Episode 16: Michael Dawson

Black Work Talk

In this sixteenth episode of Black Work Talk, our guest is Michael Dawson. Michael is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he has written extensively about the intertwined nature of Black politics and Left politics. Currently, he co-leads the Race and Capitalism Project that seeks to understand how the racial and capitalist systems of domination interact. And all of this work is grounded in his years of labor and community activism.

We had a wide-ranging conversation on a variety of topics including:

• The nature of our current neoliberal racial order
• The differences between Black liberals and Black leftists
• The changes in Black civil society over the past 60 years

For more background on Michael Dawson and his work, here are links:

• The Race and Capitalism Project (https://www.raceandcapitalism.com/)
• The New Dawn podcast
• A couple of articles:
• http://bostonreview.net/forum/future-black-politics-dawson
• “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order” Michael Dawson and Megan Ming Francis” Public Culture (2016) 28 (1 (78)): 23–62.
• His most recent book: Blacks In and Out of the Left