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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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<h1 class="reader-title">“Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange”:
An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley</h1>
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<h5><em><a href="http://rethinkingmarxism.org/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rethinking Marxism</a></em>:
It is our great honor to be talking with Robin D. G.
Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed
Chair in U. S. History at UCLA. Robin, let’s begin with
your biography of Thelonious Monk. It is quite an
achievement and a pleasure for us to read. Your in-depth
narrative of Monk’s life is informative and educational
about how to listen to jazz. Your biography provides an
exciting, often nostalgic account of the lives and times
of many of the twentieth century’s “giants of jazz.”
Thank you for undertaking and completing this
fourteen-year project. That’s a lot of time! How did you
become interested in writing a biography of Monk? What
was the journey like for you?</h5>
<p>Robin Kelley: The short version is I grew up in a
household where music was very important, especially
jazz. My stepfather was a jazz musician, so when I was
in high school I picked up the piano. I played piano for
a while. I even thought about it as a possible career.
He introduced me to Monk’s music; I was 16 years old.
And I was into way-out music, Cecil Taylor, people like
that. Monk was always in the back of my head. Not to do
any particular project; I never thought I would write a
biography. Then, all my work was driven by political
considerations, what were the emergencies at the
moment. Writing <em>Hammer and Hoe</em> was about being
in a Left movement and thinking about what
self-determination actually means on the ground. What
does it mean for people of color, black people in
particular, to build a movement that has taken Marxism
and tried to transform it into something that made sense
to them? So, I was doing all this work, responding to
emergencies all throughout the 80s and 90s, and then I
got really sick. And I was hospitalized with some kind
of virus. I remember being in the hospital and, believe
it or not, I was reading Skip Gates’s <em>Colored
People</em>, his memoir, which is pretty hilarious. I
thought to myself, if Henry Louis Gates can write this
book, I should be able to write whatever book I want to
write! So I was in the hospital thinking, <em>I want to
write a book about Monk</em>. I reached out to the
family through a very important friend named Marc
Crawford. Marc wrote about jazz. He also was very
political. He grew up in Detroit, but he ended up
leaving the country for southern Mexico, and his home
became a place for a lot of people escaping the draft. I
knew Marc because I was on the Board of Governors for
the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; they had asked me to write
an introduction about African-Americans in the Lincoln
Brigade. So this was my pathway. Marc was the one who
said, “You know, you really need to work on this book on
Monk.” He got in touch with the family; the family was
like, “No, we have that covered.” But, I didn’t give up.
I then spent years conducting research without the
family’s support, looking at publications, journals,
whatever primary sources I could get in every language
possible. What I realized is that people who write books
about artists tend to work in one language or two. Look,
I can’t read Japanese, but I found every single
Japanese article and had it translated; Dutch,
Portuguese, German, Spanish, all over the world. I
began to discover things about Monk; he would do
interviews in other languages that would be translated,
and he would say things abroad that he wouldn’t say at
home. So I collected all this material. Fast-forward
five, six years later, and the Monk family started to put
together a website and a record label. And on one of
those listservs with jazz fans who are sometimes more
dangerous than anybody else because they’re so
fanatical, the Monks starting pumping them for
information. And I write offline to Monk’s
brother-in-law, “You know, I talked to Toot, Monk Jr.,
years ago, and I know that he has some other plans for a
biography, but I happen to have about ten boxes of
materials that I’ve collected over the years that he
might want to use.” And he said, “Really?” “Yes.” “Well
bring it over.” So I drove to South Orange with all
these boxes of materials—just made copies of
everything—and gave it to them. And they realized …two
things they realized. One, I was serious! I had stuff
they didn’t have. And, secondly, they didn’t know I was
black! They assumed I was white. When they saw me, they
were like, “Oh, wait a second. You are not who we
imagined.” Jazz is music that people don’t engage
critically all the time. They’re either
ethnomusicologists, who operate at one level. Or
journalists, who operate at another. The journalists
tend to be fans, and they tend to spend more time
looking for the right adjective to describe the music
than to dig deep. So we spent, like, six hours sitting
at his house around the pool just talking about Monk. He
asked me: What’s my intention? What do I know? What do I
think? And we connected; I sort of made a promise:
“I’ll write this book, but it won’t be an official
biography. I don’t want the family’s imprimatur because
I’m going to say things you may not like.” He agreed; I
have to give him credit for that. He said, “Look,
whatever you find is the truth, just deal with the
truth.” That’s why there are things in the book that
don’t make Monk look like a grand figure; he’s a human
being. So that changed everything. And once I had
access to the family, it changed my perspective on where
the music takes place. But that leads us into your
second question.</p>
<h5>In your biography you describe Monk as a radical
individualist, a “rebel” whose life and music are part
of a tradition of “sonic disturbance.” But also an
exemplar of a creative black artist trying to live an
“authentic life” in postwar New York (we’ll circle back
to this issue of “authenticity” later). As you describe,
Monk’s method of teaching his music to bandmates, or his
approach to performance on stage or in the recording
studio, was to adopt a quasi-surrealist mode (perhaps
without the whimsy). Here we’re thinking of Monk’s
constant nudging the jazz tradition toward uncertainty,
his striving for inexpressible hidden chords
beyond—within—the melody. Or Monk’s obsessive push
against attempts to confine or rein in his imagination.
Is there radical optimism, or political hope, within
Monk’s music, his habits of work, and specifically, in
his willingness constantly to disrupt and disturb? And
does this willingness reveal elements of what you
describe as surrealist art? What are the cultural and
political implications of seeing Monk as a surrealist?</h5>
<p>So, I’m going to work backwards. On your very last
question: Is Monk a surrealist? Absolutely! Though he
isn’t an artist who identified himself as surrealist.
(Yet in an interview in the late ’40s, he compares bebop
more generally with Salvador Dali; whether or not Dali
was a real surrealist is another thing). But Monk moved
in that direction for the same reason that people like
Wifredo Lam, the painter, and Aimé Césaire, the poet and
activist, all moved to surrealism: it was a matter of
self-recognition. In other words, their lives were <em>already</em>
that. What they saw, what Wifredo Lam saw in Santeria,
for example—he says, “I recognize surrealism.” What Monk
heard in the music of the old stride pianists he studied
with, like James P. Johnson and Willie “the Lion” Smith,
was to take an instrument like the piano with fixed
pitches and to be able to bend notes. We can think of it
as whimsy. But we can also think of it as specific ways
that notes can produce emotion through dissonance and
consonance, especially dissonance. The way that notes
and rhythm can produce a sense of <em>humor</em>. And
for surrealists, <em>humor</em> is like the fundamental
emotion. It’s a fundamental expression of <em>everything</em>.
In that sense, I think Monk is definitely surrealist.
There’s also a kind of radical optimism, political
hope—I think you can <em>hear</em> that. Whether or not
Monk intends it is a different thing. In fact, what I
argue in the book is that even though Monk’s music
doesn’t change significantly over the years, its meaning
changes. So in the 1940s there was something that was
perceived to be very modern about the music, despite the
fact that in the 40s Monk spent as much time hanging out
with stride pianists at James P. Johnson’s house as he
did with some of the young bebop musicians like Dizzy
Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Joe Guy. I make the case that
he was Janus-faced: he took the tradition from the past,
he took the future, or paved the way for the future, and
took the present, and put them together in a way that
musically made sense to him. His aesthetic was never
bound by time or place. Let me step back for a second. A
lot of people assume that what made Monk’s music so
creative, so whimsical, so free, was his lack of
training. In other words, that he was not a trained
musician. This is the myth: that he didn’t have lessons,
that he had no knowledge of classical tradition. Quincy
Jones says this, Bill Evans says this, they all say it.
And yet Monk not only was well trained but he had
classical lessons; he took lessons from a black woman
who lived in his neighborhood. He was surrounded by
other musicians in a very public culture where Alberta
Simmons—his piano teacher—and the heads of the Columbus
Hill Community Center all provided education for young
musicians. In other words, it was a whole community that
helped him develop his aesthetic. That community was the
community he played for. So his music wasn’t out of this
world. How can it be out of this world if he played for
dancers? Dancers will not dance to music if you can’t
play. So the <em>embeddedness</em> of his music has
more to do with being able to understand the politics of
it. He made music with, and for, and of the people: the
people of his neighborhood. There were no boundaries,
which is why he would play alongside the Calypsonians,
like Lord Invader, and others; why walking down the
street in San Juan Hill, you listen to the radio, the
Victrolas, and you would hear Habanera, Cuban sounds;
you hear Trinidadian sounds, you hear Southern blues,
you hear Northern blues, you hear Duke Ellington, you
hear Louis Armstrong. And that music surrounded him. As
well as the Irish music up on the corner; also the
Jewish cantors. There was no sound that wasn’t available
to him. What was amazing too was that he lived near
Central Park when Goldman’s Band—which is part of the
public culture we’ve lost—would spend the summer doing
these free concerts: Tchaikovsky, John Philip Sousa,
Beethoven. His mom would take him to Central Park to sit
there and listen to this free music. Sometimes 20,000
people would come out for these concerts! And it was
free! And so you could actually be poor, growing up on
the west side of Manhattan, and have access to this rich
cultural palette of music and art. <em>That</em> was
the world that shaped him. So when I talk about
“authentic life,” I don’t mean opposed to “inauthentic.”
I mean he was a product of New York, and like so many
others who really absorbed everything, including the
sounds of the trains—that’s part of his sound. You hear
the subway, you hear the main trains dropping off cargo
at the ports. And that was his life. Now, one thing that
is different about this book compared to others was that
I realized in talking to the family that it’s a mistake
to limit the spaces for his musical practice to the
recording studio, to the stage, to the clubs, when in
fact so much of what happened was in the house with his
family, in rehearsing. It’s in his engagement with his
children. He was a really amazing father, despite the
fact that bipolar disorder eventually made it difficult
for him to function “on the everyday” all the time. For
him, also, all the boroughs were available. When you
follow an artist, particularly black artists, and you
look at the black press and other sources, you discover
that when the mainstream press pretends he’s
disappeared, he’s actually at all these other places.
Black-owned clubs in Brooklyn. In the Bronx. Or going to
places like Al Walker’s TV repair shop—</p>
<h5>In the back!</h5>
<p>Can you imagine what it meant for us to put that on the
map of jazz?! Al Walker’s TV repair shop was just a jam
session all night long! Great musicians would come
through there. And they weren’t fixing TVs! But they were
jamming. And that’s what made this book a challenge <em>and</em>
a labor of love, because I came away with a sense of the
city, a deeper sense of the music and where it takes
place, and a deeper sense of the man, and Nellie, his
wife, and his children, and his extended family; because
without them, there would be no Thelonious Monk. I tried
to break down the myth of the isolated, individual
“heroic genius.” That’s not the case with Monk at all.
Also, the politics come out more in the fabric of
everyday life. Following the money was really important.
And, of course, all the economists—<em>you</em> know,
since Amherst is the last place that actually has an
Economics Department: all the others are gone; there’s
no such thing as economics anymore, it’s just like
“rational choice,” and whatever. But following the
money—being able to go through his tax returns, his
contracts—you realize that this man struggled even at
the height of his powers. He didn’t have enough money to
have decent medical care. Even when he made the most he
ever made—in 1964—after paying out everything, he only
took home about $40,000. That’s the most he ever took
home in a year. And that’s good money for 1964. But then
it drops to $17,000 three years later, and he’s making
almost zero. He leaves Columbia Records in debt. So, in
following the money, I was able to reconstruct the
exploitative structure of capitalism in the music
industry, even at the best record labels.</p>
<h5>There’s a couple of things in what you’re saying. One
is public culture, and how important it was then and
now. Because it’s virtually gone. In work I do with guys
who are locked up, we do a lot of exploring household,
streets, neighborhoods that they came up in. So, “What’s
the story of your life up to the point of your current
incarceration?” And what is so striking again and again
is the absence of a <em>public culture</em> that can
intervene in the way those free concerts in Central Park
intervened.</h5>
<p>The way those concerts in the park intervened! The way
his local community center intervened! Can you imagine
the role that these adults played? Because they not only
taught you music but they would be there when you needed
them. And they would give you advice. They had very
strict rules; you could lose your membership card if you
go in there cursing. That might seem harsh, but, man,
those kids were so devoted to that space!</p>
<h5>That’s exactly right. In the long run, that’s helping
you to manage.</h5>
<p>Exactly. And that’s gone now. It’s devastating.</p>
<h5>That’s gone. And these guys … it’s part of the Insight
Prison Project to cultivate a recognition of that
absence. So that they see how society failed them in
that respect. <em>Neoliberal</em> society, I should
say.</h5>
<p>Exactly.</p>
<h5>Yeah. Where did the <em>State</em> go? Where did the
<em>public</em> go?</h5>
<p>Where did the State go! Exactly.</p>
<h5>I grew up in Philly. It was disappearing, but I came
through in the 70s. There was enough of it that I felt
safe in the streets. But I knew guys were moving to
gangs, and then the gangs were carving out their own
private space that was competing with public life,
locally. And of course, the cops were big problems in
navigating that public.</h5>
<p>Exactly. And if your only interaction with the State <em>now</em>
is repressive force, that is, coercive force, then
sometimes gangs make sense as a way to defend yourself.
And it’s unfortunate. It’s a combination of the
withdrawal of the State in one element and the expansion
of the State in another element, the coercive element.
Which reminds me, one other thing that’s in your
question that I didn’t address, but which is tied to
this: the question of mentorship. As you mention, Monk
had a way of teaching music to his bandmates. And
teaching music was really important. I tell stories
about how they would rehearse on the bandstand. If you
are paying money, and you’re in the Five Spot, you don’t
want to hear the same song over and over again. (There’s
something really performative about that.) But in a
realm that is understood to be deeply competitive—the
term “cutting session” is a jazz term, which is you
“cut” somebody, and you blow them off the bandstand.
