious, like all of us could talk about the actual material benefits that being white male offer, right? Of course, but for working people, especially for white people, these benefits are miniscule, if not, non-existent. Then there's the other part of it that is the expectation of material benefits that, you know, they may be poor now, but they're on the path of becoming a boss, CEO, a slaveholder, Elon Musk or whatever, right? And so they see this as an entitlement, right, rather than a privilege. And one is fairly, really fulfilled, but part of the opposition to something like a firm revaction is this idea that you're taking away from, you're taking away my entitlement by giving that entitlement to some other undeserving character. But to me, the real important question is a historical question. And that is how do we get to this point, right? And I think there's a couple things to keep in mind. One, we are living under or inherited enlightenment theories of human beings. That is, who is the human? Humans defined as European Christian man. And once you define humans as European Christian man, and again, this is modern. This is not ancient. It permits forms of unfree labor, of dispossession, subordination based on difference, again, race, gender, religion, in the name of what? Liberty. So we call this modern racism and permits kidnapping, imprisonment, perpetual enslavement of Africans and Native peoples, and to transform them into chattel. So if Africans arrive on the scene, right, as chattel, then the story that we often hear in our kind of history books when it's addressed is that there's some kind of transition to racial slavery. And slavery was not racial, but it became racial. And it's, that's not true. It's the story of how this relationship came to be was that slavery allowed for the freeing of white bonded labor, white indentured servants were virtually slaves, right? And so this is a matter of inventing the white race as a race. So why, how does this happen? Well, settlers come to North America and elsewhere. And when I say sellers, I mean the rulers, and they are dispossessing Native people, they're trying to manage coerce African labor, but they're also trying to manage this unruly white working class white indentured servants who don't see themselves as white always. So managing the white poor and managing enslaved people and trying to dispossess Native people and it requires to be like enclosure like fencing walls. Because what? Africans are running away. White people, white indentures who don't want to serve out their indentured time, they're running away. Where are they going? They're joining Native people. And Africans are also joining Native people and forming their own maroon communities, which some white people join. And what are they doing they're creating an alternative to the kind of capitalist relations of production and class rule which you're living under? So how did they solve the problem? They solved the problem through a kind of purchase. They offered white men land grants. They gave them muskets. They gave them two bushels of corn. They gave them ammunition. And that ended the form of the white bondage, turning them into citizens and to assertive property owners. And the Constitution basically finished the job by democratizing this idea of white racial privilege. But they weren't real property owners in the end. In the end, they end up being an extension of the modern North American proletariat. And with the dream of being a property owner. And so to die was cast. To set the stage for this problem. The problem of the working class in America has always been a white problem. White people just not all of them. But so many white workers just won't join the class. In the US, the development of capitalism was tied to the construction of white patrimony. The promise of ownership and status for white Americans. The idea that whiteness itself conferred a kind of inherited status. A promise of ownership, autonomy, and social mobility reserved for white Americans. By offering poor and working class white people a sense of superiority and potential access to land, labor control, and political power, the ruling class effectively divided the working class against itself. Solidarity across racial lines was a threat. So whiteness became both a shield and a wedge protecting white workers from from the full weight of exploitation while positioning them in opposition to Black and Indigenous labourers. This racialised inheritance helped mass-class exploitation, making it easier to sustain a capitalist system that extracted from many while delivering privilege to a few. These divisions were foundational to a system like Jim Crow, constructed explicitly to undermine working-class solidarity, maintain inequality, and perpetuate hate crimes against Black people. So when we think about Jim Crow, it's not about segregation per se. It's not about separation. It is the consolidation of white supremacy, not just in North America, but on a global scale. You can't separate Jim Crow from imperialism. They're probably the same process. In this new age of capitalist industrialization, Jim Crow was in fact a response to the interracial labour movements that emerged during and at the end of reconstruction. So the Black codes were just for a minute, but during and after