Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of a LeftPodcast.

This is a sample of our recent bonus episode every couple of weeks or so, our crew of researchers,

Amanda and myself get together for a roundtable discussion.

So here's a few minutes for free so you can see what all the fuss is about.

I was thinking about the effort that is being made by capitalizing black, like what is it

trying to do versus what it actually is doing and what it reminded me of was Obamacare?

Because we had a terrible system that should be fundamentally changed and Obamacare attempted

to make that fundamentally terrible system a little bit better, but actually while doing

that further entrenched the systems of power that are making it terrible.

And so in trying to capitalize the B and black, it seems like what we are doing is acquiescing

to the premise that there are these categories that mean something.

And as long as you're going to have categories that mean something, well then you better

give them the respect they deserve by capitalizing them.

However, what might be better in the long run is to demand an abolition of those categories.

And so again, bringing back to the article that is sort of what is being argued.

So just to read a little bit more, it says, the philosopher Denise Ferreira de Silva suggests

that concepts like culture and race both attempt to schematize the world to partition it

into classifications that can be separated from each other by rigid boundaries.

As she and other philosophers have argued, these efforts to render the world legible by

demarcating it with impermeable conceptual boundaries are a defining feature of modernity,

but not an absolute or inevitable element of human life.

It can be difficult to bring this phenomenon of categorical distinction into view, not

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