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<h1 id="reader-title">Black Study, Black Struggle | Boston
Review</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Robin D. G. Kelley <span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2016-03-07T00:00:00-05:00">March
7, 2016</span></div>
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<p>In the fall of 2015, college campuses were engulfed by
fires ignited in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This
is not to say that college students had until then been
quiet in the face of police violence against black
Americans. Throughout the previous year, it had often
been college students who hit the streets, blocked
traffic, occupied the halls of justice and malls of
America, disrupted political campaign rallies, and
risked arrest to protest the torture and suffocation of
Eric Garner, the abuse and death of Sandra Bland, the
executions of Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson,
Walter Scott, Tony Robinson, Freddie Gray, ad infinitum.</p>
<p>That the fire this time spread from the town to the
campus is consistent with historical patterns. The
campus revolts of the 1960s, for example, <em>followed</em>
the Harlem and Watts rebellions, the freedom movement in
the South, and the rise of militant organizations in the
cities. But the size, speed, intensity, and character of
recent student uprisings caught much of the country off
guard. Protests against campus racism and the ethics of
universities’ financial entanglements erupted on nearly
ninety campuses, including Brandeis, Yale, Princeton,
Brown, Harvard, Claremont McKenna, Smith, Amherst, UCLA,
Oberlin, Tufts, and the University of North Carolina,
both Chapel Hill and Greensboro. These demonstrations
were led largely by black students, as well as
coalitions made up of students of color, queer folks,
undocumented immigrants, and allied whites.</p>
<p>What I offer here are a few observations and
speculations about the movement, its self-conception,
and its demands, many of which focus on making the
university more hospitable for black students. I am not
opposed to this. Nor am I questioning the courageous
students who have done more to disrupt university
business-as-usual than any movement in the last
half-century. Instead I want to draw attention to the
contradictory impulses within the movement: the tension
between reform and revolution, between desiring to
belong and rejecting the university as a cog in the
neoliberal order. I want to think about what it means
for black students to seek love from an institution
incapable of loving them—of loving anyone, perhaps—and
to manifest this yearning by framing their lives largely
through a lens of trauma. And I want to think about what
it means for black students to choose to follow Stefano
Harney and Fred Moten’s call to become subversives in
the academy, exposing and resisting its labor
exploitation, its gentrifying practices, its endowments
built on misery, its class privilege often camouflaged
in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and
security.</p>
<p>It is fair to say that most black students have minimal
interest in joining the current wave of activism. Many
are not politically radical, while others feel that they
do not yet have the discernment to know if they are.
Others fear that an activist past may haunt them in the
future, while the majority is simply trying to get
through school and join the ranks of professionals. This
essay does not attempt to offer such students an
invitation to activism, although that would be a worthy
project. Rather, I am interested in speaking to those
who are already activists, specifically about the
ideological fissures in their movement and what these
might tell us about the character of contemporary black
movements, the future of the university, and what I
believe is a crisis of political education. And while
crises reveal contradictions, they also signal
opportunities.</p>
<p>In particular, I challenge student activists to not
cleave their activism from their intellectual lives or
mistakenly believe that because the university does not
offer them the education they crave, it is beyond their
reach. There is a long history of black activists
repurposing university resources to instruct themselves
and one another—to self-radicalize, in effect. This is
not to say that today’s student activists should do
exactly as was done in the past, but historical models
may provide valuable insights for those seeking novel
solutions. Moreover, I encourage student activists to
carefully consider the language they use to frame their
grievances. In particular, I argue that while trauma can
be an entrance into activism, it is not in itself a
destination and may even trick activists into adopting
the language of the neoliberal institutions they are at
pains to reject.</p>
<p class="rtecenter">• • •</p>
<p>The epicenter of recent student activism, the
University of Missouri, Columbia, is a two-hour drive
from the spot where former Ferguson police office Darren
Wilson ended Michael Brown’s life. In November the
activism of a coalition called Concerned Student 1950
(the year “Mizzou” admitted its first black
student)—coupled with a hunger-striking graduate student
and a threatened strike by the varsity football
team—forced the president and chancellor to resign and
the university’s Board of Curators to acknowledge a long
history of campus racism. It was a victory for students
of color at Mizzou and elsewhere, who have been fighting
deeply entrenched racism for years. Since President
Obama took office in 2009, the U.S. Department of
Education’s Office for Civil Rights has received more
than a thousand formal complaints of racial harassment
at colleges and universities.</p>
<p>While students on various campuses have done everything
from addressing racial incidents to criticizing
university investments, the national trend is to push
for measures that would make campuses more hospitable to
students of color: greater diversity, inclusion, safety,
and affordability. That means more students, faculty,
staff, and administrators of color; “safe spaces” and
mental health support; reduced or free tuition;
curricular changes; and the renaming of campus buildings
and monuments after significant nonwhite figures.
