All Power to the People: Reclaiming Populism as a Tool for Liberation

The Berkeley Journal of Black Law & Policy (BJBLP) is pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Symposium entitled All Power To The People: Reclaiming Populism as a Tool for Liberation! Join us on Friday, April 18th, 2025 at UC Berkeley, School of Law in Room 100 from 9:30am until 3:00pm for a day filled with engaging panel discussions, insightful keynote addresses, and community-driven discussions around the history of Black populist movements.

This symposium will explore the potential of populism as a tool for liberation in light of the widespread distrust of news, government, and public institutions meant to support everyday people. While the term populism has gained infamy as an expression of right-wing fascism in the current Trump era, this interpretation of the term misrepresents how working-class people, especially Black Americans, have historically participated in empowering populist movements. Thus, the program will examine the rise of right-wing populism in the U.S. and its impact on democratic institutions while exploring how populist movements can be redirected toward transformative and inclusive politics.

Part I will define and clarify the meaning of populism, address the limits of the Democratic Party to serve Black American constituents as its most consistent voting bloc, and discuss the Pigford class action lawsuits against the USDA as exemplary of the need to address both race and class in any political movement. Part II will ask what to do now and how to forge a path forward. These sessions will start by framing populism as a tool for political mobilization, then explore the manifestation of this ideology in two distinct areas: cooperative economics and higher education. These panels draw inspiration from Black-led political movements and critical Black scholarship, referencing the Black Panther Party’s prefigurative politics and W.E.B. Du Bois’s writing on education.