Ian Haney Lopez: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America
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Ian Haney López is a law professor and commentator on coded racism in American politics. His most recent book is Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America (New Press, Fall 2019).
Merge Left builds on his previous book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (2014). That book anticipated the political tactics of Donald Trump by tracking the fifty-year history of politicians helping the new oligarchs through a strategy of racial divide-and-conquer.
Merge Left explains how the political exploitation of coded racism has evolved under Trump—and outlines an evidence-based approach on how to beat it. The evidence comes from the two-year race-class narrative research project involving focus groups and national polling. The main takeaway from the extensive research is that naming racism as a weapon of the rich and calling for coming together across racial lines proved to be the most effective way to defang the Right’s racial fear narratives and to build broad cross-racial support for racial justice as well as for economic populism.
Ian holds an endowed chair as the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law.
Interview Highlights:
How Ian first got interested in the work he is doing today
The work of the Race-Class Project and how it identified a winning message
Why naming racism as a weapon of the rich and calling for cross-racial solidarity builds unity across the base and enlists the broad middle in supporting progressive dreams
What folks can do now to engage with this exciting new information
Help these ideas reach more eyes & ears:
LIFT Economy is an impact consulting firm whose mission is to create, model, and share a locally self-reliant economy that works for the benefit of all life.
Ryan Honeyman is a Partner at LIFT Economy and author of The B Corp Handbook: How to Use Business as a Force for Good (Berrett-Koehler Publishers). You can follow Ryan on Twitter @honeymanconsult or email him ryan@lifteconomy.com.