Similarly the Obama administration convened a meeting of
administrators, faculty, students, and lawyers to
promote ways to “foster supportive educational
environments.” As former Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan put it, college should be about “finding a home
and a community” and ensuring that campuses are
“welcoming places for learning for every student.”</p>
<p>Indeed, to some extent campus protests articulated the
sense of betrayal and disappointment that many black
students felt upon finding that their campuses failed to
live up to their PR. Many students had come to the
university expecting to find a welcoming place, a
nurturing faculty, and protective administration. If
they believed this, it was in no small part because
university recruiters wanted them to: tours for
prospective students, orientations, and slickly produced
brochures often rely on metaphors of family and
community, highlight campus diversity, and emphasize the
sense of belonging that young scholars enjoy.</p>
<p> Can we acknowledge students’ pain in a culture that
reduces oppression to misunderstanding and psychology?</p>
<p>But while the rebellions succeeded in getting the
attention of administrators and trustees, as well as the
national media, students endured an awful
backlash—including credible death threats—that tested
the limits of the family metaphor, which to many now
seems both misguided and disingenuous. Conservatives and
liberals alike trivialized their activism, dismissing
the protesters as oversensitive whiners whose demands
for speech codes, dress codes, and mandatory anti-racist
courses threaten the university’s integrity and impede
critical thought.</p>
<p>The rancor, however, has obscured fundamental
differences <em>within</em> the movement. Student’s
core demands for greater diversity, inclusion, and
cultural-competency training converge with their
critics’ fundamental belief that the university
possesses a unique teleology: it is <em>supposed</em>
to be an enlightened space free of bias and prejudice,
but the pursuit of this promise is hindered by
structural racism and patriarchy. Though adherents of
this perspective differ in their assessments of the
extent to which the university falls short of this
ideal, they agree that it is perfectible.</p>
<p>I do not. The fully racialized social and
epistemological architecture upon which the modern
university is built cannot be radically transformed by
“simply” adding darker faces, safer spaces, better
training, and a curriculum that acknowledges historical
and contemporary oppressions. This is a bit like asking
for more black police officers as a strategy to curb
state violence. We need more faculty of color, but
integration alone is not enough. Likewise, what is the
point of providing resources to recruit more students of
color without changing admissions criteria and
procedures? Why do we stay wedded to standard
“achievement” measures instead of, say, open admissions?</p>
<p>A smaller, more radical contingent of protesters is
less sanguine about the university’s capacity to change.
Rejecting the family metaphor, these students understand
that universities are not walled off from the “real
world” but instead are corporate entities in their own
right. These students are not fighting for a
“supportive” educational environment, but a <em>liberated</em>
one that not only promotes but also models social and
economic justice. One such student coalition is the
Black Liberation Collective, which has three demands:</p>
<p>1) that the numbers of black students and faculty
reflect the national percentage of black folks in the
country;</p>
<p>2) that tuition be free for black and indigenous
students;</p>
<p>3) that universities divest from prisons and invest in
communities.</p>
<p>Likewise the demands from protesters at UNC, Chapel
Hill are a model for radical global politics. They
include ending ties to prisons and sweated labor;
retraining and disarming campus police; offering free
childcare for students, staff, and faculty; and paying a
minimum wage of $25 per hour for workers, with the
addendum “that all administrators be compensated at the
same rate as workers.” Many will say these are not
winnable demands, but winning is not always the point.
