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Labor History Reading Group—Racism and Class Struggle in 1960s-1970s Industrial America: Black Workers, the Auto Industry, and Detroit
February 16, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm CST
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A conversation with historian Jordan T. Camp
Register here to receive the Zoom link and reading for this event
This month, ESFL is providing multiple opportunities to explore the experiences of African American workers in US history and the complex interactions between race and class. For our monthly Labor History Reading Group, we are reading and discussing a chapter from Jordan Camp’s book Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (2016): “Finally Got the News: Urban Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, and the Crisis of Hegemony in Detroit.” When you register for the conversation, we will email you a pdf of the reading.
We are delighted that, in this era of Zoom, Dr. Camp will be joining us for our conversation. He is a Visiting Scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Racial Capitalism Working Group in the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. In addition to writing Incarcerating the Crisis, Dr. Camp is co-editor (with Christina Heatherton) of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016), and co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of the late Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017). His work also appears in venues such as American Quarterly, Antipode, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Eurozine, Jacobin, and Race & Class. He is currently working on a new book entitled, The Long Vendetta: Black Freedom and Carceral Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century.
We hope you have had an opportunity to view the film, Finally Got the News. It will be available on ESFL’s YouTube channel on February 12th. In this essay, Dr. Camp digs deeply into Detroit in 1968, exploring the relationship between the crisis of hegemony and mass anti-racist and class struggle in that period. He also raises the difficult question: What can we learn when revolutionaries have failed to achieve their goals? Please join us for what is certain to be a lively conversation.