Hope comes from community, and while the errors here are mine, this book would not exist without a marvelous community of family, friends, and fellow travelers.
The continuity between Merge Left and my prior book, Dog Whistle Politics, includes those who made both possible. My daughter Chelsea and granddaughter Lennea provided sounding boards with their own perspectives on racial justice, and my wife, Debbie, to whom this book is dedicated, both endured its writing and also made it immeasurably better through her keen editing. Asad Rahim, a research assistant on the prior book, offered critical feedback on a draft of this one. Claudette Silver helped promote Dog Whistle Politics and proved indispensable to Merge Left, fostering the connections that would develop into the race-class narrative project and also offering very helpful insights and probing questions in response to multiple drafts.
With Dog Whistle Politics, I developed many new relationships, and in particular learned a great deal from working with the AFL-CIO. I especially benefited from the insights of my fellow co-chairs of the Advisory Council on Racial and Economic Justice, Ana Avendaño and Dorian Warren, as well as from the support of AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. Among others, these union leaders notably pushed forward the race and class conversation: United Food and Commercial Workers president Marc Perrone, United Steelworkers executive vice president Fred Redmond, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades president Kenneth Rigmaiden, International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers president James Boland, and Canada’s Building Trades Unions director Bob Blakely. I also greatly benefitted from conversations with Carmen Berkley, Tefere Gebre, Jon Hiatt, Lisa Jordan, Tiffany Loftin, Katherine McFate, Kelly Fay Rodríguez, Damon Silvers, and Robin Williams.
AFL-CIO political director Mike Podhorzer deserves special mention. He played a key role in jump-starting and guiding the race-class narrative project, and battled through three complete drafts of the book, generously sharing insights and raising challenging questions. This book would have been further improved had I realized the friendship would have survived my imposing the next three drafts as well.
The race-class narrative team provided research, insights, conversations, and thoughtful pushback that shaped this book. Anat Shenker-Osorio took the lead on research, coordinated with the pollsters, offered tutorials on narrative strategy, raised funds, rocked colorful shoes, and helped rescue an early draft of this book. Heather McGhee, an early supporter of Dog Whistle Politics, was the other principal partner and offered her own keen insights on the tricky intersection of race and class and also, through her presidency of Demos and DemosAction, provided the race-class project an initial home. Other key contributors at Demos and DemosAction included Liz Doyle, Tamara Draut, Anika Fassia, Adam Lioz, Rodney McKenzie, and Causten Rodriguez-Wollerman.
The Service Employees International Union under the leadership of international president Mary Kay Henry and secretary-treasurer Gerry Hudson constituted a key partner in the race-class narrative project. The SEIU’s Racial Justice Center, including Tinselyn Simms, Liz Grez, Kerry Jones, and Bernard Moore, joined as an initial partner and continue to promote and develop the research. I’m also grateful to SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, as well as Faith in Minnesota, for allowing me to use the flyers they created for their canvassing test of the race-class message.
The race-class narrative project drew on two primary pollsters, Cornell Belcher of Brilliant Corners, assisted by Dee Brown, and Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners. I’m exceptionally grateful to Celinda for insights before and after the research, and to Lake Research partner Jonathan Voss, who did much of the heavy lifting for the project, and also very generously responded in detail to an early draft and helped create the graphics for Merge Left. I and the entire race-class team are also tremendously grateful to the many anonymous activists and scholars who agreed to serve as intellectual resources for the project.
Funding for the race-class narrative project came from many sources. I’m uniquely grateful to The California Endowment and Alexandra Desautels and Sandra Witt for the crucial first dollars in, as well as to the Open Society Foundations and Alvin Starks for the bulk of the funding.
In the narrative and political organizing world broadly construed, I learned from so many people I hesitate to name individuals, yet with apologies to others I’ve inadvertently omitted, let me acknowledge the insights of Lorena Chambers, Eve Ensler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Glenn Harris, Doug Hattaway, Alfred Ironside, Deepa Iyer, Saru Jayaraman, Alan Jenkins, Van Jones, Jee Kim, Richard Kirsch, Naomi Klein, Eddie Kurtz, Amber Phillips, Steve Phillips, Art Reyes, Rashad Robinson, Frank Sharry, Jonathan Smucker, and Miya Woolfalk.