Unveiling the university’s exploitative practices and
its deeply embedded structures of racism, sexism, and
class inequality can be profound acts of demystification
on their own.</p>
<p>But still, a common thread runs through both the more
modest and more radical critics of universities. Both
demand that universities change in ways that we cannot
expect them to change. The first group asks universities
to deliver on their promise to be post-racial havens,
but that will not happen in a surrounding sea of white
supremacy. The second sees universities as the leading
edge in a socially revolutionary fight. While I share
the transformative aims of the latter, I think that
universities are not up the task. Certainly universities
can and will become more diverse and marginally more
welcoming for black students, but as institutions they
will never be engines of social transformation. Such a
task is ultimately the work of political education and
activism. By definition it takes place outside the
university.</p>
<p><b>Fugitive Study</b><br>
Black studies was conceived not just outside the
university but in <em>opposition</em> to a Eurocentric
university culture with ties to corporate and military
power. Having emerged from mass revolt, insurgent black
studies scholars developed institutional models based
in, but largely independent of, the academy. In later
decades, these institutions were—with varying degrees of
eagerness—incorporated into the university proper in
response to pressure to embrace multiculturalism.</p>
<p>In 1969 Vincent Harding, Stephen Henderson, and William
Strickland, Jr., founded the Institute of the Black
World (IBW) at Atlanta University in order to mobilize
the “collective scholarship” of black intellectuals to
confront racism and colonialism, here and abroad. A year
later black students, artists, and activists at the
University of Chicago founded the Communiversity,
offering courses in African history and Marxist
political economy to community members on Chicago’s
South Side. Less than two decades later, the United
Coalition Against Racism, a student organization at the
University of Michigan, established the Ella Baker –
Nelson Mandela Center for Anti-Racist Education (BMC).
The center was never conceived as a safe space for
students of color but rather as a resource for
anti-racist struggles “dedicated to the principle of
thinking in order to act.” The BMC offered leadership
training, sponsored cultural and educational events,
provided rare anti-racist literature, and served as a
radical place for study and critical engagement open to
everyone, especially nonuniversity working-class
residents.</p>
<p> Universities will never be engines of social
transformation. Such a task is the work of political
education and activism. </p>
<p>In fact, it was during a talk held at IBW that the
Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, some six years before
he was martyred, urged radical black scholars to become
“guerrilla intellectuals.” By this he meant freeing
ourselves from the “Babylonian captivity” of bourgeois
society, moving beyond disciplinary imperatives, and
“grounding” with the people so as to engage, act, and
think collectively in terms of social movements.
Recently, Rodney’s notion of the guerrilla intellectual
has been resuscitated and transformed in Stefano Harney
and Fred Moten’s <em>The Undercommons: Fugitive
Planning and Black Study</em>.</p>
<p>Harney and Moten disavow the very idea that the
university is, or can ever be, an enlightened place, by
which I mean a place that would actively seek to disrupt
the reproduction of our culture’s classed, racialized,
nationalized, gendered, moneyed, and militarized
stratifications. Instead they argue that the university
is dedicated to professionalization, order, scientific
efficiency, counterinsurgency, and war—wars on terror,
sovereign nations, communism, drugs, and gangs. The
authors advocate refuge in and sabotage from the
undercommons, a subaltern, subversive way of being in
but not of the university. The undercommons is a
fugitive network where a commitment to abolition and
collectivity prevails over a university culture bent on
creating socially isolated individuals whose academic
skepticism and claims of objectivity leave the
world-as-it-is intact.</p>
<p>Unlike Rodney’s guerrilla intellectuals, Harney and
Moten’s guerrillas are not preparing to strike, planning
to seize power, contesting the university (or the state;
the difference isn’t always clear)—at least not on the
terms they have set. To do so would be to recognize the
university and its legitimacy and to be invested in its
regimes of professionalization. Instead Harney and Moten
argue that the university’s power over our lives is
illusory. It lulls us into believing that politics—to
lobby for access to, or control over, such
institutions—is our only salvation. The book is a
clarion call to <em>think</em> together, to plan
together in undisciplined assembly. When <em>The
Undercommons</em> hit the Internet—first as a 2008
essay and then as a 2013 collection of essays—it spread
like wildfire among the PhD precariat and
radical-thinking graduate students. For many young
scholars cobbling together a life adjuncting, Harney and
Moten’s critique of the university spoke an essential
truth: “It cannot be denied that the university is a
place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the
university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of
these conditions one can only sneak into the university
and steal what one can.”</p>
<p>Contrast this with black student protesters who appeal
to the university to “repair a broken community,” to
make students “feel safe, accepted, supported and like
they belong,” and to remedy their sense of alienation
through “intense ‘inclusion and belonging’ training for
all levels of students, staff, faculty, and
administration.” Why black students might seek belonging
and inclusion over refuge is understandable, given their
expressed sense of alienation and isolation, combined
with the university’s liberal use of the family
metaphor. It also explains why students are asking the
university to implement curriculum changes—namely, the
creation of cultural-competency courses, more diverse
course reading lists, and classes dedicated to the study
of race, gender, sexuality, and social justice. They not
only acknowledge the university’s magisterium in all
things academic, but they also desperately wish to
change the campus culture, to make this bounded world
less hostile and less racist.</p>
<p>But granting the university so much authority over our
reading choices, and emphasizing a respect for
difference over a critique of power, comes at a cost.