reconstruction, you have the continuation of movements that are not necessarily Republicans, but the Greenback Labour Party and the re-adjusters and stuff. They're fighting to continue to redistribute land, to dismantle the plantation oligarchy in the South, to fight for the franchise, for all working people, and they're being attacked by the clan, which is a ruling class instrument, not working class, and they are crushed. So it's not an accident that a lot of the Jim Crow laws and developments take place not at the end of reconstruction 1877, but in the 1890s, because that's that period of intense struggle where they have to crush work and class revolt. And again, once again went over that fraction of the white working class that had recognized the power of reconstruction as a way to free them. So what does that mean? It means that you see the implementation of lynching in a more structured, expansive way after the 1890s, which is state sanctioned. lynching is mob violence that's supported by the state because no one goes jail for that. You see disfranchisement laws implemented beginning in 1890, legally codified structural racism, right? We see a kind of, you know, intellectual warfare, theories of racial inferiority backed by the academy like Harvard, Yale, where you have the social natural sciences, social Darwinism, all that justifying imperialism in subjugation of black people. And with that comes things like the actual theft of black owned land, legalize the reduction of black people to sharecropping or debt pionage, a system that ensures differential in wages, in occupations, the use of chain gangs in forms of carceral power in prisons to extract labor from black people. All this is legal, right? All of it's legal. So what we get is the very opposite of a free market. You get a racially regulated market by by state forces, state power in the South supported by the North to make sure that black people don't have sufficient property, adequate wages, access to schools, and they extract from black people taxes to pay for white education. You know, so talk about reparations. I mean, so that's what Jim Crow really looks like. And that's why, you know, when we say capitalism is a dynamic process, it's always having to remake itself, not just because it goes into periodic crisis, but that crisis is produced by the struggles of working people themselves, right? They produce that crisis and they have to respond. And that is the history of the 20th century, the remaking of capitalism along these lines based on struggles of working people, oftentimes black and brown working people. Jim Crow may have been a US system, but the underlying logic control through racialized labor and disposability was never confined by national borders. In fact, as the American economy expanded its reach globally, those same logics were exported embedded in trade deals, supply chains, and immigration policy. Today, the global economy relies on a highly stratified labor force, millions of workers often in the global South subjected to conditions that echo coerced labor while wealth is consolidated by those at the top. It's not just that these systems resemble colonial structures is that they are extensions of them retooled for the modern market. So how does this dynamic of outsourcing labor while criminalizing migration help maintain the illusion of economic growth and who really benefits when a system is built to obscure the violence it requires to function? Yeah, well, you know, we just need to listen to all your episodes because you do address this. I mean, you do and do so very, very well. Well, it's a great question. And it speaks to a couple of things. One, I've argued elsewhere that the era that we're living in still is an era of global colonial domination. Despite the existence of the bricks and the reorganization of power around countries like Brazil, South Africa, China, despite the fact that these are kind of emerging capitalists, often corporate powers themselves, the fact is the vast majority of industrial workers in the world, mostly in Asia, are producing surplus under conditions that really are, you know, at the edge of, if not actual slavery. So we still have the colonial relationship to produce that low wage market. We see it right here in Los Angeles, you know, I'm not too far from downtown where protests are erupting against ice. And what we're seeing in terms of corporate interests and the old systems is that this is a revolt of indigenous people who are on this land first before there was a border between Mexico and the US descended from being colonized and exploited for centuries by Spanish, by the English and by Americans, who then through free trade agreements and macadilla, macaduras and other systems have been reduced to less than living wages, find their way across a border that's not of their own making to try to make a living. And meanwhile, an element of corporate interests is able to take advantage of the presence of the state through ice to try to capture and force people out. When I say one element, there's another element of corporate power that actually doesn't want that to happen. They actually want low wage undocumented vulnerable labor. They want migrant outsourcing, right, as opposed to migrant outsourcing. So again, when we think about the old