Well, Monk never did that. His thing was, if he heard
someone struggling, even if heard them when he’s sitting
in the audience, he would go up to that person and say,
“You know what, you don’t know the changes. Come to my
house tomorrow at nine o’clock and I’ll teach them to
you.” And musicians would come to his house—a little
tiny apartment: two bedrooms, the piano was partly in
the kitchen and partly in the living room. These cats
would show up. He would sit down with them and show them
music. He would show them tunes. A lot of those
musicians were pretty unknown, like Danny Quebec West.
But he gave them a chance because he really believed in
them. Then people like Jackie McLean would show up. John
Coltrane would show up sometimes and learn some stuff.
Sonny Rollins, after high school, would head straight to
Monk’s house. Monk was a teacher! And his home became
the center for cultivating the culture, but also
creating community. And the idea of creating community
among musicians is something that we don’t always
recognize.</p>
<h5>Collaboration and collective labor are other features
of Monk’s approach to jazz. Monk was a teacher who
taught so many not simply how to play “his music,” but
how to find their own voice in his music through
practicing with him. Many big-name musicians who began
as sidemen, but became bandleaders, describe how
decisive it was to work with Monk. For them, Monk
dwelled in the uncertain space between the sheet music
and its expression by a specific ensemble. Monk was
“open” to the originality of each musician’s
capabilities and commitments to a “sound.” (By the way,
this is what we learned from you! This is our reading of
what you taught us!) The long hours of practice for
which he is legendary were as much about Monk learning
how to play with them as them learning his music. How do
you think this approach to collaborative work is
indicative of the general jazz labor practices of his
time? By modeling collective cultural/aesthetic labor,
was Monk a “revolutionary” in this realm?</h5>
<p>Right! This is an excellent question. Everything that
you just said is absolutely right, I think. Let me just
address two very specific questions which build on this
description. What I’ve discovered in talking to jazz
musicians was that kind of collaboration was more common
than not. The idea of the “cutting sessions” and the
idea of the competitiveness—that makes good press.
That’s not to say it didn’t happen. But, if you look at
most films about jazz musicians, and you read the
mainstream press, competition is sexier than
collaboration. And yet what all these musicians
say—even if you’re doing so-called free jazz, even if
you’re doing something that’s much more experimental—the
most important thing to do is <em>not</em> to play but
to listen. You have to be able to listen to each other,
to be able to play with one other, to play in response
to one another. It’s like a set of conversations.
Because making music is not about virtuosity. It’s about
being able to create a kind of community voice in which
each voice is individual and can shine. Monk did some
things in his arrangements which were unusual: in the
early Blue Note recordings, he would have the horns
sometimes play the melodic line, or the piano play the
melodic line, with the horns playing the piano chords
underneath. And he would rethink which voices would be
the leading voices. But leading voices doesn’t mean
“separate.” A leading voice is in relationship to other
voices. So he thought a lot about collaboration. It
wasn’t an easy thing to do. And a key word here is
“labor.” Labor in the world of capitalism is commodified.
So sometimes the question is how do you get paid for
that labor? Collaboration sometimes is collaborative <em>composition</em>,
where someone’s name is going to go on that music. And
Monk wasn’t always the most generous. It wasn’t always
his fault; there are a couple of tunes he clearly didn’t
really write. He might have added two notes, but his
name got on it. For Duke Ellington it happened all the
time, with Billy Strayhorn. That’s not unusual. In those
days, especially the days of bebop, it was important to
get published. So what artists would often do is take
chord changes of a standard song, like “All the Things
You Are,” for example, or “I Got Rhythm,” and then write
a line over it, like a melodic line. Just on the spot.
And then they’d have an original composition, which
means they would get publishing rights. Monk, though,
was unusual in that he tended not to use other chord
progressions; he made his own. When he wrote a
composition, it was his own, and deeply original. And
because it was deeply original, they were often difficult
to play. Even if the melody lines were fairly simple,
the chord progressions were often difficult for other
artists. So this is where his role as a teacher became
very important—and this is part of your question too: he
would teach them by ear. Because he did not want people
to read—you know, he wrote everything out. But he
wouldn’t share the sheet music. Because he, like Charles
Mingus, like Duke, felt like you can get a good feel of
the music if you hear it and play it. You don’t have to
worry about how to match the rhythms exactly, but <em>hear</em>
it. So he would do that. When you ask the question, “Was
this revolutionary?,” much of what he did was pretty
revolutionary at the time. The last thing I’ll say, to
go back to the question about money, because money is
the bottom line: he’s trying to raise his family, raise
his kids—he ends up sending them to private school. He
wasn’t making much, and the critics really did not
appreciate his music until 1956. It was about the time
when he began to sell records, and yet, at the same
time, he never compromised on his aesthetic. He kept
playing and writing <em>complex</em> music. The tragedy
is he’s 40 years old by the time he really begins to
make a living. Very few artists after 45 or so are
writing new music. They’re playing the music they always
played. And at the moment he reaches this sort of
pinnacle of fame—and he’s writing some new music—that’s
when the critics are saying, “Oh, he’s tired; he’s
playing the same thing over and over again; it’s not
rock ’n’ roll; they need to do something to resurrect
his career.” And that was one of the tragedies. This
happened simultaneously with his bipolar disorder. The
combination of these things made it difficult.</p>
<h5>So, thinking about the difficulty in earning a living
and his faithfulness to his understanding of his craft,
economic anxiety had to have pervaded his household, his
life, extended family—the patron was kind of important,
but even before that, sharing resources in his
neighborhood. Are there things about the economic
anxiety, being a professional musician named Thelonious
Monk, in this time and place, that you didn’t put in,
that you thought: “That’s suffering from the economic
hardship”?</h5>
<p>I put <em>everything</em> in there. [<em>Laughter</em>]
It’s a good question because the essence of the question
for me was, “How do you capture that anxiety?” How do
you capture it? And it’s hard because of two things. One
is that he had anxiety, but he also had Nellie. And
Nellie always worked. Nellie worked until that turning
point around 1956, which was the point when he started
to sell some records, he started to get gigs. Just
before he’s about to get his cabaret card back for a
moment; she worked, she worked as an elevator operator,
as a seamstress, a tailor; she worked her butt off.
Secondly, he was in the apartment that his mother had.
They didn’t leave that apartment until 1964. Totally
rent controlled, so rent was not an issue. And when they
had fires—two times they ended up living with family up
in the Bronx—they had a whole entourage of people to
help them: nieces and nephews, his brother-in-law, his
brother, his sister. They all pitched in. When they
couldn’t keep the kids at home because he was going to
go on tour, they would stay at the aunt’s house. The
irony is that the baroness—who is supposed to be the
great patron—she hardly gave Monk <em>anything</em>.
She didn’t have that much. She had a really nice car and
she had a nice house. But she didn’t have huge amounts
of money to give out because she was kind of cut off
from her family. That’s one of the big myths. The big
myth is that “Oh yeah, we had this patron.” At one
point, Monk loaned <em>her</em> money. Because she
wasn’t always that responsible, but that’s another
story. The other part of it is that Monk always had
enormous confidence in himself. See, he never thought
that the music he was making was so out of the ordinary
that he had to convince people; he never thought of
himself as “avant-garde.” He said, “I don’t do that
avant-garde shit! That’s not me.” He said, “I’m trying
to get a hit.” And he said this over and over again. He
just assumed that a song like “’Round Midnight” would be
a hit. Like, it’s a perfect song! “Monk’s Mood.” “Ruby
My Dear.” Of course these should be hits! There’s a
story in the book about working with this singer named
Frankie Passions—Frank Paccione. He’s a local singer,
he’s a crooner, sort of like Frank Sinatra, trying to be
Sinatra, but also like Perry Como. And Monk actually
does some arrangements for him. They go into the studio
to make this record. They cut two sides. And the
arrangements are so wild! You have to be an incredible
singer to be able to follow. But for Monk it’s perfectly
logical! It’s the logic of the music in his own
recognition that it has all the things that a
composition needs: balance, color, the right rhythm, a
sense of swing. He says, “I got all of that stuff. So
what else do you want from me?” He assumed at some point
he was going to make it. And eventually he did. He was
right about that. But he never saw himself as an
outsider. He was on the inside of the music.</p>
<h5>Moving on from the biography, we noted in our reading
of your work that you not only advocate “empathy” as a
fundamental condition of practice within shared
political struggles, but you also <em>practice</em> it
in how you write about your biographical subjects
(examples are Monk, Grace Halsell, the African and
American jazz artists featured in <em>Africa Speaks</em>,
race essentialists, student movements in the present,
and so forth). When you are led to critique or point out
the flaws in your subjects, you do so in a loving,
generous, often gentle, but also matter-of-fact way.
That is, you avoid heavy-handed browbeating, or writing
them out of the struggle. Is this by now a conscious
method in your approach? Do you set out to write
“empathic” <em>critique</em>—often calling attention to
nearly absurdist contradictions in the lives and
actions of your biographical subjects—in your work? And
how do you do this so consistently?</h5>
<p>That’s a good question. It’s funny because I’ve
actually moved away from empathy. Let me explain what I
mean. I think what I’ve been calling “empathy” was
really, if you get down to it, <em>solidarity</em>. One
thing about empathy is that it often pivots around
taking a singular story, someone’s singular experience,
and then, from that, projecting out. As if that singular
experience—empathizing with the individual—then allows
us to understand everyone who might be suffering from a
particular set of circumstances or struggles. It gets
you into the problem of “innocence.” That is, you
empathize with victims and not so much with
understanding the people who are not identified as
victims, not “innocent,” but as perpetrators. I agree
that what I try to do is to understand <em>other</em>
positions. So to go back to your question of identifying
contradictions and engaging critique, I guess this is
old-school Marxism for me. It’s early Marx; it’s also
“late” Marx. I make a distinction between old-school
Marxism and myself as a Marxist <em>versus</em> the
sectarian organizations I was a part of. I don’t ever
remember reading in Marx about democratic centralism. I
don’t know if Marx ever wrote about it, but I’m sure
it’s something that comes up later. So I go back to
Marx’s appreciation for Hegel—that is, that you have the
thesis and antithesis which produce a new synthesis. And
I’m so interested in new syntheses. Because I clearly
don’t have all the answers. I’m not interested in
winning an argument; it has never really been my
objective. Trying to <em>understand</em> has been,
because I think the questions we’re all struggling with
are life-and-death questions. A concrete example:
recently I got myself involved in the whole Cornel
West/Ta-Nehisi Coates—</p>
<h5>That’s our next question. As we have said, scholarly
generosity and empathy, kindness of/in ethical critique,
are real virtues that permeate your writing. That’s our
impression. So even if you have a different reading now
on the issue of empathy, we maintain our view that you
are empathic about your subjects, in the sense that you
see flaws, but you don’t then write twenty-five pages of
evisceration.</h5>
<p>Right, because, see, if I would do that, then I’d have
to do auto-critique! Because I could give you <em>fifty</em>
pages of self-evisceration!</p>
<h5>[<em>Laughter</em>] Wait, no Robin! You are with two
of the most self-loathing people on the face of the
earth. You can interview us!</h5>
<p>We are in the same club!</p>
<h5>[<em>Laughter</em>] So in one recent moment that
brought tears to my eyes, you weighed in on the
published critique that Cornel West made of Ta-Nehisi
Coates. Cornel is a personal friend and former teacher
of mine. When I read what he wrote about Ta-Nehisi, I
was struck by how right Cornel was, but also by its
coldness as boldness. When you weighed in, you spoke to
the need for compassion. You wondered why the
cannibalistic or eviscerative impulse tended to happen
again and again. And what’s so odd, as you point out, is
that what Cornel said about Coates bore some resemblance
to Adolph Reed’s 1990s critiques of West. (Michael Eric
Dyson has more recently and less effectively written in
a similarly caustic way.) But you were noticeably
compassionate, gentle, no less sharp in staking out a
politics, but not hurtful. There are two parts to this.
How easy or hard is this approach for you? And where do
your edges show up?</h5>
<p>Well, to go back to the context for this intervention,
which I did not want to get into—ironically, I felt the
need to intervene because Cornel was being attacked. It
was the attacks on Cornel that disturbed me the most. It
was so messed up; even friends of mine, like Jelani Cobb
and others, began to attack Cornel as if it was simply
personality, personal hating.</p>
<h5>Well, Cornel looked small. He’s also always a very
expansive guy, generous. But there he looked small. His
critique was great, but it was very worrisome.</h5>
<p>I know that part of it has to do with what it means to
be interviewed as opposed to writing a long piece. Part
of it has to do with these really short pieces in the <em>Guardian</em>.
I understand that. So, whatever Cornel said, and I
fundamentally agree with him … that’s why he called me
out in the piece. I never said I don’t agree with
Cornel. I agree with him on his critique of Coates. I
also had read Coates’s book. And Coates and I actually
did a debate.</p>
<h5>That debate’s up on YouTube. I did see that.</h5>
<p>Yes, it’s up on YouTube, and it was at the L.A. Public
Library. It wasn’t really a debate. It was my asking him
hard questions, <em>which he appreciated</em>. As a
result of that conversation, Ta-Nehisi’s followers
basically drove me off of Twitter! That’s why I’m no
longer on Twitter. This is why it’s so ironic. Ta-Nehisi
goes off of Twitter as a result of this; <em>I</em>
went off because of <em>his</em> followers. And
Ta-Nehisi doesn’t know that; I never talked to him about
it. But I asked some difficult, challenging questions,
talking about James Baldwin. They were serious
questions. I felt like his reading of James Baldwin was
one I didn’t recognize in Baldwin’s texts. And I was
pushing him on some things. And people who are his
followers were writing me all this hate mail. Like, “You
had no right to speak; your job is just to interview
him. You need to shut your ass up. If you want a
MacArthur, get your own MacArthur.” As if somehow that
had <em>anything</em> to do with it! So I felt bad. The
pattern was Ta-Nehisi Coates/West became a spectacle
like Dyson/West became a spectacle. People were weighing
in as if somehow it’s a spectacle of the <em>fight</em>.