Students not only come to see the curriculum as an
oppressor that delimits their interrogation of the
world, but they also come to see racism largely in
personal terms.</p>
<p><b>The Personal Is Not Always Political</b><br>
Second only to a desire for increased diversity, better
mental health services were a chief priority for student
protesters. Activists framed their concerns and
grievances in the language of <em>personal</em> trauma.
We shouldn’t be surprised. While <em>every</em>
generation of black Americans has experienced
unrelenting violence, this is the first one compelled to<em>
witness </em>virtually all of it, to endure the
snuffing out of black lives in real time, looped over
and over again, until the next murder knocks it off the
news. We are also talking about a generation that has
lived through two of the longest wars in U.S. history,
raised on a culture of spectacle where horrific acts of
violence are readily available on their smartphones.
What Henry Giroux insightfully identifies as an
addiction does nothing to inure or desensitize young
people to violence. On the contrary, it anchors violence
in their collective consciousness, produces fear and
paranoia—wrapped elegantly in thrill—and shrouds the
many ways capitalism, militarism, and racism are killing
black and brown people.</p>
<p>So one can easily see why the language of trauma might
appeal to black students. Trauma is real; it is no joke.
Mental health services and counseling are urgently
needed. But reading black experience through trauma can
easily slip into thinking of ourselves as victims and
objects rather than agents, subjected to centuries of
gratuitous violence that have structured and
overdetermined our very being. In the argot of our day,
“bodies”—vulnerable and threatening bodies—increasingly
stand in for actual people with names, experiences,
dreams, and desires. I suspect that the popularity of
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s <em>Between the World and Me</em>
(2015), especially among black college students, rests
on his singular emphasis on fear, trauma, and the black
body. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In America, it is traditional to destroy the black
body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the
antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get
a human being to commit their body against its own
elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual
wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and
brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to
escape. It must be rape so regular as to be
industrial. . . . The spirit and soul are the body and
brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why
they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The
spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Coates implies that the person <em>is </em>the brain,
and the brain just another organ to be crushed with the
rest of the body’s parts. Earlier in the book, he makes
the startling declaration that enslaved people “knew
nothing but chains.” I do not deny the violence Coates
so eloquently describes here, and I am sympathetic to
his atheistic skepticism. But what sustained enslaved
African people was a <em>memory of freedom</em>, dreams
of seizing it, and conspiracies to enact it—fugitive
planning, if you will. If we reduce the enslaved to mere
fungible bodies, we cannot possibly understand <em>how</em>
they created families, communities, sociality; how they
fled and loved and worshiped and defended themselves;
how they created the world’s first social democracy.</p>
<p>Trauma is real. But reading black experience through
trauma can lead to thinking of ourselves as victims
rather than agents.</p>
<p>Moreover, to identify anti-black violence as heritage
may be true in a general sense, but it obscures the
dialectic that produced and reproduced the violence of a
regime dependent on black <em>life</em> for its
profitability. It was, after all, the resisting black
body that needed “correction.” Violence was used not
only to break bodies but to discipline <em>people</em>
who refused enslavement. And the impulse to resist is
neither involuntary nor solitary. It is a choice made in
community, made possible by community, and informed by
memory, tradition, and witness. If Africans were
entirely compliant and docile, there would have been no
need for vast expenditures on corrections, security, and
violence. Resistance is our heritage.</p>
<p>And resistance is our healing. Through collective
struggle, we alter our circumstances; contain, escape,
or possibly eviscerate the <em>source</em> of trauma;
recover our bodies; reclaim and redeem our dead; and
make ourselves whole. It is difficult to see this in a
world where words such as <em>trauma</em>, <em>PTSD</em>,
<em>micro-aggression</em>, and <em>triggers</em> have
virtually replaced <em>oppression</em>,<em> repression</em>,<em>
</em>and<em> subjugation</em>. Naomi Wallace, a
brilliant playwright whose work explores trauma in the
context of race, sexuality, class, war, and empire,
muses:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mainstream America is less threatened by the ‘trauma’
theory because it doesn’t place economic justice at
its core and takes the focus out of the realm of
justice and into psychology; out of the streets,
communities, into the singular experience (even if
experienced in common) of the individual.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Similarly, George Lipsitz observes that emphasizing
“interiority,” personal pain, and feeling elevates “the
cultivation of sympathy over the creation of social
justice.” This is partly why demands for reparations to
address historical and ongoing racism are so
antithetical to modern liberalism.</p>
<p>Managing trauma does not require dismantling structural
racism, which is why university administrators focus on
avoiding triggers rather than implementing
zero-tolerance policies for racism or sexual assault.