systems, I think old systems always fall apart and become new systems that look like the old systems. They carry with it the residue of the old systems. And that residue is precisely, again, the racialized hierarchy because they're only going to have the black, brown, Asian undocumented people. If they really were concerned about undocumented people, they'd be in my neighborhood, which is near Fairfax, which has a very large undocumented Israeli population, right, many ultra orthodox who just don't want to get citizenship or don't really believe in documentation. So then and over here, I should be everywhere here, but they're going after particular people. Now, how does this benefit corporations? Again, one element of corporate power saying we actually want cheap labor, there's another element of corporate power that says, you know, anything that could divide the working class is good. And if we can get all these folks, not just white workers, but others who claim a US citizenship in our convinced or being taught that their jobs are under attack, which is not true. If they could be that not true in terms of where the attack comes from, the jobs are under attack, but from capital, not from these poor workers. But if we can get them mobilized to support this violent siege on our fellow workers, what does it do? It shores up a segment of working class support for a fascist state and it allows for the suspension of law of habeas corpus of the very things that can be used again. and to rest those cats, right? So it's a win-win situation, despite the fact that a segment of the corporate sector will lose a portion, just a small portion, over slowwage labor, but it becomes a bludgeon to create low wages across the board. - When we witness over authoritarian tactics, like ice raids or violent crackdowns on protesters, there's often a collective sense of outrage. Across race, class, and citizenship status, my hope is that we can agree this isn't what safety looks like. The indiscriminate use of tear gas to suppress protesters is not what safety looks like. For context, tear gas is banned from use in war zones on our international law by the Geneva Convention of 1925. And yet, it is widely used by law enforcement domestically. We want peace in our neighborhoods, not policing the tears families apart and criminalize the survival. And yet, when it comes time to organize, when we move from protests to building real alternatives, that's where things often fracture. Not because people don't care, but because the differences between us shaped by generations of lived experience under racist, sexist, ableist, and xenophobic systems, makes solidarity feel complicated. Even if we understand that those divisions were constructed to maintain power, we're still navigating their impact in our daily lives. Class struggle doesn't erase identity. And sometimes, instead of uniting against shared material conditions, we find ourselves siloed, speaking past one another, and even mistrusting each other. So the question becomes, how do we move through that? How do we resist the urge to divide ourselves when the system already does that work for us? And maybe more importantly, who's showing us what that kind of solidarity can look like right now? Race, class, gender, ableism, or co-constitutive, they emerge together, they can't be separated. It's like curry. There's some spices that you can't even taste, but they're important, like fenugreek, right? But it's there, coriander, vitamin, it's all there. So it's like trying to fight over, you know, like what's more important, but it constitutes something else. That is the working class. So we see some of these elements in labor organizing, like unite here, in the most progressive elements of the service, employee, and international union, national nurses united, which is one of the greatest unions of all time, united all workers for democracy, southern worker power, black workers for justice, change to win. There's so many that are trying to build up an anti-racist class struggle, a feminist class struggle, right? An anti-abelist class struggle, you know, and they're doing so. But again, this other fight that's going on is kind of useless, I think. And so, you know, this is where we have to remember that there's a difference between a kind of upper class, defense of the black or brown CEO who's being discriminated against, which I don't lose sleep over, versus the fact that even something as basic as a firm of action, began not to try to get a new black middle class, but as a way to end the kind of glass ceilings that were imposed on black industrial workers in the auto industry, steel industry, in the electrical industry, right? All these different areas are trying to bring about fairness in the employment process. And if everyone in the class believed that, then you can imagine every single white worker would be doing everything that they can to fight for abortion rights, right? To fight against racism, to fight against deportation. They'd all be out there, but instead, they're not because of this kind of fake division. Systems of oppression are not separate tracks. While different struggles require different voices at the forefront, these systems still co-construct one another. They shape who gets protected, who gets paid, and who gets punished. Some