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Hi, I'm Adam Shatz. Our guest today on the LRB podcast is Keenga Yamada Taylor. Taylor is a professor of African-American studies at Princeton and the author of Race for Profit, How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership, from hashtag Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation,

and how we get free, black feminism and the Kobamhi River Collective.

As a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a columnist for the New Yorker.com,

she has emerged in the last few years as one of our most important

commentators on the political economy of race, class, and gender in America. She's an activist

intellectual, an academic who hasn't forgotten her background as an organizer, which gives her work

not only its analytic power, but a rare urgency.

When I see her byline, I put everything down because I want to know what she's thinking.

Keenga has been kind enough to take time out of her very packed schedule to discuss the extraordinary events in America and the world of the last few weeks,

the uprising against police brutality and other forms of injustice that erupted after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

We're also going to talk about the history that preceded this moment, a history to which her own work has been an acutely illuminating guide.

Kiena, welcome to the LRB podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Very glad to be here.

You're in Philadelphia, and I just read that Daniel Outlaw, the police commissioner in the city

where you live, has announced a moratorium on the use of tear gas and apologized for its use

in a protest in early June. That's Danielle outlaw, and she is the new police chief. I think she just got here in January.

She and the mayor, Jim Kenny, had a press conference yesterday. It was a very curious affair

because they essentially admitted to lying

weeks earlier. The police in Philadelphia shot tear gas at a peaceful demonstration that

had taken over a highway, but it was an act of civil disobedience. And the police lied and said that people threw rocks at them and were threatening officers.

And not only were there witnesses, also members of the clergy, also reporters who denied this,

...