Buildings will be renamed and safe spaces for people of
color will be created out of a sliver of university real
estate, but proposals to eliminate tuition and forgive
student debt for the descendants of the dispossessed and
the enslaved will be derided as absurd. This is also why
diversity and cultural-competency training are the most
popular strategies for addressing campus racism. As if
racism were a manifestation of our “incompetent”
handling of “difference.” If we cannot love the other,
we can at least learn to hear, respect, understand, and
“tolerate” her. Cultural competency also means reckoning
with white privilege, coming to terms with unconscious
bias and the myriad ways white folks benefit from
current racial arrangements. Powerful as this might be,
the solution to racism still is shifted to the realm of
self-help and human resources, resting on
self-improvement or the hiring of a consultant or
trainer to help us reach our goal.</p>
<p>Cultural-competency training, greater diversity, and
demands for multicultural curricula represent both a
resistance to and manifestation of our current
“postracial” moment. In <em>Are We All Postracial Yet?</em>
(2015), David Theo Goldberg correctly sees postracialism
as a neoliberal revision of multicultural discourse,
whose proposed remedies to address racism would in fact
resuscitate late-century multiculturalism. But why hold
on to the policies and promises of multiculturalism and
diversity, especially since they have done nothing to
dislodge white supremacy? Indeed I want to suggest that
the triumph of multiculturalism marked a defeat for a
radical anti-racist vision. True, multiculturalism
emerged in response to struggles waged by the Black
Freedom movement and other oppressed groups in the 1960s
and ’70s. But the programmatic adoption of diversity,
inclusion, and multiculturalism vampirized the energy of
a radical movement that began by demanding the <em>complete</em>
<em>transformation</em> of the social order and the
eradication of all forms of racial, gender, sexual, and<em>
</em>class hierarchy.</p>
<p>The point of liberal multiculturalism was not to
address the historical legacies of racism,
dispossession, and injustice but rather to bring some
people into the fold of a “society no longer seen as
racially unjust.” What did it bring us? Black elected
officials and black CEOs who helped manage the greatest
transfer of wealth to the rich and oversee the continued
erosion of the welfare state; the displacement,
deportation, and deterioration of black and brown
communities; mass incarceration; and planetary war. We
talk about breaking glass ceilings in corporate America
while building more jail cells for the rest. The triumph
of liberal multiculturalism also meant a shift from a
radical anti-capitalist critique to a politics of
recognition. This means, for example, that we now
embrace the right of same-sex couples to marry so long
as they do not challenge the institution itself, which
is still modeled upon the exchanging of property;
likewise we accept the right of people of color, women,
and queer people to serve in the military, killing and
torturing around the world.</p>
<p>At the same time, contemporary calls for cultural
competence and tolerance reflect neoliberal logic by
emphasizing individual responsibility and suffering,
shifting race from the public sphere to the psyche. The
postracial, Goldberg writes, “renders individuals solely
accountable for their own actions and expressions, not
for their group’s.” Tolerance in its multicultural
guise, as Wendy Brown taught us, is the liberal answer
to managing difference but with no corresponding
transformation in the conditions that, in the first
place, marked certain bodies as suspicious, deviant,
abject, or illegible. Tolerance, therefore,
depoliticizes genuine struggles for justice and power:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Depoliticization involves construing inequality,
subordination, marginalization, and social conflict,
which all require political analysis and political
solutions, as personal and individual, on the one
hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the
other. Tolerance works along both vectors of
depoliticization—it personalizes and it naturalizes or
culturalizes—and sometimes it intertwines them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But how can we embrace our students and acknowledge
their pain while remaining wary of a culture that
reduces structural oppression to misunderstanding and
psychology?</p>
<p><b>Love, Study, Struggle</b><br>
Taped inside the top drawer of my desk is a small scrap
of paper with three words scrawled across it: “Love,
Study, Struggle.” It serves as a daily reminder of what
I am supposed to be doing. Black study and resistance
must begin with love. James Baldwin understood
love-as-agency probably better than anyone. For him it
meant to love ourselves as black <em>people</em>; it
meant making love the motivation for making revolution;
it meant envisioning a society where everyone is
embraced, where there is no oppression, where every life