Rather than the <em>political issues</em> at hand. Once
the political issues are lost, then we’re lost.
Ta-Nehisi reached out to me because he was concerned I
was joining the bandwagon against him. I said, “Look,
I’m not for or against anyone. I’m for liberation. I
don’t have time. I love everybody.” But liberation is a
project that we have to work on together. It doesn’t
mean we agree. In fact, if we all agree, we’ll never get
there. You’ve got to be able to create thesis,
antithesis, synthesis. And so you need to be able to
lay out exactly what Ta-Nehisi is doing in his book,
which didn’t come out in West’s critique. I wanted to
remind us that Cornel has a <em>long</em> history, a <em>long</em>
and <em>dedicated</em> and <em>amazing</em> history as
a <em>revolutionary</em> thinker. That’s why I went
through this whole thing about his Marxist background,
the way that he tried to think through these things—he’s
one of the leading … he’s like my hero! And he still is,
and will always be. But then, my <em>main task</em> was
to get to Jackson, Mississippi. I wanted to use this as
a way to pivot, to say, “Look, here on the ground in
Jackson are people working out these ideas; it’s very
hard, it’s not easy, but they’re struggling through it.”
What annoyed me the most after that piece came out were
people who wrote me and said, “Oh, you should moderate a
debate between Cornel and Ta-Nehisi in Jackson.” I’m
like, “<em>Did you read the piece?!</em>” That defeats
the purpose. The people in Jackson don’t need “Ta-Nehisi
versus Cornel!” More spectacle?! Bring the spectacle to
Jackson?! That annoyed me. But I learned to be this way
because this is how my mother is. My mother’s always
been like this; her religion is Self-Realization
Fellowship. Paramahansa Yogananda is her guru, similar
to Sonny Rollins. I grew up with that. And my sister,
Makani Themba—who’s an activist, longtime, she’s my
older sister—she trained me and raised me. And she’s
always looking for opportunities for dialogue, always
looking for a way to wage critique that is open and
loving, but still critique. Because the flip side of this
story is what annoys me the most, and that is, whenever
I’m giving a talk and people start snapping their
fingers, you know, they do this thing now [<em>snaps fast</em>],
I feel I must have said something wrong! Because it’s
not my job to <em>confirm</em> what you already know.
And that to me is the flip side of it. The idea that
people want speakers or want to read things that <em>confirm</em>
what they know rather than <em>challenge</em> what they
know. That’s where I think, if I have edges that show
up, that’s what I’m most critical of. Because it’s tied
to the opposite. The culture of ad hominem and the
culture of hating: the flip side of that is <em>confirmation</em>.
Neither of them is dialectical. Hating is banishment.
Confirmation is nothing changes. They’re two sides of the
same coin. We’re raised politically to think
dialectically. Which is that we <em>need</em> to have
that thesis/antithesis <em>constantly</em>. And you
cannot separate them; they have to be together, because
those contradictions are drivers, they’re not something
to be afraid of.</p>
<h5>Thinking back to my early background, I was part of a
community organization, a community center, back in
East New York in Brooklyn. The guy who ran it was a
social worker who had come out of the Communist Party,
he had left the Communist Party, and then in the 1950s
and ’60s, he went to various places, including Atlanta,
and trained all these different radical social workers.
The thing that he was most about was <em>conflict</em>:
<em>conflict</em> and <em>conflict resolution</em>. So we
would sit in meetings—we were fifteen years old, sixteen
years old—kids of different backgrounds, different
racial backgrounds, we were all mostly from the
neighborhood. And he would just <em>sharpen</em> those
differences, and make us have to deal with each other
and confront each other. And it was hard because part of
that process is that you’re getting ripped apart! On the
other hand, we knew, and there was a sense that, we were
involved in this process together, that there was a kind
of solidarity in that what we were working toward was
trying to figure out how to live together. So I think
about that when you ask, what’s our job? What is it that
we’re about? In our teaching, confirmation is not absent
from what we need to do, but it’s certainly not the
project. It’s not the goal; but sharpening
contradictions …</h5>
<p>Yeah, I think that’s really important. But the idea of
conflict <em>resolution</em>: I’ve always thought of it
more as conflict <em>transformation</em>.</p>
<h5>That’s probably what it is. You know, what we were
trying to do, to be blunt, was trying to figure out ways
kids in the neighborhood were not outside in the streets
fighting with each other, sometimes even pulling weapons
on each other. We were trying to figure out an
alternative to that.</h5>
<p>Yeah, because you wanted to stop fighting.</p>
<h5>It wasn’t because we were trying to <em>evaporate</em>
the conflict; it was let’s bring it inside and use it to
figure out how we could all continue to live.</h5>
<p>Exactly. One of the people who really pressed me to
have to think dialectically, who was also a teacher of
mine, was Grace Lee Boggs. Grace was a <em>huge</em>
influence. I first met her in 1991 or ’92—I know it was
before Jimmy Boggs passed away. And I know that before
he died, the last thing he was reading was <em>Hammer
and Hoe</em>. I really appreciate that; she told me
that. Every time I wrote something and Grace
disagreed—and she <em>disagreed!</em>—she would write
me letters, back before emails, telling me all the
things that were <em>wrong</em>. And we’d go back and
forth. Her thing was to think dialectically and <em>not</em>
to be locked in the old debates, the old Marxist
debates. To really push Marxism—her thing was to push <em>beyond</em>
Marxism. To push beyond Leninism. And this is the person
who did the first translations of Marx’s <em>Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts</em>; it was Grace!
People give Erich Fromm all the credit, but it was
actually Grace who did the first translations from the
German. So she knows what she’s talking about. But she’s
also like, “You need to think dialectically,” meaning,
“Think dialectically where you are <em>now</em>.” “What
time is it on the clock of the world?,” she’d always
say. “And what is it <em>now</em> we’re dealing with?”
She said the genius of Lenin is that he wasn’t back in
the late nineteenth century trying to have debates. He’s
like, “At this moment, what are we doing right <em>now</em>?
What is our plan <em>now</em>?” So, I learned that from
her. And this idea of not wanting confirmation—part of
the reason I wrote “Black Study, Black Struggle,” that <em>Boston
Review</em> piece, was because it went against the
grain. In fact, at first, people were very upset with me
about that piece. A lot of students felt I was
critiquing them and not being supportive. I said,
“Yeah, I was critiquing some things.” But that’s the
whole point. The point is that we have to ask really
hard questions. Not so much, what do students want the
university to do for them? Let’s ask the bigger
question. What kind of world are we trying to build? Why
turn to the university administration to give you things
rather than demand and take the things that you want?
And why do we think of education in such narrow terms
as, again, <em>confirmation</em>? They were demanding
reading lists that would <em>confirm</em> their humanity
as black and brown people, as queer people. I said,
well, look, we can confirm that, but then what do you do
after that? We can’t stop there; we have to be able to
push into auto-critique because otherwise what we end
up doing is adopting a political position in which all
black people, including those who signed, sealed, and
delivered legislation that is putting us in prisons,
become “oppressed.” <em>Equally</em>. We’re all like
equally oppressed. We’re all equally under the gun. And
antiblackness becomes the <em>only</em> way to conceive
of the global nature of oppression today. How do you
push beyond that? So I’m trying to push them hard.</p>
<h5>I’m starting to get a sense of why you’re moving away
from <em>empathy</em> to <em>solidarity</em>. That
makes sense. Empathy tends to be inside a therapeutic,
psychological discourse about self-improvement and “I’m
OK.” And in that <em>Boston Review</em> essay, you’re
challenging students to political maturity. Like you
said, what comes after you’ve affirmed that your identity
belongs on this campus or in this class? So, solidarity
is the thing …</h5>
<p>Right, and empathy also requires identifying with the
person you’re empathizing with. And sometimes you only
identify with those whom you recognize. That’s a problem
because part of <em>solidarity</em> is the people you <em>don’t</em>
recognize. The people who you <em>don’t</em> see
yourself in. And we’re raised in this particular era of
liberal multiculturalism to see ourselves in others.
When in fact I tell my students, “Look, not only do you
not see yourself in others, but if we’re talking about
enslaved people in the eighteenth century, I’m sorry,
none of y’all can know what that means.” We can begin to
understand not by simply imposing our own selves but by
stepping <em>outside</em> of ourselves and moving into
different periods of history. Understanding the
constraints and limitations of people’s lives that are
not us, as opposed to those who are <em>like</em> us.
The fallback is always, “Well, if it were me,” or, “I
can see how other people feel,” as opposed to, “Let me
step outside myself.”</p>
<h5>That is partly what led Serap Kayatekin and me to read
Emmanuel Levinas; the reason why we wanted to read
Levinas was the issue of “radical otherness.” What do
you do when there is no identification? It’s not like <em>you</em>
adopt that position; you’re not standing in others’
shoes. So now what? Now what do you do with <em>that</em>?
What is the ethics of dealing with a <em>radical</em>
other?</h5>
<p>Right, exactly! I was wrestling with that. While I was
attaching the adjective “radical” to “empathy,” that
was my way of struggling to get to that point. Until
finally I realized that it could only get me so far.
Solidarity, which is also a tricky thing, will get us
much closer to what I’m trying to wrestle with. Now, the
problem is we’re at a political moment where it’s hard
to talk about solidarity, at least in the circles I’m
around, among a lot of my students. I remember being in
a meeting about a year ago with some activists, and I
was talking about the traditions—the black radical
traditions—of <em>abolition democracy</em> that DuBois
discusses. Newly freed black people, freed from chattel
slavery, still struggling with other forms of unfreedom,
were opening up the possibilities of free universal
education for <em>all</em> people, of democratizing the
<em>whole</em> nation, of saying, “Look, we’re going to
transform this world as we know it.” And suddenly I got
this pushback from some young people who were like,
“Well, that was their mistake; they should have just
been fighting for their own.” I said, “That doesn’t make
any sense.” “Well, but what did they get out of it? They
got lynching and ….” “They had to endure lynching and
violence <em>precisely</em> because they were fighting
for democratizing America.” And so the main takeaway was
that in an era of antiblackness we need to be fighting
just for our own. And there’s no possible way you can
transform or win others. To go back to Ta-Nehisi,
Ta-Nehisi’s position is that you can’t win over white
people, so just forget it. It’s some kind of
Afro-pessimism—he’s not an official Afro-pessimist, he’s
more like an existentialist. And that’s not where my
politics are, because we don’t really have a choice. I’m
much closer I think to Dr. King in this when he talks
about what <em>agape</em> actually means. The constant
struggle to create community. <em>Constant struggle!</em>
You can’t stop fighting. And creating community means
creating community with those you don’t like. And people
who don’t like you. And trying to figure how to move
forward to something better. Not to the point of, as
King would put it, <em>sentimental</em> love. But a <em>hard</em>
love, a hard love that’s <em>in</em> struggle. I can’t
think of another path to go; it’s inconceivable to me.
But that’s not necessarily a very popular thing right
now. And I can understand it.</p>
<h5>Within the black community.</h5>
<p>Oh yeah, within the black community. I can understand
why, because these are painful times. They’ve always
been painful times. The difference is that these painful
times are up now on YouTube!</p>
<h5>Robin, moving on, in your writings, the terms
“authenticity” and “purity” appear. They appear as
descriptors of positions and identities, but they are
also often, seemingly, used ironically or
self-critically. This is not only in terms of how the
words are used but also in your examples. So you note in
<em>Africa Speaks</em> that jazz purists often could not
accept some contemporary African music as “jazz,
proper.” Likewise, you indicate that Sathima Bea
Benjamin’s insistence on singing American jazz classics
during the period of anti-apartheid uprisings, in which
she played an important part, and not more
“tribal-derived” protest music, like Miriam Makeba, was
something that held her back professionally and also
brought suspicion on her commitment to the struggle. In
a different vein, you remark how Babatunde Olatunji’s
first “Drums of Passion” group in the United
States—purportedly “introducing” African drums and
rhythms to America—paradoxically had three non-African
drummers, and himself (who only learned to play while at
Morehouse). You do something similar with Guy Warren,
who you say was greeted with suspicion and suffered
professionally for being neither “authentically” a jazz
musician nor a pure African musician. And the same with
the oud-playing jazz musician Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who
described himself as Sudanese and claimed Middle
Eastern/North African music as his heritage, but whom
you show to have had only Caribbean forebears and who
was born in Brooklyn! Yet you are gentle in your
treatment, do not chastise anyone for these seeming
transgressions against so-called authenticity and purity
(which we liked!), and instead evaluate their efforts on
the grounds of their commitments and achievements, both
musically and politically. How do you connect your views
here with the very heated similar debates today over
“cultural appropriation,” especially pertaining to who
can, should, does, etc. play and perform music that
originates with a specific racial or ethnic or gender
group, etc.? Are there analogies here with your
examples? What are the obligations of artists who
violate or transgress “the authentic”?</h5>
<p>Well, you’re absolutely right that I tend to use terms
like “tradition” and “authenticity” ironically.
Basically to signal the fact that they’re all
constructions. And they’re all <em>constructions</em>
created in the twentieth century by those who have the
most influence over commercial elements of the music.