of the most transformative labor movements today understand that building power means building across difference. But not all struggles are equal. There's a tendency, especially in liberal discourse, to center representation at the top, who's leading, who's excluded. And while discrimination in elite spaces matters, it's not the heart of the fight. We're not here to defend power. We're here to redistribute it. Liberation isn't only about who gets to sit in the board room. It's about who gets to live with dignity. So what does that future look like? When the goal isn't to climb the existing ladder, but to imagine something entirely different? Well, of course, the first steps, or the big steps, are the two things have to go. Modern capitalism and systemic racism. Now, I know, like in your show, we do with a lot of people who believe in corporate responsibility. I'm not against that. But in the long run, I just don't think our planet won't survive, because corporations can never be responsible if they're making the rules, right? Absolutely, because self-regulation is not viable. We cannot trust corporations to make decisions to center people in the planet, especially when we are working within a hyper capitalist system where the fiduciary duty is to shareholder profits. Exactly, exactly, which is why I like your show. But I would go even one step further. Certainly, the planet is what we're fighting. And then by planet, I mean, all life itself. We won't survive under gendered racial capitalism. But we also need to decolonize. Because again, the colonial conjuncture is the thing that has shaped the last half a millennium and is still with us. And I return to what I think is one of the most important documents produced in the last 10 years. And that is the red nation producing a manifesto called the red deal. And I won't repeat within it, but I suggest people read it. But the suggesting that when we have to free the land from the hold of the colonial capitalist relations that have been opposed on it is killing it and restore that land to its rightful stewards. Land back is not a dream. It's about reorganizing our relationship to land. So the earth could flourish. People could flourish. Life could flourish. And this is what it means to save the planet. But it also means rejecting the idea of land as property, which speaks not only to how we have to decolonize land, but also how we have to think of freedom not based on ownership or possession. Liberty was the key word in the creation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but that liberty was based again on property. I imagine a liberated life, which requires a radically ordering of things, of taking resources that we use for a coercive arm at the state, prisons, police, military, and move it toward real education, universal health care, no one should pay for health care, housing. And we haven't talked about this, but we're dealing with another kind of genocide. And we're certainly dealing with genocide in Gaza, but there's another genocide having in North America against trans people. And so liberation means freeing our minds and the body from all the constraints of the kind of imposed normativities so that people could be free, bodily free, free in terms of their identities, and also that requires ending all borders to be able to create a different kind of planet. And people say, oh, that's impossible. It can't be impossible, and I could prove it, because it wasn't always like this. True liberation challenges fundamental assumptions around land, property, borders, and identity. It calls for dismantling the systems we know and rebuilding something that isn't highly new to us. However, this liberated version of the future would not necessarily be the first of its kind. As Dr. Kelly said, it wasn't always like this. Property has long been the legal and ideological backbone of systems designed to exploit and extract. turning everything in. culture and tradition into tradable commodities. What's been codified as property in law has often been violently stolen, land, labor, bodies. This legal fiction masks histories of dispossession, making theft appear legitimate and resistance criminal. By enshrining ownership through conquest, property law has functioned as a weapon of control, ownership, and theft. That theft wasn't just physical. It was narrative. Colonial and capitalist systems didn't just claim ownership. They rewrote legitimacy and shrining stolen wealth as natural and embedding those justifications into everything from constitutions to classroom curricula. Exactly. And let me just add one more thing to this about who defines property. I mean, the amazing thing about the fetishism of property rights in, you know, European law is that 90% of the property in the world became property after was stolen. So would you think about it? I mean, if we were to really be strictly legal, then there would have to be reparations paid to every former colony, to every, not just descendants of enslaved people, in native peoples, but all those who are connected to them. I mean, so imagine what it means, how, like the hypocrisy of going around the world, taking all the stuff, then declaring it yours and then imposing property rights on those things that you just stole. So when we hear calls for land back or redistributing