“Café en casa” with Andrew J. Douglas, Jared A. Loggins, and Rachel Harding: Watch the Recording

Note: The latest episode of “Café en casa” was recorded on December 6, 2021. Guests included Andrew J. Douglas, Jared A. Loggins, and Rachel Harding. “Café en casa” is a virtual series created by the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), bringing together scholars and activists across generations in dialogue on research and memory—on what it means to achieve greater equality, liberation, and human dignity at the local, national, regional, and global levels.

On December 6, 2021, Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins—co-authors of Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (2021)—came into dialogue with Rachel Harding on Martin Luther King Jr., Vincent and Rosemarie Harding, racial capitalism, the Institute of the Black World, and the academe both past and present.

Douglas and Loggins’ book, Prophet of Discontent, reconstructs, in the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., a critical theory of racial capitalism. And in their recently co-authored in the Boston Review, “The Lost Promise of Black Studies,” Loggins and Douglas highlight the efforts of historian Vincent Harding to found the Institute of the Black World (IBW), which as the authors explain, “was established to carry forth a mode of Black scholarship in the spirit of King’s later work. Thus, it represents a case study in the challenges, both epistemic and material, of planning and building the beloved community from within the confines of the racial capitalist world order.”

The two authors were in conversation with Harding's daughter, Rachel Harding who is an associate professor of indigenous spiritual traditions at the University of Colorado Denver. Dr. Harding is author of A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (2000) and Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism and Mothering (2015), which combines her own writings with those of her mother, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, on the role of compassion and spirituality in African American social justice organizing.