It may seem bleak, but Robin D.G Kelley’s view of the world says there is no promise of liberation, only struggle. Kelley has spent his career bringing to life the stories of the Black labor organizers and anti-capitalists who are often left out of history books, from radical farmers in the South to Black unions during the Gilded Age. And he’s come to a provocative conclusion: that the secret to capitalism’s survival is racism. His scholarship uses historical connections between race and labor to directly challenge the premise that there can be any justice within America’s current economic system — and to ask what that means for the people who seek it. This week on Throughline, a view of Black history you don’t often hear in February.

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