What makes something “authentic” often has to do with
the marketplace. It’s not even about what are the
various elements of it. Part of the Olatunji story is
that Columbia Records saw him as more “African” than Guy
Warren. Now, as you know, they’re both from the
continent of Africa. The difference is that Guy Warren
trained at West Africa’s most important music school:
Achimota College. Olatunji had no training. So if you
were to think of a really concise definition of what it
means to be an authentic musician—not to say that this
is even true—then part of it might be were you trained
in your instrument, in your discipline, as opposed to
self-taught? To me, that’s not criteria. But just say,
for the sake of argument, it is. Then one would think
that Guy Warren would have been the ideal person! What
does it mean to be an African musician? Well, to be an
African musician! And it should be that, but that’s not
how it works. Because in the end, Columbia Records is
interested in selling records. Sathima Bea
Benjamin—because she doesn’t sound like African-American
singers and because she’s not sounding like Miriam
Makeba—there’s no niche for her. And that is part of the
problem. So one of the things that that book tries to do
is challenge the idea that, in this age of
decolonization, artists were actually atavistic in that
they were trying to go back to some ancient past, that
they were trying to resurrect ancient Africa. When they
all were creating this <em>modern</em> music! Even
Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who is taking the oud and playing it
differently, played music that laid the groundwork for
much of what we think of as “Free Jazz” or “Avant-Garde
Jazz.” So I kind of disrupt the notions of “tradition”
and “authenticity”—<em>I </em>don’t do it, the <em>artists</em>
do it. They’re responsible. They’re doing all this
disruption. Even Randy Weston’s story of finally getting
to African soil, finally getting to Nigeria, his
dream—his father called himself an African; his dream
was to be on the continent. He gets there, and he’s like
in the bush, trying to find authentic music. And what
does he find? He finds Highlife music! In the city of
Lagos! He finds other jazz musicians there! And he
discovers a whole new world opening to him. And he comes
back home and records Highlife music. And this is hip,
this is modern, this is new. At a time when, for
Africans on the continent, for anyone involved in
decolonization—or like for Frantz Fanon!—Africa <em>is</em>
the future! It’s not the past, it’s the <em>future</em>.
And so, of course, the future is going to create <em>future
music</em>. Jazz in South Africa was the music of the
future. It was the music of progress. It was only after
you get South African musicians coming to Europe, into
the U.S., that their “authenticity” as Africans had
deeper political meaning. And I’m not saying that
anything is more or less “political,” just that there
are different kinds of political articulations. Think
about someone like Hugh Masekela, who comes out playing
like Clifford Brown, listening to Miles Davis—he makes a
decision after Sharpeville: “Look, I’m going to go back
to township music, I’ma play this music!” And it is
still <em>modern</em>, it is <em>still</em> music for
the times, but it’s resurrecting a form that is
connected to the people, a more democratic form. So for
me, the project of understanding music and politics is
to discard notions of “tradition” and “authenticity,” <em>except</em>
in the way that it frames the work, the way it frames
the commercial limitations and possibilities and
constraints, the way it frames how critics write about
it, the way it frames even the way musicians think about
the music. And I don’t want do deny. Like when Randy
says, “I play traditional music,” I know what he means
by that. It’s not to say that I’m having an argument
with Randy; but again, it is inseparable from
commodification. So when we get to the question about
“cultural appropriation,” to me, I can never separate
the issue of “appropriation” from the issue of the
market.</p>
<h5>So copyright matters.</h5>
<p>Yeah, it matters. There’s copyright, but there’s also
who is accumulating money capital as a result of taking
someone else’s social/cultural capital. This is the
classic case of Elvis Presley and rock ’n’ roll, the
classic case of Pat Boone. Going and saying, “I’m going
to take this music and I’m going to make a record.” I
don’t think that there’s any crime in one person, two
people, a thousand people, a million people borrowing
from, drawing from, recreating forms of cultural
practice or art from another. It’s when you translate
that into cold cash.</p>
<h5>Livelihoods.</h5>
<p>Livelihoods! When you’re denying one group of people a
livelihood, or you’re milking them for everything. To
me, that’s when it matters. The whole history of culture
and art has been one of appropriation. You can hardly
find examples where that’s not true. Modern art cannot
have emerged—<em>cubism</em> could not have
emerged—without the discovery of African sculpture. And
everyone knows that, and no one’s paying reparations to
those artists. For <em>stealing</em>. But theft is only
theft when it’s a commodity. To me, it is so common—so
if you think of something as basic as music from the
Caribbean. Many elements of Caribbean music come from
different sources. Some of the sources are Indian. Or
Asian. Some of the sources are British hymns. There are
many sources. And yet it’s still creative, <em>original</em>
music. Even the idea of the pan, that is, you make music
out of an oil drum. One could say, “Well, the oil
companies, they need to get credit for that.” This is
about creating new forms of culture in a way in which
the world becomes your creative palette. It’s the <em>translation</em>
to money that’s really the problem. Now, people don’t
agree with me on that. Because some people say cultural
appropriation is appropriation.</p>
<h5>I tend to think closer to how you describe it.
Nonappropriation is unimaginable. I don’t understand
that at all. But I do understand the problem of
livelihoods, and a commodity is going to be sold, and
who it is that’s going to be receiving the royalties on
it, and for what reasons. So if somebody signs their
name over a formation that they are very conscious that
they’ve borrowed, but, “Here’s my interpretation of it,
and now I’m signing my name over it,” that’s very
troubling.</h5>
<p>Or even just not <em>acknowledge</em>—what you say in
the last part of your question. To even <em>acknowledge</em>
where these things come from. That’s basic, but we don’t
always do that.</p>
<h5>More about how you’ve thought about and analyzed
authenticity in black culture. In <em>Yo Mama’s
DisFUNKtional!</em>, you use the early experiences of
wearing Afros by people like Andrea Benton Rushing (at
Amherst College, right?) and Helen Hayes King to
criticize social-scientific and pop-cultural tropes of
“real” authentic blackness. But you also point out the
pervasive masculinism (and, we might add today, gender
binarism and heteronormativity) of so much “race man”
knowledge as authentic blackness. That tendency
persists to this day, although #metoo originated in the
work of Tarana Burke. And Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and
Patrisse Cullors—three queer women—started the #blm
movement, the plight of black women’s economic and
social realities. And in our time queer people of color,
particularly in carceral settings or homelessness on the
streets—those conditions as spaces of blackness often
remain an afterthought, or a footnote. In your teaching
and writing, how do you enact your feminism and your
commitment to the primacy of <em>black women’s</em>
material subjective experiences?</h5>
<p>That’s an excellent question! When I wrote <em>Freedom
Dreams</em>, that chapter on black feminism was really
important to me, and that was because I was trying to
make the point that black feminists—particularly of that
second or third wave— offered the best challenge to
those who were critiquing what was then considered <em>identitarianism</em>.
That’s another story; whether or not it was identity
politics as we know it today versus what it was then, is
different. So anyone who really believes in eradicating
all forms of oppression and exploitation has to begin
there, as Anna Julia Cooper said: “When and where I
enter, the whole race follows.” So I didn’t really have
much of a choice. In terms of my own teaching and
activism, certainly I try my best to support feminism
writ large and try to live and function in ways in which
I understand both the <em>pleasures</em> of difference
but also the <em>constraints</em> and the <em>limitations</em>
of difference—that to be queer is an assertion of
identity, but what also come with it are certain
dangers, certain constraints. I’m always harping on the
idea that the identities that we always think of as
identities are more than that. That race and gender and
sexuality are also sites of oppression and
marginalization. That difference is not just for
difference sake, but difference is produced; we need to
make a difference. So as Opel Tometti, Alicia Garza, and
Patrisse Cullors know, when they say Black Lives Matter,
they are saying ALL black lives matter, every single
black life matters, and therefore, that means that ALL
black lives are under <em>threat of elimination</em>.
That second part is extremely important because it asks
how do we defend our communities from this kind of
violence, particularly violences that within our
communities we actually enact and defend and protect? To
talk about what it means to have a queer politics or a
feminist politics is to recognize that class and race
alone—both sites of intense struggle—can also be used as
ways to mask, hide, occlude forms of heteropatriarchy,
heteronormativity, denying people identifications and
freedoms based on those sets of differences. To me,
that’s very important. And in my teaching, I’m always
struggling with how can I be better. I’m teaching a
course right now in modern African American history.
We’re talking about the 1870s to the present. And I
decided to use no textbook, but only biographies and
autobiographies. So I’m using Assata Shakur; I’m using
Keith Gilyard’s book on Louise Thompson Patterson; I’m
using Jeanne Theoharis’s book on Rosa Parks, <em>The
Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks</em> (which is a great
book); I’m using George Lipsitz’s book on Ivory Perry
and Mia Bay’s book on Ida B. Wells. So four black women
and one black man as a way to tell the narrative of
African American history. And ALL organizers, ALL
activists. The emphasis is not just on the everyday
lives of black people in this period but really who were
the ones struggling to try to transform this world. So
it becomes intellectual history, it becomes history of
philosophy, history of social movements. But the point
is that four black women and one black man can be the
foundation for telling the story. And that kind of threw
the students because they’re like, “Got so many black
women …”</p>
<h5>Is that right?</h5>
<p>Yeah. It’s my experiment. I’ve done it in the past when
I’ve used textbooks; I’ve used Paula Giddings’ book <em>When
and Where I Enter</em>, which is a history of African
American women, as the textbook. And then fill in with
lectures. It’s not enough, but I’m trying to figure out
how to do that and be better at it. So in “This
Battlefield Called Life”—</p>
<h5>Right, in “This Battlefield Called Life,” your essay on
black feminism, you write, “Radical black feminists have
never confined their vision to just the emancipation of
black women or women in general, or all black people for
that matter. Rather, they are theorists and proponents
of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity
and reconstructing social relations across the board.”
Key to this claim—with which we agree—is what you say in
the same paragraph: that black radical feminist theory
and social engagement is not about identity politics. (<em>How
do we get our students to move beyond this immersion
point?</em>) Here again a theme so prominent in your
work emerges. Historically, black radical feminists
occupy a historical, cultural, and socioeconomic
position or experience that has necessarily been more
expansive, more inclusive, more fundamentally
oppositional to the status quo. Sounds somewhat like
materialist standpoint theory. It is, and it isn’t. Or
it begins there, but it leads elsewhere, goes elsewhere.
In this brilliant essay, you refer to the important
“choice” in the late 1970s by Barbara Smith, Demita
Frazier, and Beverly Smith to be revolutionary rather
than accommodationist in their politics because they
recognized intersectionality, complexity, contradiction
in/as identity. Identity is descriptive and may, as a
point estimate, offer a snapshot of who, what, where we
are. But <em>intersectionality</em>—the fluidity and
indeterminacy of identity—is how we live our
experience. We refer to this important understanding in
terms of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality
mostly these days. It allows us to see that quests for a
pure, ancestral community within ourselves and in the
form of our families or communities or versions of “us”
are mythical quests for Eden. But given the multifaceted
and dynamic forms of social movements (think Combahee
River Collective and its insistent class focus on
resource deprivation for black women and black families)
in the twentieth century, this concept <em>intersectionality</em>
also reminds us that nonviolent (military, domestic,
imperial), nonracial, nonsexist, nonhomophobic social
relations in the family, community, schools, public life
are not possible in a capitalist society! That is a
profound vision of <em>revolutionary</em>, not
reformist, radical black feminism. At the end of the
essay, you frame the question as follows: “Can we all
get along long enough to make a revolution?” Rather than
these fits-and-starts reforms.</h5>
<p>I forgot I wrote that [<em>laughter all around</em>].</p>
<h5>So I guess what we’re trying to get at in that
question has to do with radical black feminism’s <em>revolutionary
insistence</em> as a challenge to us.</h5>
<p>Exactly. You know, it’s so <em>interesting</em> that
you bring that out. The women that I end up writing
about, like Barbara Smith, for example, and Angela, they
are in some ways—what they are arguing for is the
antidote to Afro-pessimism. Because for them there’s no
question about the rapaciousness of capitalism. They
begin there. They call themselves socialists. The
Combahee Collective, they don’t play. They say, we’re
socialists, but we’re not <em>just</em> socialists.
Socialism is part of our agenda, but they’re also saying
that if we’re able to seize the state on this day and
simply implement a form of state socialism, that would
not resolve the contradictions of heteropatriarchy, the
contradictions of racism. These things have to be
struggled through because they’re all coconstitutive;
they emerge together. And have to be eliminated
together. Even our definition of freedom can’t be limited
to basic biological needs. Freedom is also about freedom
of sexuality, freedom to be with the partners we want,
freedom to rethink our social relations all together.
And that makes them <em>deeply</em> revolutionary,
ironically—tied to the “young Marx” in some ways. They
also were advocates of a solidarity politics. They felt
like they needed to build alliances with other groups,
other movements, whether it’s movements around
reproductive rights, welfare rights, the labor unions.
And that goes against the grain of narrower thinking,
saying, you know, the concerns of our community are the
only concerns that we have to be apprised of. And they
were internationalists as well! There’s another group I
write about in that chapter, which is still somewhat of
a mystery, but they were an amazing group of women based
in Mount Vernon who put out a book called <em>Lessons
from the Damned</em>—we’re trying to get that
reprinted actually. Verso is trying to do it. <a
href="https://734blackink.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/lessons_from_the_damned.pdf"
target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Lessons from the
Damned</em> is this book that is black feminist
practice <em>laid out</em></a>. In the clearest terms
possible. These were black women working in the
community, a low-income community, around housing
rights, welfare rights, and they got together everyone
they’re working with—young kids, elders, people of all
ages, all poor people—and said, look, write about the
oppressions you’re dealing with, write about what you
want to see. Without an author, per se.</p>
<h5>“The Damned.”</h5>
<p><em>The Damned</em>. The Damned is the author. You
can’t get more radical than that! Because that’s an
example of <em>praxis</em>. That is, groups of people
coming together to theorize their condition, to think
through what’s the next step, and then to write it down
in ways that are full of contradictions, but
contradictions that are not resolved or disappear, but
open up new possibilities. And that is the best because,
to go back to the question of intersectionality,
intersectionality is used a lot today; I’m not always
clear what people <em>mean</em> by that. Oftentimes,
intersectionality is treated as compound identities.