state resources away from prisons and policing towards education and care, it's not about symbolic gestures. It's about refusing the foundational logic of conquest and commodification. It's about imagining freedom outside the bounds of ownership, outside human domination, over land, over life, over each other. When we talk about slavery and capitalism so often, the focus is on markets, right? And on, like, how many bushels, how many bells of cotton and how much sugarcane is produced and how much money is flowing, but the secret, the key to understanding the relationship between saving capitalism is that the enslaved African was a worker, was the first industrial proletariat in a new world. And if I could just make a plug, David McNally has a new book about to come out about saving capitalism, which I think is one of the best things I've ever read under subject. But what he recognizes that you go back 90 years to W. B. DeBoys' Black Reconstruction to C. L. R. James is the Black Jacobins, two of the greatest history books ever written, as far as I'm concerned. And they make the point that, you know, they first modern proletariat, industrial proletariat working along industrial lines were enslaved people. And what that means is that they were the labor movement and they were the key because what you can't do with workers that you can do probably with cows and goats and chickens is you can't control them so much. They produce surplus, but they also do things to disrupt the process. So let's step back for a second. The emancipation proclamation did not free any slaves. I mean, technically no one, because it wasn't meant to end slavery was meant as a war document to demand that certain states that are in rebellion that those enslaved people are free. So the ideas that you're telling people they're free, hoping that their own agency as runaways would lead to the end of the Confederacy. Now, in other words, with ironic as the emancipation proclamation, depended on Black people's agency. It really did. Emancipation relied fundamentally on the agency of enslaved peoples themselves through acts of resistance, escape, rebellion, and everyday defiance. Far from being passive recipients of freedom enslaved people actively undermined the institution of slavery from within. These acts of resistance were not isolated. They were part of a broader collective movement of self liberation, ultimately paving the way for constitutional change. So when we understand emancipation as self emancipation, but not just as emancipation, but as a revolution, a revolution that was defeated, then everything looks different. And again, this is not new. I mean, the boy said it, and when you read some of the testimony of the man, and in this case, Harriet Tubman, who led a campaign, a military campaign on behalf of the Union Army to free 750 slaves in Combine South Carolina. It's an amazing story. But here are people who brought freedom to America when the Constitution itself did not have any provisions for that kind of freedom. It was that blood and sweat and escape and determination that resulted in the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendment, which is why I tell my students, they're the authors of those documents. They're the authors of that law. The authors of those amendments, right? Through their blood. As we conclude, let us remember the Juneteenth is not simply a commemoration of a past victory. It is a living reminder of the ongoing struggle for freedom. For centuries, black people in the US have waged a self-determined unrelenting fight against enslavement, dispossession, racial capitalism, and systemic violence. This struggle has never been passive. It has continually forced systems of power to adapt, mutate, and reinvent themselves just to survive. And yet, black resistance endures, refusing to be subdued. That legacy offers all of us a powerful lesson. Systems of domination are not invincible. They depend on our resignation, but when we resist, when we organize, speak out, and imagine boldly, we chip away at their foundation. Let the enduring fight for black liberation serve not just as history, but as a guide. Because if power must constantly reassert itself in the face of resistance, then every act of struggle brings us closer to a world where it finally loosens its grip. Collective liberation recognizes that our struggles are interconnected, that none of us are free until we all are free, and that a society that denies freedom to the most oppressed cannot offer justice to anyone. I'd like to sincerely thank Dr. Robin D. G. Kelly for joining me today and lending such a powerful insight on the complex issues that we tackle together. We hope you found this episode particularly resonant, and if so, we encourage you to please share, discuss, and reflect on this conversation, especially during these difficult times. Cultivating a new path forward is radical and is necessary, so we hope this episode helps steward those efforts. Our ifs visionary is entirely listener supported. I truly hope you consider contributing to it by visiting artisasonry.com/support. Please remember to subscribe to artis visionary wherever you listen to podcasts, and give it five stars. Thank you to our producer Ali Oneray and editor Noah Kowalski. Original theme music is by Katrina Sembrak.