Robin D.G. Kelley, "Cops, Capitalism, Counter-war: Scenes from the Struggle for Black Life"

The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public – a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University) , Glen Coulthard (University of British Columbia), Jack Halberstam (Columbia University) and Robin Kelley (UCLA).

Robin D. G. Kelley's lecture is entitled "Cops, Capitalism, Counter-war: Scenes from the Struggle for Black Life." In this talk I contend that struggles to end state-sanctioned racial violence and the very conditions that made Black people vulnerable to premature death, held out the possibility for a robust anti-capitalist movement. Rebellions against police killings also focused on jobs, wages, and a predatory criminal legal system that extracts millions of dollars from mostly poor, Black communities, while cutting funding for education, affordable housing, and essential services. Without diminishing workplace struggles, I argue that it is in the war for Black life, what Orisanmi Burton calls “counter-war,” that abolitionist alternatives to police, prisons, and capitalism itself are born.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, and Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life (forthcoming). His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, New York Review of Books, American Quarterly, and The Boston Review, for which he is Contributing Editor.