That is, I’ve got this list of identities … but there’s
no intersections taking place! But intersectionality,
from what I understood, from not just Kim Crenshaw, but
the people who preceded her … when the Third World
Women’s Alliance was formed, and people like the woman
who wrote <em>Triple Jeopardy</em>—Fran Beal! So Fran
Beal, who’s a long-distance runner, who is one of the
central figures in the Black Radical Congress years
later; Fran Beal, who’s someone who comes out of the
Left, comes out of SNCC—the way she and others were
thinking about “triple jeopardy” is that not only are we
dealing with these compound oppressions, but those
oppressions are, again, coconstitutive, codetermining,
they are inseparable from each other. We need to build
deeper alliances in order to fight them all, to develop
a political framework, a political critique, that can
address all of them together. Because they don’t operate
separately, like as a list. They operate as one. That’s
the idea I think behind “triple jeopardy.” We’ve got to
figure out a way to get back to that. “Can we all get
along long enough to make a revolution?” That requires
what we were calling an “empathic leap” or a “leap of
solidarity.” That is, for those who are not black women
to basically <em>not</em> claim to walk in their shoes,
but to <em>listen</em>. To hear things and take them at
their face value. That the issues around reproductive
rights, reproductive rights defined by having the freedom
to actually have children rather than facing forced
sterilization; to be safe in the streets, so that when
we have the force of the State and individuals treating
us as vulnerable—and therefore, as vulnerable to sexual
violence and other forms of violence—these are the
things that are urgent. And if women and queer people
say these are the urgent issues, then we’ve got to stand
behind them and support in solidarity <em>fully</em> as
<em>comrades</em>, instead of <em>allies</em>.</p>
<h5>That’s good. We have that conversation too; one of us
says, “I don’t think of myself as an ‘ally,’ but I
certainly do think of myself as a comrade: always.” But
that’s a whole other thing. Shall we move on?</h5>
<h5>We read online that your current book project is a
biography of Grace Halsell, the white woman from Texas
who worked as a journalist, served as a speechwriter for
President Johnson, and was famous for her book about
racial passing, <em>Soul Sister</em>. You’ve written
eloquently about why her career interests you. In the
essay we found online about this project, you describe
how you first learned of her existence, and then much
later why you decided to write a biography of her life
and work. You write, “In Grace Halsell I found my life’s
work—”</h5>
<h5>I didn’t know whether that was hyperbole or not.</h5>
<p>Yeah, that was hyperbole [<em>laughter</em>].</p>
<h5>[<em>continuing</em>] “—the perfect subject to tell a
profoundly American and global story about four forces
that shaped our modern world: race, sex, war, and
empire.” Later you say, “I am still searching for Grace
Halsell, whose truths and fears, lives and loves lay
fragmented in a vast sea of archival boxes awaiting
reconstruction. As I work through the pieces of her life
I am reminded of the considerable impact Grace has had
on me,” and then you go on to talk about your first trip
to Palestine “where what I witnessed fundamentally
changed my life.” How did being in Palestine
researching Grace Halsell change your life
fundamentally? How is freedom struggle—the quest for
human dignity and justice—“global”?</h5>
<p>I wrote that piece for a particular journal for an
organization that she was very much a part of—yes, some
of that is hyperbole. But when I said “life’s work,” I
was thinking that much of what she ends up doing
connects a lot of things I’m interested in. I’m
interested in indigenous struggles and decolonization;
I’m interested in black movements in modern ghettoes in
the 1960s; cold war politics. So she ends up being kind
of my Zelig. Going to all these hot spots. At first it
was a book about following her to tell a larger
story—that’s why I call it “An Intimate History of the
American Century.” But then her own personality, which
is kind of complicated, I have to say—it’s not always a
happy story—gets in the way of me telling that story.
The punchline, though, is that she goes from being a New
York Times bestseller and a very well-known journalist
to being persona non grata, all because of Palestine.
When I went to Palestine in January 2012, I didn’t go
there to research Grace. That was just a side trip. I
went there because I was part of a delegation; I’m on
the board for the U.S. Academic and Cultural Boycott of
Israel. I’ve been involved with them for a while. While
I was there, I did interview some people who knew her.
So there’s two things I can link to the trip to
Palestine in terms of your question: “How is freedom
struggle—the quest for human dignity and
justice—‘global’?” One is that writing the book on Grace
gave me an intimate, bird’s-eye view of the Asian
theater in the postwar period, Latin America after 1959,
the ghettoes and reservations and barrios of North
America—she hit them all. Ghettoes, reservations,
barrios, and the border are these hot spots not only of
day-to-day drudgery, dispossession, and violence, but
hot spots for revolutionary possibility. Like
celebrations around 1968, it made me realize in doing
this work and revisiting that time that the movements
that erupted in these spots were revolutionary
movements; they were not interested in reform. Reform
was not their agenda. And part of it has to do with the
fact that their main opposition was to <em>liberals</em>.
It was <em>liberals</em> who waged the war in Vietnam;
it was <em>liberals</em> who were overseeing under
Lyndon Johnson the invasion of the Dominican Republic
and what was happening in Indonesia; it was <em>liberals</em>
who were waging a war on poverty that did not consider
the structural dimensions of capitalism and, instead,
thought that education and programs would somehow solve
that problem. The National Welfare Rights Organization
that emerges, they’re fighting liberals. It was liberals.
It reminds me of the importance of capturing that
radical sense of possibility. The struggles that we
think of as identity struggles, like the American Indian
Movement, the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, the Black
Panthers—they actually were working together. That level
of solidarity across the board: Japanese-Americans
coming out in solidarity with the people occupying
Alcatraz Island; the Black Panthers supporting
Palestine and Iranian students who can’t return home as
a result of the Shah; <em>socialist</em>-feminists who
are taking an antiracist position; as if, somehow, ALL
the white people are just, like, worthless. And so much
of socialist-feminism in Chicago, the Socialist-Feminist
Union—and these organizations, they’re thinking about
alliances across the board. To remind us, they were all
basically anticapitalist— they were not for fixing the
system. And for all of them it was global. It was Native
Americans and indigenous people around the world; it was
black people’s struggle along with what was happening in
Africa and the Caribbean. Visiting Palestine was
important for me. And this is the second point. Because
in this particular era, where people begin talking about
decolonial or decolonialization as a metaphor, you
cannot go to Palestine and see a set of metaphors, it’s
not a metaphor …</p>
<h5>There’s nothing metaphorical about the last 2–3 weeks
[April 2018], holy shit!</h5>
<p>Right? Not at all! You see straight colonial violence.
You see dispossession. We were visiting people in East
Jerusalem who were being forced out of their homes. For
no other reason than pretexts, like, if you decide to
build another room, that’s a violation of a housing
code, and they just evict people. They’re bulldozing
olive trees! And now they’re just shooting Palestinians
from 300 yards away: snipers. It’s just the cost of
elimination.</p>
<h5>Exploding bullets. And think about it. At a fence?!</h5>
<p>Yeah, and that was shocking!</p>
<h5>And talk about liberals! Our liberal press simply
won’t even acknowledge it. It won’t even make the news.
We’ve been following this.</h5>
<p>Right, and so to me, Palestine is one example, but
Palestine is a very important one to remind us of
ongoing colonialism, the violence that people are
experiencing on an everyday basis, both in Gaza and
also the West Bank. And again, I return to what I feel
like is a very dangerous trend, a kind of withdrawal, at
least from my community, of people saying, “Well, you
know we don’t really have time to fight for Palestine.
Palestine is 7,000 miles away. And, besides,
Palestinians harbor antiblackness, too, so therefore we
shouldn’t be in solidarity.” Now, I’ve heard that more
than once.</p>
<h5>Is that right?</h5>
<p>Yes. And I’m like, okay, how does that make any sense?
So you’re saying that Palestinians shouldn’t ask support
from black people because there are some blacks who
harbor Islamophobia? And trust me there are a lot of
folks who are Islamophobic! So does it go both ways? Our
support and solidarity with people who are struggling
for human dignity and justice should not depend on their
knowing anything about us! <em>Solidarity is not a
market exchange</em>. It’s not, <em>you</em> need to
give us <em>your</em> love and we’ll give you <em>ours</em>!
Whether it’s the Rohingya, whether it’s the Roma,
whether it’s the Palestinians, we’ve got to be able to
say, this is not acceptable! And I’ll give you a really
good example of this. I’ll never forget when Obama was
debating Romney, it was the second campaign. At one
point, Obama said something like we shouldn’t be
exporting jobs and buying commodities from China
because labor is so cheap. So his point was that the
Chinese pay workers slave wages, and therefore we
shouldn’t buy from them. <em>Nothing</em> about it’s <em>unacceptable</em>
for <em>anyone</em> around the world to receive slave
wages! It wasn’t even an issue. The issue was China is
bad; we’re not going to deal with them. Let <em>them</em>
pay the slave wages. And it wasn’t even about paying
American workers higher wages. It was, we’re not going
to do business with them. I remember talking to my
students about this: there is something called the
International Labor Organization, the ILO, which is
totally weak. But the idea that there should be an
international standard: <em>that</em> should be the
position of labor! There should be an international
standard. Not that we’re going to “bring jobs back
home,” but <em>a living wage for the world</em> should
be our fallback position! That should be basic. But that
is inconceivable even among progressive people I know.
And that gets at the essence of what it means to fight at
the global level for human dignity and justice.</p>
<h5>The Palestinian situation is … I have no words for it.
But one thing which relates to your last point. My
family is Jewish. My father was a Sephardic Jew who grew
up in that part of the world before he came to the
United States. And it’s <em>inconceivable</em> to <em>me</em>
that any Jew in this world would not be pro-Palestinian.
You can’t go through the experiences that Jews have gone
through and not understand. And that’s what’s so
shocking. Because some of what you say is exactly right.
Some say, “Arabs hate us”; so fucking what? Or, “They
don’t recognize the Holocaust.” They don’t recognize
the Holocaust, therefore you withhold your solidarity?
What?! It is really clear what role the State of Israel
plays in relationship to Palestinians. <em>That’s</em>
what matters. That’s what counts. The rest of it isn’t
the point.</h5>
<p>Exactly. And the State of Israel also had to shore up
its support from Sephardic Jews because they were the
oppressed under Ashkenazi leadership. The Sephardic or
Arab Jews were considered Arabs. They were in line with
the Palestinian Christians. You know, like, “We’re all
second-class citizens.” And you probably know this
already, but the Black Panther party of Israel was
Sephardic Jews; they weren’t Palestinian Muslims. They
were Arab Jews. They were formed in ’71; there were laws
passed that targeted Sephardic Jews that treated them as
second-class citizens. ’67 happens, and right around
that time—the Black Panther party originally was formed
after that, but it’s also the time that the Israeli
state realizes that they need to shore up support. So
they begin to incorporate Sephardic Jews more and more
into the ruling—not the higher, but the middle ruling
group, as police officers; same thing they do with the
Ethiopians.</p>
<h5>And they become some of the most reactionary elements
in Israel.</h5>
<p>It’s a really interesting question, a really
interesting history. But, as time is short, let’s jump
into another question.</p>
<h5>We can jump to Cedric Robinson. Are you working on a
biography on him?</h5>
<p>Here’s the thing: I was asked to. His widow, Elizabeth,
was open to me doing it. At first I was, “Oh yeah, I’d
love to.” But then I thought to myself: <em>I got so
many obligations</em>. I could deal with his life
story because I’ve done a lot of research on that. It’s
all the other stuff I’m not smart enough to do because
that dude was one of the smartest people I’ve ever
encountered. So I’m trying to convince someone to do
it; I was going to do it with someone, but that fell
through. But it’s going to be done at some point. I
jotted down notes on “racial capitalism”; it occurred to
me, I don’t typically use that term.</p>
<h5>You don’t typically use it, but we saw some talks on
YouTube, and that struck us.</h5>
<p>There’s a story behind that, but let’s get into the
question.</p>
<h5>So we regard you as one of the most important radical
historians of our time. This is our view; hey, man, we
read your stuff! For readers who may not be as familiar
with your work, what would you say is Marxist about your
work? How is your work influenced by Marxian tradition?
Are there specific Marx-inspired thinkers other than
Cedric Robinson who have influenced you? There’s a
history that you just explained about your involvement
in the Communist Workers Party, but in any event, it
would be useful for anybody reading this journal to know
what your connection is to Marx.</h5>
<p>Thanks to my sister Makani Themba, I came up <em>reading</em>
Marx. My pathway wasn’t through anyone except I remember
one summer, 1980, when I read <em>Capital</em>, volume
1, just by myself. Just went to the library every day
and read half a chapter a day and got through it. Of
course, I read the <em>Communist Manifesto</em>, and
then I was reading the <em>Critique of Political
Economy</em>, I started reading volume 2 [of <em>Capital</em>],
read the early <em>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts</em>,
read the <em>Eighteenth Brumaire</em> …</p>
<h5>You did this on your own? Did you play sports at all?
[<em>Laughter all around</em>.] Good god!</h5>
<p>And this is the transition from high school to college.
