Laundering Black Rage: Capitalism, Empire, and The Mechanics of Co-optation
Revolutionary Left Radio
Breht O'Shea
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2024
⏱️ 137 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rasul Mowatt and Too Black join Breht to discuss their new book Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. The book is a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State that examines how Black Rage—conceived as a constructive and logical response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings racialized as Black—is cleaned for the unyielding means of White capital. Interlacing political theory with international histories of Black rebellion, it presents a thoughtful challenge to the counterinsurgent tactics of the State that consistently convert Black Rage into a commodity to be bought, sold, and repressed. Laundering Black Rage investigates how the Rage directed at the police murder of George Floyd could be marshalled to funnel the Black Lives Matter movement into corporate advertising and questionable leadership, while increasing the police budgets inside the laundry cities of capital - largely with our consent.
Essayist/Performer Too Black and Geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital and the established order of things, which must therefore be managed by the process of laundering.
Intertwining stories of Black resistance throughout the African diaspora, State building under capitalism, cities as sites of laundering, and the world making of empire, Laundering Black Rage also lays the groundwork for upending the laundering process through an anti-colonial struggle of reverse-laundering conquest. Relevant to studies of race and culture, history, politics, and the built environment, this pathbreaking work is essential reading for scholars and organizers enraged at capitalism and White supremacy laundering their work for nefarious means.
Check out The Black Myths Podcast
You can find the book HERE
(25% Discount code at checkout: EFLY01)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode we have on |
| 0:10.5 | Rasul Moat and Two Black who co-authored the book Laundering Black Rage, |
| 0:16.4 | The Washing of Black Death People, Property and Profits. |
| 0:19.6 | It just came out a little earlier this month, think early April and they are on the show to discuss |
| 0:26.4 | this book and just have a incredibly wide-ranging rich and deep conversation and |
| 0:32.3 | analysis about Black Rage about the 2020 George Floyd |
| 0:38.1 | protests, the sort of deep materialist analysis of what those protests actually represented the |
| 0:44.6 | co-optive mechanisms of the state and how they kicked in during and after that |
| 0:50.9 | protest we go all the way back to the Tulsa race riots in the 1920s, the massacre |
| 0:57.0 | that ensued there, doing a lot of corrective work on a lot of the fiction and fantasy built up around that massacre and the advancing of the |
| 1:06.7 | black Wall Street narrative which is a mystification of the actual class divisions and the actual concrete material reality of that |
| 1:15.6 | situation I found that fascinating we talk about so much in this episode the |
| 1:20.9 | the book is incredibly deep and rich in its analysis and we get some of that here in this conversation, but of course there's never a substitute for the book itself. |
| 1:31.0 | Luckily, Two Black gave me a 25% off code for the book because the book is a little bit pricey. |
| 1:38.0 | So I'll link to that in the show notes so people can get just right off the top 25% off of their book making it much more |
| 1:44.2 | accessible hopefully to more people highly recommend people check that out I |
| 1:47.6 | highly recommend people check out to Black's podcast that he does with |
| 1:51.3 | several other comrades called the Black Myts |
| 1:53.8 | podcast. It's incredibly good podcast. I'm not just saying that I |
| 1:58.0 | genuinely subscribe to it. I genuinely listen to it and I highly |
| 2:02.1 | highly encourage people right now to go download |
| 2:05.0 | subscribe whatever your podcast app that you prefer is |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Breht O'Shea, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Breht O'Shea and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.