The Forum with Ian Haney López

The Forum at Grace Cathedral

From the acclaimed author of Dog Whistle Politics, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America is an essential road map to neutralizing the role of racism as a divide-and-conquer political weapon and to building a broad multiracial progressive future.

“Ian Haney López has broken the code on the racial politics of the last fifty years.”―Bill Moyers

In 2014, Ian Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics, named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing politicians over the last half century―and thereby anticipated the 2016 presidential election. Now the country is heading into what will surely be one of the most consequential elections ever—again — with the Right gearing up to exploit racial fear-mongering to divide and distract, and the Left splintered over the next step forward. Some want to focus on racial justice head-on; others insist that a race-silent focus on class avoids alienating white voters.

Can either approach―race-forward or colorblind―build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country’s direction?

Over two years, Haney López collaborated with a research team of union activists, racial justice leaders, communications specialists, and pollsters. Based on conversations, interviews, and surveys with thousands of people all over the country, the team found a way forward.

By merging the fights for racial justice and for shared economic prosperity, they were able to build greater enthusiasm for both goals―and for the cross-racial solidarity needed to win elections. What does this mean? It means that neutralizing the Right’s political strategy of racial division is possible, today. And that’s the key to everything progressives want to achieve.

Two days before the Presidential Primary Election, join Grace Cathedral Trustee Tobias Keller for a conversation with Haney López about the upcoming political season and the larger fight to build racial justice and shared economic prosperity for all of us.

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About the Guest

Ian Haney López is a law professor at UC Berkeley who studies racism. His focus for the last decade has been on the use of racism as a class weapon in electoral politics, and how to respond. In Dog Whistle Politics (2014), he detailed the fifty-year history of coded racism in American politics. Ian has since actively promoted the idea of a race-class fusion as the basis for a multi-racial progressive majority. He co-chaired the AFL-CIO’s Advisory Council on Racial and Economic Justice, along with Dorian Warren and Ana Avendaño, and founded the Race-Class Narrative Project, along with Anat Shenker-Osorio and Heather McGhee. In his latest book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America (2019), Ian explains Trump’s complex relationship with dog whistling and further develops the race-class response. Ian is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published four books and two anthologies, and has been a visiting professor at Yale, New York University, and Harvard. He lives in Richmond, California.

About the Moderator 

Tobias Keller counsels clients in a variety of industries dealing with financial distress, advising on dislocations arising from excessive leverage, uncontrolled litigation or unanticipated employee or vendor problems, and the governance questions that arise in connection with those challenges. He regularly lectures for organizations on governance, distressed mergers and acquisitions and various restructuring topics. He is a fellow in the American College of Bankruptcy and has been recognized as a leading lawyer in publications including Chambers USA. He is the Vice Chair of the Grace Cathedral Board of Trustees.

   

About The Forum  

The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum’s host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.  More about Grace Forum Online:  

gracecathedral.org/the-forum.