My sister was reading this stuff, and she would tell me
what to read. When I got to college, I became involved
with different organizations. Of course, I took my first
black studies course. Like most people who take black
studies for the first time, you’re incensed with all the
things you don’t know. Now, I had grown up in a
household where I knew some things, but in the context
of college, it’s a little bit different. And then I end
up hooking up with a brother who was the local organizer
for the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party.</p>
<h5>Where are we? L.A.?</h5>
<p>This is 1980 in Long Beach. Cal State, Long Beach. At
the time, tuition was $90 a semester. So I did a study
group with him. He was the only person. He was trying to
organize, but nobody else would join him. We did a study
group, and we were reading Nkrumah, Fanon, some Marx.
And then my college history teacher—I had two teachers
who were very important to me. One, Jack Stuart, who was
a former Trotskyist and had known Bayard Rustin—you
know, Rustin’s lover was a leading Trotskyist at some
point. Jack Stuart went to Columbia University, got a
Ph.D., and wrote about socialists. And then another
professor, Leo Rifkin, who had become a Rockefeller
Republican but came out of the Communist Party and was
still sympathetic. He was a Republican <em>and</em>
sympathetic about the Communist Party because he had
nostalgia. In fact, he had one glass eye, so he reminded
me of the guy from <em>Invisible Man</em>, Brother
Jack, who has this one eye. But these are two Jewish
radical scholars at a state university who took me in.
And when they saw I was interested, they began to
introduce radical stuff to me. And it was Jack who said,
“I have a study group you should go to”: it was the
Peace and Freedom Party in Long Beach. So imagine: I am
nineteen years old, I am the only black person in the
room, and everyone there is over 60! I’m not making this
up! So my introduction is a very unusual one. I’ve got
my All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party study group
over here, and I’ve got my Peace and Freedom Party study
group over there. And we’re reading Marx, and we’re
reading some Lenin. So, as a result, I began to read as
much as I could and got deeply involved. As to who I was
reading, I was reading Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and
Trotsky, because the idea of “permanent revolution” made
perfect sense to me. I didn’t even know enough to know
that there was a beef! I thought that, well, Trotsky’s
one of the great thinkers. I only later figured it out.
And then it became Raya Dunayevskaya, then Grace Lee
Boggs, and then C. L. R. James. And soon, everything I
can get I identified with Marxism. Because, for me,
Marxism was not a set of laws. It wasn’t a set of
principles. It was a set of ideas rooted in three
things. One, the idea of historical materialism— that
is, that people make their own history, but under
particular material conditions that constrain and limit
possibility. But also, within that, the working classes,
the oppressed classes—by working classes I meant all
forms of labor, from the enslaved to the serfs to the
proletariat—they are making history in motion, they are
the motive force. Class struggle is the motive force.
So, yeah, historical materialism; two, class struggle is
the motive force. And the third thing was simply
thinking dialectically. What does it mean to think
dialectically, for contradictions not to be resolved,
but possible nuggets for revelation? For revelation to
understand where things are moving, not to predict the
future, but to understand how things unfolded? And how
things unfolded—thinking of these three things: class
struggle, historical materialism, and dialectical
processes —all reveal what is <em>hidden</em> from
public view. So Marxism was my path to history. Because
it became my way of understanding that to study history
is to try to reveal what you can’t see.</p>
<h5>Those things that are hidden.</h5>
<p>Those things that are hidden! That was key for me. And
ALL this before <em>Black Marxism</em> came along! So
we’re talking about a period from about 1979; ’83, <em>Black
Marxism</em> is published. And to go to the foreword
of <em>Black Marxism</em>, I talk about the impact that
<em>Black Marxism</em> had on me. By the time I got the
book, I was the book review editor at Ufahamu, which was
a graduate student journal—I did my B.A. in three years,
so I was very young. I was twenty-one years old when I
started graduate school, and was reading as much as I
could. I remember reading Rosa Luxemburg’s <em>Accumulation
of Capital</em> at the time. So in pops <em>Black
Marxism</em>, which I received as a book to review. I
didn’t know Cedric Robinson. And I read it; it took many
times reading it to grasp what he was getting at,
because it was quite a radical interpretation, which is
actually a <em>critique</em> of Marxism. He comes out
of it less a Marxist than someone who is trying to think
dialectically but sees Marxism, again, not as a set of
principles or laws that are airtight, that people
debate, but rather as a way of thinking about the world.
So his critique of Marxism is a way of advancing the
basic principles of dialectical thinking but then also
shifting historical materialism, into which he
incorporates or at least acknowledges other
dimensions—cultural dimensions, spiritual dimensions. He
also argues <em>against</em> the idea of the
proletariat as the universal subject. So that threw me;
that made me think really hard about what was I doing,
and why. By the time I got to that book, I had already
begun to think about <em>Hammer and Hoe</em> as a
project. My original project was a comparative study of
the Left in South Africa and the U.S. South. That was my
original plan. And I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t
get into the country; it was 1985–6. So <em>Black
Marxism</em> became a working model for writing <em>Hammer
and Hoe</em>. But Ididn’t understand the book well
enough for it to be a full working model. So reading
Cedric did not lead to my abandonment of Marxism. It
just meant a more critical stance towards certain
contradictions in what was becoming Marxism. And I was
in an organization at the time—like all these
antirevisionist organizations that all claimed to be the
pure, true, authentic Marxist group. The way you measure
… because … you remember those days …</p>
<h5>Oh yeah.</h5>
<p>The way you measure your fidelity to Marxism is how
close you are to Lenin. The idea of being
antirevisionist, saying we’re not going to revise
because we’re close to Lenin. So the Maoists: “No, we’re
closer to Lenin.” The Trotskyists: “No, we’re closer to
Lenin.” Everybody’s trying to be close to Lenin. And so,
of course, we’re reading Lenin. And then I realize at
some point, wait a second, this is hemming me in too
much.</p>
<h5>Let me ask you about that. When I first started working
on Marxism, it was pretty orthodox, but I did become
aware in the late ’60s that there were different
traditions. As you say, orthodoxy existed then and had
fairly strict ideas—you could be an orthodox Trotskyist,
you could be an orthodox Maoist, and so forth. But there
was also the idea that there were “traditions” and there
were options. And that not all Marxisms were economic
determinist, and not all of them believed that culture
didn’t matter. Some of them in fact emphasized culture.
That’s what I was interested in. When you were reading
Cedric Robinson, was it also in your head that there
were traditions that still called themselves Marxist
that were alternative options?</h5>
<p>Yeah. Exactly. It was an interesting time, though. It
is true—because I was reading all kinds of stuff. I was
reading Eurocommunism. There’s a wing of the British
Labor Party—what’s his name, the father …</p>
<h5>Miliband.</h5>
<p>Ralph Miliband was writing stuff I was reading. There
were traditions coming out of Latin America. There was
also the moment when liberation theology was actually
very popular. Especially living in L.A. where a lot of
our work was in the sanctuary movement. So all these
things existed, and I was really interested in them.
But I had certain blinders. And I’ll tell you what they
were. I was at that point a <em>nationalist</em>. In
the old-school way. So part of coming to <em>Hammer and
Hoe</em> was trying to figure out, what does it mean to
be a black communist? Are there movements that
incorporate both black nationalism <em>and</em>
Marxism? So I was familiar with different traditions,
but I was trying to figure out what does a <em>black
nationalist Marxism</em> look like? Part of my
attraction to the CWP and to Workers Viewpoint was that
they had more people of color than other organizations.
It was ironically a kind of identity politics—the
limitations of that—which drew us, my sister and I, to
the organization. Come to discover that our decision to
join had everything to do also with this idea that you
can’t just talk Marxism, you gotta join a party! Even if
the party is not perfect, you can’t be an armchair
Marxist. So I ended up joining a party, and, for all the
limitations and contradictions, the CWP was the one I
joined. This was a crucial moment when joining a party
seemed fundamental. And it made perfect sense, because
think about the trajectory. You have ’68, ’69, the
revolutionary youth movement splits. And a bunch of
people say, “We’ve got to become Marxists, go work in
the factories.” So you’ve got the industrial
concentration movement in the 1970s happening. More
parties are being formed. The Greensboro massacre
happens in ’79, which then steels people to think, hey,
we’re in a fascist moment. So we definitely need an <em>underground</em>
party. The election of Reagan, the Greensboro massacre,
the failure of the industrial concentration movement,
meant that we’ve got to build parties, and the best way
to do it is through antirevisionist organizing. So <em>that</em>
became a kind of fetter on all the openings that were
taking place. And the irony for all the people who talk
bad about the academy—and I’m not one, because I think
there’s much of value in the academy (though I talk bad
about some things)—was that it was stepping out of the
antirevisionist organizations and returning back to a
deeper reading of Marxism and critiques of Marxism,
which included Cedric Robinson’s book, that opened up
the path for me to even deeper thinking about some of
these things …</p>
<h5>Throughout your work, there are numerous examples that
take the form of your pointing to seeming
contradictions, often in your telling of an event or
feature in the lives of your human subjects. How would
you describe your use of contradictions or perhaps
paradox in your writing? Do you regard it as a
necessary component of historical narrative unfolding?
Are contradictions decisive nodal points in the lives of
your subjects? Is contradiction a fundamental principle
of discursive construction and legibility? Do you use it
to call attention to the frailty of all human actions?
Do you see contradiction as part of a broader commitment
to write history “dialectically”?</h5>
<p>Contradiction is central to all of my work, partly
because of my own reading and training as a Marxist to
think dialectically. My own political work when I was in
my late teens and early twenties compelled me to try to
make sense of Hegel by way of Marx and Engels, Lenin,
and C. L. R. James. But before I talk about this, I have
to say that the discovery of contradiction was also
intuitive—the result of both my experience growing up as
a young kid in Harlem, single mother, poor, and thus
living every day in an antagonistic relationship with
the institutions surrounding us: schools, police, social
workers, etc. These were not just everyday
contradictions—my first-grade teacher forcing kids who
acted up in my predominantly black and Latino class to
stand in the wastepaper basket and say “I am garbage” as
punishment, or the daily treatment we received from
cops, school security guards, store owners, who treated
seven-and eight-year-old kids as if they were about to
commit a crime. More than that, my mom, sister, and I
seemed like we were always at some demonstration
protesting those very institutions. I have vivid
memories of marching around during a cold evening in
front of P.S. 28 chanting “Overcrowded! Overcrowded!” to
draw attention to the condition of our school. Many
parents did not show up; some teachers felt embattled
but did not have the support of parents for various
reasons—having to do with fear, race (many white
teachers), time (had to work long hours), and the
school’s failure to engage the community. These all
pointed to contradictions whose resolution led to new
strategies, new coalitions, and new problems.</p>
<p>To the philosophical aspect: when I was nineteen and a
rising sophomore, I spent an entire summer just reading
Marxist stuff and precedents (like Hegel) on my own. I
had just decided to change my major to history, so I was
obsessed with understanding what was later called the
“materialist conception of history.” I kept spiral
notebooks, so I’m now drawing on these to convey what I
learned: Marx’s reading of Hegel’s dialectic provided a
radical way of understanding historical change that was
not linear or evolutionary but revolutionary. This was
based on two premises: that all things are contradictory
in themselves, as Hegel would put it, and that
“contradiction is the source of all movement and life.”
Dialectics for Hegel was a means to think through
opposing conceptions or ideas—“thesis” and
“antithesis”—in order to move to a higher and deeper
level of analysis, a new “synthesis.” This is not about
coming to some middle ground, as in contemporary
liberalism, but the outcome generally results in a
radical break from old ideas. Perhaps more importantly,
for me at least, was Hegel’s lessons that when we look
at individual things and phenomena, we see only the
differences between them, and they stand as discrete
entities. But looking dialectically, we can see how they
are all part of the same process; they acquire meaning
once we see them in dialectical tension, as moments in a
process of change.</p>
<p>Of course, for Marx the point of dialectical method was
not to understand the battle of ideas, as if philosophy
were above the material world, but rather to comprehend
reality, society, the historical development of classes
and social relations. This is not to say ideas don’t
matter, but rather they are shaped by (I wouldn’t say
determined by) the material conditions of people and
their relation to one another. For Marx, the problems of
philosophy cannot be solved by passive interpretation of
the world as it is but only by remolding the world to
resolve the philosophical contradictions inherent in it.
Struggle against/within one’s reality produces the
possibility of new philosophy; action changes reality,
which then demands analysis, which in turn has material
force. Even more than his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach,
I was influenced by this quote from Marx’s <em>Critique
of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”</em>: “The weapon of
criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of
weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material
force. But theory also becomes a material force once it
has gripped the masses” (Marx, 1970, 137).</p>
<h5>In part 1 of this interview, we asked if you would
trace your own historical connections, as you see them,
to Marxist intellectual traditions. In addition, we
asked if there were writers not necessarily connected to
Marxism whose work you felt was foundational and
influential to your own thinking and writing. We found
your answers in part 1 edifying and illuminating. Would
you be so kind as to fill in a few more of the remaining
gaps for <em>RM</em>’s audience?</h5>
<p>My response to your previous question above begins to
answer this one. To put it bluntly, my historical work
has always been about class struggle in the modern
world—mostly in the United States. A modern world is
necessarily a racial and gendered world. There are too
many influences to name all, but there was a point when I
tried to read as much as I could in Marxist theory, and
I wasn’t concerned about ideological camps. This isn’t
evident explicitly in my historical writing since I made
a concerted effort to draw on theory to understand the
movement of people, the conditions of their lives, and
the horizon of possibility rather than to use stories to
engage theoretical debates. So much of that is
submerged.</p>
<p>I can, however, point to the chief Marxist authors and
texts that shaped my own thinking, besides Marx and
Engels and Lenin. I had taken to Rosa Luxemburg, <em>The
Accumulation of Capital</em> (specifically her insights
into imperialism); Antonio Gramsci, <em>Selections from
the Prison Notebooks</em>; C. L. R. James, too much to
name, but notably <em>Notes on Dialectics</em> and
essays in <em>Spheres of Existence</em> and <em>Facing
Reality</em> (coauthored with Grace Lee Boggs and
Cornelius Castoriadis), among other things. Grace Lee
Boggs and James Boggs, with whom C. L. R. James worked
in the 1950s and early 1960s, were also both very
important in my own thinking. I got to know Grace very
well, and she became both an interlocutor and tutor.
