IAN HANEY LÓPEZ
MERGE LEFT: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America
With Saru Jayaraman
“With great clarity and thoughtfulness, Ian Haney López shows why the path
to a truly just society lies in a multi-racial coalition of poor, working and
middle-class Americans…Powerful, urgent, and timely.”
––Robert B. Reich
“In Dog Whistle Politics” López explained how coded racism in politics tears us
apart. He shows us how we can come together again in his new book, Merge Left.”
—Van Jones
Ian Haney teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law. One of the nation’s leading thinkers on how racism has evolved since the civil rights era, his current research emphasizes the connection between racial divisions in society and growing wealth inequality in the United States. In Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (2014), Haney López detailed the fifty-year history of how politicians exploit racial pandering to fracture social solidarity and ultimately to convince many voters to support rule by the rich. After publishing Dog Whistle Politics, Haney López co-chaired the AFL-CIO’s Advisory Council on Racial and Economic Justice and then co-founded the Race-Class Narrative Project, exploring how to defeat dog whistle politics. His most recent book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America (2019), explains how the political manipulation of coded racism has evolved in the Trump era, while also offering an evidence-based approach to neutralizing political racism and building cross-racial solidarity. Haney López holds an endowed chair as the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of White by Law as well as Racism on Trial, books that respectively critique the legal construction of white and Latinx racial identity
Saru Jayaraman is the President of One Fair Wage, Co-Founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United), and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. Saru is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was profiled in the New York Times “Public Lives” section in 2005, named one of Crain’s “40 Under 40” in 2008, was 1010 Wins’ “Newsmaker of the Year” and New York Magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City. She was listed in CNN’s “Top10 Visionary Women” and recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014, and a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015. Saru authored Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), a national bestseller. Her most recent book is Forked: A New Standard for American Dining.” In 2019, she was named the San Francisco Chronicle Visionary of the Year.
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical legacy, please join the Bay Area Poor People’s Campaign for a screening of a 45-minute sneak preview of We Cried Power, a documentary about the current Poor People’s Campaign. Martin Luther King Jr launched the first Poor People’s Campaign with a march on Washington in 1967.
“Public safety” has often been used to justify increasing police presence in communities of color, prosecuting quality of life offenses, and continuing the crisis of mass incarceration. After decades of policies reinforcing increased interactions with the criminal justice system, it is clear that these policies are not working. Join the San Francisco chapter of the ACLU and its guest panelists as we explore how alternatives to policing and incarceration are ultimately more effective ways to promote public safety for all of us.
