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Births of a Nation: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson

CEDRIC ROBINSON WAS FOND of quoting his friend and colleague Otis Madison: “The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people, not Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.” Robinson used the quote as an epigraph for a chapter in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007), titled, “In the Year 1915: D. W. Griffith and the Rewhitening of America.” When people ask what I think Robinson would have said about the election of Donald Trump, I point to these texts as evidence that he had already given us a framework to make sense of this moment and its antecedents.

Robinson’s work—especially his lesser-known essays on democracy, identity, fascism, film, and racial regimes—has a great deal to teach us about Trumpism’s foundations, about democracy’s endemic crises, about the racial formation of the white working class, and about the significance of resistance in determining the future.

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Winter 2017
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Boston Review
Introduction
CEDRIC J. ROBINSON’S PASSING this summer at the age
Triptych
But for is always game. A man can be murdered twice
To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice
To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and
History Matters
WALTER JOHNSON ARGUES AGAINST a triumphalist narrative
Abolition as Market Regulation
WHAT LANGUAGE SHOULD WE use when we talk about slavery?
The Gong of History; Or, What Is a Human?
EVERY GREAT HISTORICAL EPOCH in the freedom struggle
Theories of Justice
RETHINKING OUR NOTION OF JUSTICE through the history
Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat
OUR IDEA OF RACIAL CAPITALISM, as Walter Johnson explains
Reviving the Black Radical Tradition
WALTER JOHNSON IS UPSET at the state of the historiography
Putting Rights in Their Place
WALTER JOHNSON GIVES A BRACING critique of two ways
What Slavery Tells Us about Marx
Following W. E. B. Du Bois and Cedric Robinson, Walter
When Liberalism Defended Slavery
Walter Johnson demonstrates how little liberal humanism
Black Humanity and Black Power
BLACK HUMANITY IS UNEXCEPTIONAL, Walter Johnson exhorts.
This, Our Second Nadir
IT HAS BEEN WORSE. Let’s not forget “The Nadir,” as
Racial Capitalism and Human Rights
Are we not coming more and more, day by day, to making
Lake Michigan, Scene 22
And I point to the list of the names of the missing
From Good Stock / Strange Blood Dawn
Symptomatic of being a slave is to forget you’re a
Further Reading
In addition to the work of our contributors, the editors
Contributors
Dwayne Betts is a poet, memoirist, and teacher. His