is valued—even those who may once have been our
oppressors. It <em>did not</em> mean seeking white
people’s love and acceptance or seeking belonging in the
world created by our oppressor. In <em>The Fire Next
Time</em> (1963), he is unequivocal: “I do not know
many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white
people, still less to be loved by them; they, the
blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by
the whites every instant of our brief passage on this
planet.” But here is the catch: if we are committed to
genuine freedom, we have no choice but to love all. To
love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation
and oppression everywhere, even on behalf of those who
think they hate us. This was Baldwin’s point—perhaps his
most misunderstood and reviled point.</p>
<p>To love this way requires relentless struggle, deep
study, and critique. Limiting our ambit to suffering,
resistance, and achievement is not enough. We must go to
the root—the historical, political, social, cultural,
ideological, material, economic root—of oppression in
order to understand its negation, the prospect of our
liberation. Going to the root illuminates what is hidden
from us, largely because most structures of oppression
and all of their various entanglements are simply not
visible and not felt. For example, if we argue that
state violence is merely a manifestation of
anti-blackness because that is what we <em>see and feel</em>,
we are left with no theory of the state and have no way
of understanding racialized police violence in places
such as Atlanta and Detroit, where most cops are black,
unless we turn to some metaphysical explanation.</p>
<p>For my generation, the formal classroom was never the
space for deep critique precisely because it was not a
place of love. The classroom was—and still is—a
performative space, where faculty and students compete
with each other. Through study groups, we created our
own intellectual communities held together by principle
and love, though the specters of sectarianism, ego, and
just-plain childishness blurred our vision and
threatened our camaraderie. Still, the political study
group was our lifeblood—both on and off campus. We lived
by Karl Marx’s pithy 1844 statement:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But if the designing of the future and the
proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is
not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly
what we have to accomplish in the present—I am
speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything
existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must
not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict
with the powers that be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Study groups introduced me to C. L. R. James, Frantz
Fanon, Walter Rodney, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Karl
Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Chancellor
Williams, George E. M. James, Shulamith Firestone, Kwame
Nkrumah, Kwame Turé, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci,
Chinweizu Ibekwe, Amílcar Cabral, and others. These
texts were our sources of social critique and weapons in
our class war on the bourgeois canon. As self-styled
activist-intellectuals, it never occurred to us to <em>refuse</em>
to read a text simply because it validated the racism,
sexism, free-market ideology, and bourgeois liberalism
against which we railed. Nothing was off limits. On the
contrary, delving into these works only sharpened our
critical faculties.</p>
<p>Love and study cannot exist without struggle, and
struggle cannot occur solely inside the refuge we call
the university. Being grounded in the world we wish to
make is fundamental. As I argued in <em>Freedom Dreams</em>
nearly fifteen years ago, “Social movements generate new
knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical
ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual
engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations
confronting systems of oppression.” Ironically I wrote
these words with my students in mind, many of whom were
involved in campus struggles, feeling a bit rudderless
but believing that the only way to make themselves into
authentic activists was to leave the books and radical
theories at home or in their dorms. The undercommons
offers students a valuable model of study that takes for
granted the indivisibility of thought and struggle, not
unlike its antecedent, the Mississippi Freedom Schools.</p>
<p>The Mississippi Freedom Schools, initially launched by
the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee as part
of the 1964 Freedom Summer, were intended to create “an
educational experience for students which will make it
possible for them to challenge the myths of our society,
to perceive more clearly its realities and to find
alternatives, and ultimately, new directions for
action.” The curriculum included traditional subjects
that publicly funded black schools did not offer, but
they were never designed to be simply <em>better</em>
versions of the traditional liberal education model.
