If you look at literacy tests in the South, for example, they were absurdly difficult and didn't measure literacy. They were simply measuring whether or not you were black. So at every moment when we've said, hey, we don't want certain people to vote because they are not educated enough, it is often simply become a way of excluding black and brown people.

We have to convince the white worker that they have something to gain by forming a solidarity politics with black workers because everything that's happened over the last three to 400 years in America has divided the white and the black worker.

If you look at literacy tests in the South, for example, they were absurdly difficult and didn't measure literacy. They were simply measuring whether or not you were black. So at every moment when we've said, hey, we don't want certain people to vote because they are not educated enough, it is often simply become a way of excluding black and brown people.

The hoodies themselves aren't criminal. White people wear hoodies all the time!

If we begin by the conversation that some people shouldn't be encouraged to come to the polls, that does nothing to help us. And just as a practical matter, when we don't encourage voters to come out to the polls, the people who stay home quickest are black and brown folk.

Part of why I wrote my book was so that we could focus on the structural and systemic reasons behind social misery. Changed hearts and minds are important. But they do little against the backdrop of a system that needs to exploit people and labor to survive. I'm more interested in changed systems than changed hearts.

Nothing lasts forever, whether it's Greece, Rome or the British Empire. It doesn't mean that America has to end. The country could be reshaped and reimagined in a way that is even more democratic and less imperial in nature. We're trying to radically reshape the nation in ways that are more just and fairer. That's what I mean when I say that empires eventually fall. I'm not calling for the end of America. I'm just calling for a reimagination of its democratic possibilities.