I drew heavily on the goodwill of Berkeley Law and our inspirational dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, for the time and the resources to write. Berkeley also provided a willing (or at least captive) set of readers. This included my colleagues at a faculty workshop as well as the students in the fall 2018 social justice writing seminar I co-taught with Kathy Abrams. In addition, the extraordinary/irreverent students in my spring 2019 race and American law seminar productively critiqued, debated, and satirized the book: my thanks to Candace Graff, Vanessa Hernandez, Tori Larson, Alex Mabanta, Peta Oxholm, Alexis Payne, Amed Prado, Anna Rodriguez, Dylan Saba, Kristina Steinmetz, Emily Storms, Genesis Tejeda, and Farrah Vazquez.
At Berkeley, I also benefited greatly from my colleague David Oppenheimer’s steady encouragement and many ideas, as well as from the critiques offered by Shaun Ossei-Owusu, a former student and now a law professor. Very helpful comments and research came from several students outside my classes, including Nadim Houssain, Melissa McCall, EJ Toppin, and Gus Tupper. Thanks also to Alejandro Ceballos for his excellent and upbeat administrative assistance. Finally, thanks go to Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and its remarkable collection of activist-scholars, especially its director, john powell, as well as Olivia Araiza, Taeku Lee, Gerald Lenoir, Julie Nelson, Stephen Menendian, and Richard Rothstein.
Thank you, too, to Rick Banks at Stanford Law School for inviting me to workshop a few chapters in his race and law seminar, and also for introducing me to his sister, Sandy Banks, who carefully edited and vastly improved the manuscript.
I’m indebted to The New Press, and to its funders who gave it the leeway to publish a book that many commercial presses shied from. New Press executive director Diane Wachtell first encouraged me to write Dog Whistle Politics so it was a nice closing of the circle to work with her on this project, and editorial director Carl Bromley through his steady interventions prodded the book closer toward intelligibility. My agent, Andrew Stuart, thoughtfully responded to my evolving ideas about how best to write back against Donald Trump’s election, and in this way not only helped find a home for Merge Left but shaped it from the outset.
In addition to those already listed, many other friends also contributed directly. Michelle Anderson provided unstinting encouragement as well as incisive comments on two drafts, and also trenchant advice on the craft of writing, only crudely followed, I’m afraid. A regular dinner crew—Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Herman Gray, Aída Hurtado, and Craig Haney—leavened food and wine with sharp political insights that have found their way into Merge Left. Rey Rodríguez helped me keep in perspective the reasons I was writing and the sacrifices required to do so. Al Lepp, who has provided extensive editorial assistance over the years, this time begged off but did offer the tooth marks of his new toddler on an initial printout. Marcy Kates cheered an early draft, as did my neighbor, Carole Ramsey. Melissa Daar was a creative gem, brainstorming with me about key insights and metaphors, and enlisting her network into the effort as well. My thanks—and apologies—to the many other friends who tolerated excessive book talk with good humor.
For me, authoring these two books has involved many passages. Most painfully, in the years preceding Dog Whistle Politics, I lost both my brother and my dad. In the years since, while writing Merge Left, my brother’s best friend, Danny O’Sullivan, also passed on, and so did my father’s best friend, Bob Miller. As the youngest child, I knew both my whole life and both acted like older brothers to me. Danny’s generosity, humility, joshing, and laughter made the world better and lighter. Millers (for no apparent reason we always added the “s”) helped inspire my law career as well as a passion for justice, and in turn politics. His family—wife Stephanie, and children Sarah and Stephen—closed his memorial program with a favorite quote from his personal hero, Robert F. Kennedy: “make gentle the life of this world.” Millers fervently believed in this mission—and also in the need to fight like hell to make it so. I hope this book carries something of his spirit.