Rather, students examined power along the axes of race
and class. Students and teachers worked together to
reveal how ruling whites profited from Jim Crow, and
they included in their analysis the precarious position
of poor whites. Rural black kids of all ages learned to
distinguish between “Material Things and Soul Things,”
developing a trenchant critique of materialism. The
freedom schools challenged the myth that the civil
rights movement was just about claiming a place in
mainstream society. They didn’t want equal opportunity
in a burning house; they wanted to build a new house.</p>
<p>Perhaps one of the best historical models of radical,
collective, grounded intellectual work was launched by
black feminists Patricia Robinson, Patricia Haden, and
Donna Middleton, working with community residents of Mt.
Vernon, New York, many of whom were unemployed, low-wage
workers, welfare mothers, and children. Together, they
organized and read as a community—from elders to
children. They saw education as a vehicle for collective
transformation and an incubator of knowledge, not a path
to upward mobility and material wealth. Influenced by
Frantz Fanon, they interrogated and critiqued racism,
sexism, slavery, and capitalism, emphasizing the ways in
which racism produced a kind of psychosis among poor
black people. Their study and activism culminated in a
collectively written, independently published book
called <em>Lessons from the Damned</em> (1973). It is a
remarkable book, with essays by adults as well as
children—some as young as twelve, who developed
trenchant criticisms of public school teachers and the
education system.</p>
<p>Although they acknowledged the unavoidability of
addressing trauma, they understood that one’s activism
could not stop there. In a section titled “The Revolt of
Poor Black Women,” the authors insisted that a genuine
revolution requires the overthrow of capitalism, the
elimination of male supremacy, and the transformation of
self. Revolution, they argued, is supposed to usher in a
brand new beginning; it is driven by the power of freed
imagination, not the dead weight of the past. As
Robinson, Haden, and Middleton wrote, “All
revolutionaries, regardless of sex, are the smashers of
myths and the destroyers of illusion. They have always
died and lived again to build new myths. They dare to
dream of a utopia, a new kind of synthesis and
equilibrium.”</p>
<p>At UCLA, where I teach, these same insights are taking
a new form. A group of graduate students launched their
version of the undercommons in January 2016. Based on
the Freedom School model, UCLA’s undercommons holds
weekly outdoor meetings featuring activists from groups
such as Black Lives Matter, Critical Resistance, and the
L.A. Poverty Department. Faculty and students lead
discussions. These events have drawn as many as 150
students, and the community continues to grow. The
primary organizers—Thabisile Griffin, Marques Vestal,
Olufemi O. Taiwo, Sa Whitley, and Shamell Bell—are all
doctoral students who see the university as a site of
contestation, a place of refuge, and a space for
collective work. Their vision is radical and radically
ambitious: they are abolitionists committed to
dismantling prisons and redirecting their funding to
education and the repair of inequality. Their ultimate
goal is to create in the present a future that
overthrows the logic of neoliberalism.</p>
<p>These students are demonstrating how we might remake
the world. They are ruthless in their criticism and
fearless in the face of the powers that be. They model
what it means to think through crisis, to fight for the
eradication of oppression in all its forms, whether it
directly affects us or not. They are <em>in</em> the
university but not <em>of</em> the university. They
work to understand and advance the movements in the
streets, seeking to eliminate racism and state violence,
preserve black life, defend the rights of the
marginalized (from undocumented immigrants to
transfolk), and challenge the current order that has
brought us so much misery. And they do this work not
without criticism and self-criticism, not by pandering
to popular trends or powerful people, a cult of
celebrity or Twitter, and not by telling lies, claiming
easy answers, or avoiding the ideas that challenge us
all.</p>
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San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
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