I’ve discussed her influence on me in my introduction to
the reissue of Grace’s memoir, <em>Living for Change</em>,
so I won’t repeat that here.</p>
<p>As I think back, my introduction to Marxism is partly
indebted to Jack Stuart, my history professor at Long
Beach State. A former Trotskyist who taught a wonderful
course on the history of Western Marxism, Jack hipped me
to the <em>Monthly Review</em> crowd. Besides becoming
a regular subscriber (I also had a subscription to the <em>African
Communist</em>, the journal of the South African
Communist Party!), I read Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran (<em>Theory
of Capitalist Development</em>; <em>Monopoly Capital</em>,
etc.), Harry Braverman, and Harry Magdoff; Walter
Rodney, <em>How Europe Underdeveloped Africa</em>,
which opened up to me a whole lot of underdevelopment
and dependency theorists—Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank,
and so on. In fact, it is worth mentioning that I went
to graduate school at UCLA with the intention of
studying the political economy of colonialism in Africa,
specifically commodity production in Mozambique. I’d
written a prize-winning undergraduate thesis at Long
Beach State titled “Structural Change and
Underdevelopment in Niger,” about the transition to
groundnut production and its impact on the economy.</p>
<p>And there were others, notably historians whose work
became models for me: W. E. B. Du Bois’s <em>Black
Reconstruction</em>, C. L. R. James’s <em>The Black
Jacobins</em>, and Walter Rodney’s <em>How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa</em> were the holy trinity of
texts and drove me into the discipline and into the
revolution.</p>
<p>Actually, there were many texts whose impact was
equally profound and deeply grounded in what might be
considered a black Marxist tradition. We sleep on the
late 1970s and early 1980s, but I’m fortunate to have
come of age politically during a renaissance of radical
work. From 1980 until 1983, I was taking black studies
in college and for a brief period participated in a
study group organized by the All-African People’s
Revolutionary Party. I was a Black socialist in the
making, trying to navigate between my commitment to a
politics of black self-determination, a Marxist
critique of political economy, and a kind of fuzzy
recognition that there is something more than material
conditions and exploitation driving our movement. Of
course, we read Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah and Kwame Ture,
Amilcar Cabral, and others. On my own I read Aimé
Césaire, Michael Löwy, Stuart Hall, Oliver Cox, Clarence
Munford, and Chinweizu’s still underappreciated text, <em>The
West and the Rest of Us</em>.</p>
<p>There is Cornel West and his entire body of work. But,
for me, <em>Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American
Revolutionary Christianity</em> proved formative for
understanding the ways in which working-class African
Americans melded Marxism and prophetic Christianity,
which laid the ideological and cultural basis for the
Party—especially in rural Alabama. This deeply
historical and incredibly powerful book engaged
questions of spirituality and black ontology in the
context of slavery and racism in the United States. Like
Cedric Robinson—he begins with an exegesis on the
emergence, development, and decline of European
modernity and then examines the consequences of
excluding Native American and African culture and
thought from the formation of American social order. He
then considers the contours and meaning of the
emergence of a unique Afro-American culture and its
engagement with modernity and postmodernity. The core
of the book, however, is his brilliant examination of a
dialogical encounter between black prophetic
Christianity and Marxism, producing in the end what he
deemed an Afro-American revolutionary Christianity.</p>
<p>Manning Marable’s impact, as a Black Marxist and
engaged intellectual, cannot be overstated. I first read
<em>Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class
Consciousness, and Revolution</em> when it came out in
1981. The essays in it explored the history of black
struggles for freedom, tracing the roots of contemporary
social movements to slavery and Reconstruction, to black
faith communities and battles for land and economic
independence, all the way through the civil rights
movement and urban rebellions. This was no academic
book; Marable proposed what he called a “Common Program
for a Third Reconstruction” rooted in a politics of
transformation as distinct from (or perhaps the
dialectical synthesis of) integration (civil rights) and
separatism (black nationalism). But it drew on the
history of the Bolshevik Revolution! It was modeled on
the mass of workers and soldiers represented in the
Petrograd Soviet and the middle-class parliamentary
opposition in the Provisional Government. This analogy
of “dual power” that he envisioned might emerge under a
Third Reconstruction, as a transitional stage to
dismantling the racist state under socialism. That
futuristic, imaginative move always stuck with me, and
rarely do Marable’s admirers return to that early text.</p>
<p>The work that left the biggest impression on me was <em>How
Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America</em> (1983),
a critical treatise on the ravages of late capitalism,
state violence, incarceration, and patriarchy on the
life chances and struggles of black working-class men
and women. That book, I would contend, influenced an
entire generation to focus our energies on the terrain
of the prison-industrial complex, anti-Klan work, labor
organizing, alternatives to black capitalism, and
challenging patriarchy—personally and politically. Just
reading the preface stopped me in my tracks: “The
intellectual who makes a public commitment to transform
society, to smash white racism and the inherently
exploitative system laughingly described as ‘free
enterprise’ by its defenders, cannot plead his/her case
in muted grey tones. For the Black masses to ‘return to
their own history,’ we must begin by rewriting that
history—but not in the language, style or outlook of the
system” (Marable 2015, xlvii).</p>
<p>And then there was Angela Davis, the thinker, not the
icon. Her book <em>Women, Race, and Class</em> was
standard reading in my black leftist study groups. The
essays examined the intersection of race, gender, and
class and taught me/us a great deal about the barriers
to building a class-conscious, antiracist feminist
movement over the past century. She also looks at the
intersection of forces oppressing women, including
various forms of sexual violence. It was important to
read Davis at that time since her insights into
reproduction became an entrée into the debates that were
raging in the 1970s around reproduction, class, and
patriarchy among Marxist feminists, notably Silvia
Federici, who is one of my biggest influences, but also
Marlene Dixon, Shulamith Firestone, Maria Mies,
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Lise Vogel, Juliet
Mitchell, Heidi Hartmann, Michèle Barrett, Zillah R.
Eisenstein, and others I can’t recall now.</p>
<p>A number of historians working within a Marxist
framework directly shaped my own work, many of whom
published in <em>The History Workshop Journal</em>, <em>Radical
History Review</em>, and <em>Science and Society</em>.
Among them were E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, George
Rudé, and the like. But of that next generation, the
most important for me were David Roediger (<em>The
Wages of Whiteness</em>) and Peter Linebaugh (<em>The
London Hanged</em> and many other books, including <em>The
Many-Headed Hydra</em>, which he coauthored with
Marcus Rediker, another influence). I’ve written about
Linebaugh in several places, most notably in an essay in
<em>Monthly Review</em>, titled “Dead Labor,” back in
1993, which demonstrated how his book <em>The London
Hanged</em> turned my entire understanding of history
and historical method upside down.</p>
<p>Finally, I have to mention the late George Rawick, who
became a mentor to me in the spring of 1987 while he was
visiting at UCLA. He sat with me for hours and schooled
me in ways to interpret working-class movements,
culture, and resistance, and he introduced me to some
of his groundbreaking essays, such as “The Historical
Roots of Black Liberation” (1968), “Notes on the
American Working Class” (1968), and “Working-Class
Self-Activity” (1969). By paying greater attention to
Rawick’s concept of “self-activity,” Alabama’s
Communists opened up another world of politics, since I
found that most of the people the Party fought for did
not join insurgent organizations. They fought back as
individuals or groups, often using strategies intended
to cover their tracks. Rawick also insisted I read <em>Class
and Culture in Cold War America: A Rainbow at Midnight</em>
by George Lipsitz. Published in 1981, the book argued
that the postwar period was not the death of labor’s
struggle but one of the most active, militant periods of
working-class opposition in U.S. history. He
acknowledged the defeat of the postwar strike wave but
revealed expressions of militancy through popular
culture. But Lipsitz’s 1988 book on a St. Louis
organizer, <em>A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and
the Culture of Opposition</em>, gave me the framework
I needed to understand the local political culture and
to help me see the Alabama Communists and their
supporters as organic intellectuals. Once I did that, I
could see the cultural and ideological bases of their
own way of seeing alternatives to the status quo. I came
to understand why the Bible was more important in
challenging the dominant ideology than, say, Marx or
Lenin.</p>
<h5>You write in the foreword to <em>Black Marxism</em>
that Cedric Robinson’s ambitious critique of both
Western Marxian traditions and black radical traditions
fundamentally transformed your life, your sense of
mission, your approach to history and revolutionary
politics. Can you summarize the impact Robinson’s work
has had on your own?</h5>
<p>I can never sufficiently explain the impact Cedric’s
work and tutelage have had on my development as a
historian, as an intellectual, and as one who identifies
as a revolutionary. I hope it is clear in most of what
I’ve written over the past thirty years. To be clear,
Cedric and I were not personally close, despite the fact
that he served on my dissertation committee and we
remained in touch on and off since 1984. While I never
took a class with him (he was teaching at UC-Santa
Barbara and I was at UCLA), I’m not being hyperbolic
when I say that no person I’ve personally encountered
in my lifetime has had a greater intellectual impact on
me besides my mother. His ideas—or at least my
interpretation of them—thoroughly shaped my first book on
the Communist Party in Alabama. I initially framed the
problem as why the “white” Left had failed to mobilize
the black working class, but reading <em>Black Marxism:
The Making of the Black Radical Tradition</em> (1983)
made me realize that my question was wrong. It was never
about a failing in the “Left’s” ability to mobilize
black people but our conceptual failure to recognize
what Cedric identified as a “Black Radical Tradition”
critical of, and illegible to, a Euro-American Left
formed by the logic of Western Civilization. When this
tradition found its way into Left movements—in Africa,
Latin America, the United States—it brought its own
unique vision, historical sensibility, and set of
resistance strategies to the Communist movement and, in
doing so, altered the Party. In other words, I was
initially stuck arguing against scholars who tried to
prove that Communism was alien to black people;
Robinson compelled me to ask what black people brought
to the Left to make it their own. The presumed objects
of Communist machinations became subjects and agents in
making their own history.</p>
<p>But Robinson’s influence continued to shape my thinking
in unique ways, which I hope is evident in all of my
subsequent work. For the past three decades, I have
continued to return to <em>Black Marxism</em>, his
essays in <em>Race and Class</em>, and his later books,
<em>Black Movements in America</em> (1997), <em>An
Anthropology of Marxism</em> (2001), and <em>Forgeries
of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race
in American Theater and Film before World War II</em>
(2007). I should say something about his first book, <em>The
Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of
Leadership</em> (1980), although it wasn’t the first
thing of his that I read. In fact, I tried to read it in
graduate school and, quite frankly, I couldn’t
understand it because I hadn’t read enough (it wasn’t a
matter of language, by the way). But once I understood
it, Robinson forced me to come to terms with the limits
of Marxism—even while acknowledging the variety of <em>Marxisms</em>
I’d encountered. His thesis demolished the Western
presumption that mass movements reflect social order and
are maintained and rationalized by the authority of
leadership. Critiquing both liberal and Marxist theories
of political change, Robinson argued that leadership
(the idea that effective social action is determined by
a leader who is separate from or above the masses of
people) and political order are essentially fictions, and
he proved it with examples of radical democracy that
break with Eurocentric models of Greco-Roman diffusion.
He concludes that it is not enough to reshape or
reformulate Marxism to fit the needs of Third World
revolution, but we must reject all universalist theories
of political and social order. That made me go back to <em>Black
Marxism</em>, yet again (which inspired me to push the
University of North Carolina Press to bring it back into
print in 2000).</p>
<p>There was much I didn’t appreciate the first time
around—namely, the thoroughness with which he took on
Marxism, though from an astutely radical position. For
example, Robinson directly challenges the Marxist idea
that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of
feudalism, arguing instead that capitalism emerged
within the Western feudal order in societies that were
already racialized. Capitalism and racism, in other
words, did not break from the old order but rather
evolved from it to produce a modern world system of
“racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence,
imperialism, and genocide. He lays out in great detail
how the first European proletarians were <em>racial</em>
subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and
how they were victims of dispossession (enclosure),
colonialism, and slavery <em>within Europe</em>. I had
missed this since I wasn’t so concerned with Europe in
my early twenties.</p>
<p>Part of his point, of course, was that capitalism was <em>not</em>
the great modernizer, giving birth to a modern
proletariat as a universal subject. Indeed, the
proletariat was not a universal subject. Just as the
Irish were products of very different popular traditions
born and bred under colonialism, the “English” working
class was formed by Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, a racial
ideology shared across class lines that allowed the
English bourgeoisie to rationalize low wages and
mistreatment for the Irish. The other shock, which he
elaborates in his book <em>An Anthropology of Marxism</em>,
is that it was in this dynamic, unstable feudal order
that socialism was born as an alternative bourgeois
strategy to deal with social inequality.</p>
<p>The creation of a European proletariat, he argues, was
only one part of the formation of a world system. At
this very moment, African labor was being drawn into the
orbit of the world system through the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, just as indigenous people were being drawn
in through invasion and dispossession. Thus, to
understand the dialectic of African resistance to
enslavement and exploitation, he insists we look outside
the orbit of capitalism and into the cultures of West
and Central African culture. The first waves of African
New World revolts were governed by a total rejection of
enslavement and racism, with a commitment to preserving
a past they knew, and were more inclined to escape:
creating maroon settlements, fugitivity, etc. But with
formal colonialism, settlement, and the incorporation
of black labor into a more fully governed social
structure came a native black bourgeoisie that occupied
a contradictory role as victims of racial/colonial
domination and tools of empire, since they were educated
in the colonial system. A portion of this class
revolted, becoming the radical black intelligentsia, who
in so many instances turned to what Robinson identified
as the most dynamic oppositional ideological tendency in
the twentieth century: Marxism. It was through their
engagement with Marxism that figures such as W. E. B. Du
Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright confronted
black mass movements, compelling a revision of Western
Marxism and a break from some of its most basic tenets.
