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Assata Told Me - Black Lives, Mass Incarceration, and State Violence / Donna Murch

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White nationalism predates neoliberalism, it goes back to the very origins and the settlement of the United States and it predates the period that we would think of as the industrialization in the nineteenth century. It really is a very, very large force in the origins of the United States. The downward mobility of the white population is crucial to understand the kinds of counterrevolutionary forces that we are facing today. However if you look at who went to January 6, who was there, and I was watching this very carefully at the time, and thought that this was not the lens that Rachel Maddow was providing, these were not racial deplorables, of essentially white riff-raff. Because this was initially how January 6 was reported on, and these were people of some means. The investigations found that ninety percent of the people that were there were not part of white supremacist organizations. Most of them were business owners. We have a son of a New York court judge from Brooklyn. Most of these people are middle class or upper middle class elites. And that means we have a vast white nationalist movement that has been fueled by the fury and anger created by white downward mobility. This is a very dangerous revanchist force, but it is important to note that it is a cross-class, racial phenomenon.

Historian Donna Murch talks about her book "Assata Taught Me: Black Lives, Mass Incarceration, and State Violence."

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Donna Murch

Donna Murch is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

 

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