Socialist Night School - Antiracist Socialism: Building a Multiracial Working Class Coalition

Start: 2020-11-10 19:30:00 UTC Central Daylight Time (US & Canada) (GMT-05:00)

This is a virtual event

The Fall 2020 STL DSA Socialist Night School continues!

The Socialist Night School is open to anybody interested in learning more about the ideas and history behind left and socialist movements. Like most STL DSA events, we will be conducting these virtually, via Zoom, at least through the end of 2020.

This week we'll be discussing why our class struggle must also be antiracist. There are unique ways in which class and capitalism oppress people of color, so we should pay close attention to those hurdles in order to build a socialist future that functions for everyone. People of color make up a large share of the working class, so a movement that does not include them and speak to their needs cannot succeed. This requires us all to do both internal work (decolonizing our minds) and external work (building multiracial coalitions). We'll talk about the importance of antiracism in our anticapitalism and strategies for committing to it.

We'll be discussing three readings (but we encourage you to attend even if you don't read them!):
The first is an excerpt from Ibram X. Kendi's book How to be an Antiracistwhich gives a primer on how race and class are intertwined.
The second is the Combahee River Collective Statement, written by a group of Black feminists in 1977 which still functions as a guiding light for many who work on antiracism.
The third is an article by DSA comrades in Chicago about how we can go about building true cross-racial solidarity and multiracial organizations.

Hope to see you there! Note that, upon RSVPing, you will receive a message providing details for the Zoom call.