[On March 29, 2019, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted a keynote address by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Grad Center, CUNY) entitled "What is the Racial in Racial Capitalism? Magic, Partition, Politics," as part of the Racial Capitalism Symposium. Below is a response by Ezgi Guner (Anthropology] Rehearsing the Revolution Written by Ezgi Guner Early on a Friday morning, the Knight Auditorium was filled up for Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s keynote lecture, “What is the Racial in Racial Capitalism? Magic, Partition, Politics.” Not surprisingly, Professor Gilmore started off the Racial Capitalism conference with a quote from Black Marxism: “The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate-to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.” By revisiting Cedric Robinson, whose seminal work has laid the ground for all subsequent research in the field, Professor Gilmore reminded her audience that racial practice neither began with the development of capitalism nor has it emerged from the encounter with the non-European Others. She then tied Robinson’s historical argument to her own conceptualization of racism as exposure of certain populations to premature death. Yet, Professor Gilmore warned the audience in a brief “scolding” moment to be mindful of how we deploy our concepts so that they won’t become the grease of the machinery we are trying to stop. The lecture was composed of two parts. The first and autobiographical part focused on the intellectual, theoretical, and political trajectory of a generation of activists and scholars gathered around the Southern California Reading Group in the late 1980s. The second part focused on the experiences of community organizing against prison expansion in Central California in the late 1990s and early 2000s. [caption id="attachment_1901" align="align-right" width="375"] Stuart Hall[/caption] Being introduced to the works of Stuart Hall through his student Hazel Carby’s writing, the reading group explored not only a new theoretical model, but also new ways of engaging with theory. For Hall, social theory was action. It involved both analyzing and changing “the global maldistribution of material and symbolic resources.” Reading theory in order to recite was therefore bad reading. In becoming better readers, the group started rehearsing what they read through performance and improvisation as interpretive practices. Rehearsing required patience and a good amount of waiting and trying. To the organizers full of rage, C.L.R. James reminded, “revolutions happen because people wait and wait and try.” In the second part of her lecture, Professor Gilmore turned to political struggles on the ground as rehearsals of freedom and read excerpts from the forthcoming second edition of Golden Gulag. Founded in 1998, the California Prison Moratorium Project reached out to locals who opposed the building of a new prison in their town and organized resistance at the grassroots level in solidarity with labor unions. A mobile organizing unit traveled across California and met farmers and farm workers in order to stop prisons that would render them and their loved ones vulnerable to incarceration, rehearsing the revolution. Professor Gilmore stressed the urgency of grassroots mobilization against prisons by remarking that 70 million people that make up half of the US workforce face structural impediments to employment because of arrest or conviction records. [caption id="attachment_1903" align="alignnone" width="863"] William H. Johnson. Chain Gang. 1939-40. Smithsonian Museum of American Art.[/caption] Later in the conference, extending the discussion from racial oppression and expropriation in the United States, to the workings of financialized capitalism in and across the global South, Professor Gilmore emphasized that every capitalism is racial capitalism. Even if the whites evaporated from the surface of the earth, capitalism would remain racist. After all, “capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it.”