On this edition of “Closer Look,” historian Peniel Joseph discusses his new book, “The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.”
In the book, Joseph argues that recent threats on our nation’s democracy – such as the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol – have caused the country to go into a third reconstruction period, with the first occurring after the Civil War and the second during the civil rights era of the 1950s and ‘60s.
“The third reconstruction is 2008 to the present. It’s Obama, BLM 1.0, the rise of the Trump administration and MAGA … but also the activism of black women like Stacey Abrams and getting Warnock and Ossoff elected so that the Biden-Harris administration can pass any policies,” said Joseph. “This is an effort to transform what we think about things like wealth inequality, mass incarceration, racial segregation.”
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