Subject for Chapters:
These two chapters, with a combined Grant of $1,600, will cover a historical analysis of the social construction of ‘race’, with the advent of the slave trade, plantation systems, and implementing racism as a concept of social control and domination; included is a history of poverty in the modern era, with the advent of social welfare programs implemented by states as a method of social control to protect against rebellion and revolution from below, but also to maintain low living standards of those in poverty in order to make permanent a dependent labor force; the abolition of slavery in the United States, leading to the Reconstruction period, and subsequently, the North-South ‘compact’ that followed which implemented a new form of slavery through criminalization, the prison system, and its use of prison labour; the relationship between poverty, labour, and race; the role of major foundations in managing the black population of the United States and elsewhere (establishing their educational systems, social welfare provisions, etc.); the poverty, resistance, and unrest which grew out of the Great Depression, and the subsequent social welfare programs implemented for the purpose of social control, as well as their implications for race relations at the time; the development of ghettos in the United States, the role of foundations and states in this process, in order to manage the migration of black Americans from the south to urban areas; the origins and development of the Civil Rights movement, its revolutionary potential and the role of foundations in preventing that potential from being reached; welfare, social services, and other state programs designed to manage the ‘poor’ and especially the black population of the United States; the “War on Poverty” (as a “War on the Poor”); the “crisis of democracy” that emerged in the 1970s as a result of what the Trilateral Commission called an “excess of democracy”, and the innovative methods of managing this: expansion of the prison system, Drug War legal discrimination against black Americans, increased prison labour, student debt, poverty management; and global implications of the race-poverty dichotomy: expansion of poverty in the ‘Third World’, effects of poverty, racial discrimination, origins and development of slums (global ghettos), etc.
For a sample of the research, ideas, and focus of these chapters, see:
“An Empire of Poverty: Race, Punishment, and Social Control”
Please contribute to The People’s Grant!