In other words, black Marxist intellectuals were <em>not</em>
the Black Radical Tradition; rather, it was through
their engagement with the Left and Marxist ideas that
they discovered the Black Radical Tradition.</p>
<h5>Are there any other thinkers who have been as
influential as Robinson in guiding your work? If so, who
and how?</h5>
<p>Besides the many I already mentioned above, there are
many historians and other scholars and activists whose
work has been formative in my own writing, especially on
black radical movements. Some are of my generation—Tera
H. Hunter, Elsa Barkley Brown, Earl Lewis, Michael
Honey, Joe W. Trotter, Farah Griffin, Gerald Gill, and
others you will find in my book acknowledgements. For the
sake of space, I will highlight two more senior figures:
Nell Irvin Painter and Barbara Smith. Painter is the
author of several influential books, including <em>Exodusters</em>;
<em>Standing at Armageddon</em>; <em>Southern History
Across the Color Line</em>; <em>Sojourner Truth</em>;
and <em>A History of White People</em>. But the text
that had the greatest direct impact was <em>The
Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro
Communist in the South</em>. That book set me on this
journey to Alabama to find the Communist Party. Nell
Painter spent all of her professional life trying to
figure out how subjugated people tried to rebuild
democracy in their own interest. Sometimes that
democracy was public and national, sometimes it was
community-based and local, and other times it was at the
level of the household.</p>
<p>I came to Barbara Smith’s work first through her
coedited anthology, <em>All the Women Are White, All
the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black
Women’s Studies</em> (1982), edited by Smith, Gloria
T. Hull, and Patricia Bell Scott. More than anything I
had read before about black studies, Smith and Hull’s
introductory statement made the strongest case for
critical analysis as a mode of praxis, insisting that
there has to be a deep, organic, dialectical link
between black women’s studies and the black feminist
movement and that black women’s studies must necessarily
be “feminist, radical, and analytical.” Looking back, it
is pretty clear now that <em>But Some of Us Were Brave</em>
contributed so much more than making black women
visible. By calling for a critical analysis of race,
gender, and sexuality, Smith anticipates so much of the
scholarship that now falls under the rubric of queer
studies and critical race theory.</p>
<h5>Race features centrally in nearly all that you write
about. To help clarify some of the discussion here, and
to help us understand where one critical concept ends
and another possibly begins, can you tell us: what do
you mean by race?</h5>
<p>What is race? This is a hard question since it is often
conflated with “racism” and “racialization.” The
dictionary definition of race still includes things like
groups of people that share “genetically transmitted
physical characteristics,” despite the fact that there
is no biological basis for race. It is a social
construct. Racial categories are contradictory,
contingent, and reflect power relations more than
scientific research. Race is socially produced categories
of difference with the intention to subordinate,
exclude, denigrate, etc. This is why there is no such
thing as race without racism. Race isn’t simply an
“identity” but is a structure of power, or a means of
structuring power, through “difference.” <em>Skin color
is not an essential feature of racism</em>. Racism is
an ideology based on the idea that race determines, or
can explain, human traits and capacities and that racial
differences produce an inherent superiority of a
particular “race.” Finally, I invoke Cedric Robinson’s
definition of a “racial regime”: “Racial regimes are
constructed social systems in which race is proposed as
a justification for the relations of power. While
necessarily articulated with accruals of power, the
covering conceit of a racial regime is a makeshift
patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable.”</p>
<h5>Racial capitalism is the term Robinson theorized. It
has become quite current in contemporary historical and
social analyses of the plight of marginalized people
within global capitalism. What is your understanding of
racial capitalism?</h5>
<p>The term racial capitalism merely signals that
race/racial categories and capitalism are
co-constitutive, a point central to Cedric Robinson’s <em>Black
Marxism</em>, as I mentioned in an earlier response.
Capital accumulation occurs through various “racial
projects that assign differential value to human life
and labor,” as Andy Clarno so eloquently put it in his
book <em>Neoliberal Apartheid</em>. The phrase
originated in South Africa during the mid 1970s and is
sometimes attributed to Martin Legassick and Harold
Wolpe, among others like Bernard Magubane. It emerged as
an analytical framework to understand how the apartheid
state structured relations of race, class, and
accumulation. In the South African context, it made
sense to add the adjective “racial” to capitalism, not
to distinguish it from other kinds of capitalisms but
rather to pose a political question: whether
dismantling apartheid <em>without</em> overthrowing
capitalism would leave in place structures that
reproduce racial inequality and the superexploitation of
nonwhite workers. Or put differently, would a
postapartheid nation be able to eliminate the very
structures that reproduce deep racial, class, and gender
inequality without dismantling capitalism?</p>
<p>Today, we tend to associate the term with Cedric
Robinson, who—building on the work of sociologist Oliver
Cox—argues not only that race/racialism preceded
capitalism but that racialization begins in Europe
itself as part of colonial processes of invasion,
settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy. The
takeaway here, then, is that “racial capitalism” is not
merely a type of capitalism, say as opposed to nonracist
capitalism. The term simply signals that capitalism
developed and operates within a racialized and gendered
order.</p>
<h5>Robinson’s critique of Marx begins with the
observation that white supremacy as a racial “regime”
predates capitalism and is entrenched in the process of
primitive accumulation, yet Marx never sees or analyzes
it. White supremacy as a feature of European feudalism
was reconstituted in the transition to capitalism but
was not critically engaged by Marx and other
anticapitalists. Robinson sees this as a kind of
cultural or ethnocentric bias. In the context of global
labor, what is incomplete in <em>Capital</em>? How does
Robinson’s insight, and/or yours, regarding Marx’s
neglect of already existing white supremacy invalidate
or transform Marx’s conception of class and the
appropriation of surplus labor from productive workers,
which Marx calls “exploitation”?</h5>
<p>I can’t possibly do justice to this question without
producing a small book, but let me try to begin to
answer. First, I don’t think Robinson’s critique of Marx
and Engels pivots around his observation that white
supremacy predates capitalism. I think he would say
racialism predates capitalism—which is to say, the
production of racial difference and hierarchy emerged
within European society itself, <em>before</em> the
kinds of encounters that would give rise to “whiteness”
as a category. But by examining, say, the shifting and
increasingly violent character of the English
colonization of Ireland in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, he demonstrates that there were
other antagonisms or contradictions that disrupted any
tidy analyses that put class and class struggle at the
center. What happened in Europe was similar to the
racialization of indigenous peoples by dispossession.
Those who are not killed are dispersed, often ending up
as indentures on ships to the New World or as migrant
labor on the English mainland. Robinson observes that it
was these historical experiences that shaped Irish
nationalism and determined its relationship with its
English working-class counterparts. And he goes on to
show how the Irish came to be understood as “an
inferior race.” The main point, as Robinson puts it, is
that “the tendency of European civilization through
capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to
differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and
dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”</p>
<p>In other words, Marx and Engels argued that bourgeois
society would rationalize social relations and <em>demystify
social consciousness</em>, but the opposite occurred
precisely because of the ways in which race shaped the
development of capitalist society and its attendant
social ideology. Racism or racialism permeated the base
and superstructure, creating hierarchies, allegiances,
and identifications that <em>did not</em> lead to a
unified proletariat or social consciousness. Robinson’s
point is that what Marx and Engels could not grasp at
the time was how racialism (and subsequently
nationalism) actually affected the class consciousness
of workers in England.</p>
<p>Robinson takes Marx and Engels to task on so many
issues—too many to recount here. In his preface to the
2000 edition of <em>Black Marxism</em>, for example,
Robinson wrote, “Fully aware of the constant place
women and children held in the workforce, Marx still
deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor
that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into
the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist,
noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation.” Robinson is
not alone in arguing that Marx’s formulation of
so-called primitive accumulation is misplaced in that
these forms of exploitation were not archaic or did not
prefigure the extraction of surplus value from the
proletariat but rather were coconstitutive, and that
forms of unfree labor actually expanded with capitalism,
not the other way around. But perhaps the most important
critique of Marx and Marxism has to do with liberation
movements, not exploitation. Again, from his preface,
Robinson wrote, “But Marxism’s internationalism was not
global; its materialism was exposed as an insufficient
explanator of cultural and social forces; and its
economic determinism too often politically compromised
freedom struggles beyond or outside of the metropole.”
Yes, Marx wrote a lot about India; yes, he wrote about
the United States and Russia; yes, Marx excoriated
slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—anyone who says
he ignored these things is lying; yes, Marx himself
never claimed to be doing anything beyond understanding
the processes of capitalist development in Western
Europe. But what he missed was the significance of
revolt in the rest of the world, specifically among the
enslaved, corvée labor, coolie labor, and the like.
These people were humans, exploited, but ripped from
“superstructures” with radically different beliefs,
morality, cosmology, metaphysics, intellectual
traditions, etc. So Robinson tries to push beyond Marx
to imagine how we might advance a radical interpretation
of liberation movements by examining their rebellions
not as expressions of precapitalist people or examples
of primitive accumulation but as modalities of struggle
against the world system of capitalist exploitation.
Because neither Marx nor Engels considered the colonies,
plantations, or the countryside central to <em>modern</em>
capitalist processes, resistance in these places was
always regarded as underdeveloped or peripheral.
Moreover, this resistance did not resemble the secular
radical humanism of 1848 or 1789, so it was
incomprehensible. And Marx’s argument that the export of
capitalist forms to the colonies was a good thing in
the long run since it sped up the development of the
productive forces and accelerated class struggle (in
this case, India) revealed significant lapses, in my
view, but more importantly reinforced the illegibility
of forms of struggle that were rendered backward or
primitive.</p>
<h5>In <em>Freedom Dreams</em> you examine radical black
movements for their visions and desires. You do so to
examine not only what problems and “unfreedoms” they
identified (and which gave rise to them) as <em>critique</em>
but also to remind readers of the possible or
alternative worlds they imagined, dreamed of one day
inhabiting, but which did not yet exist. Indeed, this
powerful idea occurs throughout all of your work, and
certainly up through and including <em>Africa Speaks,
America Answers</em>. You encourage your readers not
to despair or embrace cynicism but to see the
impossibility of the present as a symptom, as a shared
element of what drove earlier black freedom seekers. And
you point readers to previous ways that black radicals
turned impossibility into the seeds of possibility.
Would you call this dream- or visionwork “utopian”? Or
is utopian thought, in your view, specifically
Eurocentric, visions based upon nineteenth-century
European ideas of socialism and communism? What do you
see as the main visionary impulses or desires in black
radical traditions? Or emerging in the present
challenges facing contemporary black radicals
transnationally?</h5>
<p>I go back and forth on the term “utopian,” which I use
in Freedom Dreams a few times but not always positively.
Utopian technically means “nowhere,” which implies
impossibility, and this may actually be true since what
might be collectively conceived as possible is
conceivably better than “nowhere.” Utopia is also what
Fascists were trying to achieve, so I’m cautious about
that term. I’m also cautious because I’m not one to
quickly dismiss Engels’s iconic essay “Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific.” While I might question the
scientific claims and the implication of inevitability,
the third chapter of that text, which explains the
dialectical relationship between social and economic
struggles and the possibilities that open up for
revolution, grounds a vision of socialism in actual
social movements rather than just the movement of
capital.</p>
<p>I begin here because I often fear that <em>Freedom
Dreams</em> is misread, not just by critics but by
those most inspired by the book. They like the idea of
“visionwork” as you call it, but too often divorce that
work from critical analysis, the thinking that emerges
directly from social movements, the challenges of
solidarity, and a much deeper understanding of the
mechanisms of oppression that generate the conditions
for new modes of analysis. So the book emphatically
argues that it is not enough to imagine a world without
oppression (especially since we don’t always recognize
the variety of forms or modes in which oppression
occurs), but we must also understand the mechanisms or
processes that not only reproduce structural inequality
but make them common sense and render those processes
natural or invisible. I was trying to write about people
in transformative social movements, how they
moved/shifted their ideas, rethought inherited
categories, tried to locate and overturn blatant,
subtle, and invisible modes of domination. In other
words, they were never in a dream state but a kind of
struggle state. Of course, there are many examples of
work that unveils these processes and that interrogates
categories that we continue to take for granted: what is
human, race, power, gender, sexuality, security,
capital, the law, crime, leadership, and freedom. Just
off the top of my head, there is Cedric Robinson, Sylvia
Wynter, Beth Richie, Denise da Silva, Erica Edwards,
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Fred Moten, Roderick Ferguson,
Asfanah Najmabadi, Alexander G. Weheliye, James Ford,
Chandan Reddy, Mishuana Goeman, Sara Ahmed, Jodi Byrd,
and too many others to name.</p>
<p>I’m not sure I can identify the main visionary impulses
in black radical traditions outside of historical
context. I agree with Cedric Robinson’s account of the
era prior to emancipation, in which he located those
impulses first in West and Central African culture. The
first African New World revolts were more intent on
preserving a past than transforming Western society or
overthrowing capitalism; they created maroon
settlements, ran away, became outliers, and tried to find
a way home even if it meant death. These impulses have
changed over time, and right now some of the central
impulses center on sexual freedom and liberation from
gender oppressions, bodily integrity in a state that
deliberately seeks to destroy black bodies in so many
ways, and the continual question of land—that is to say,
a place to exercise self-determination (like present-day
Jackson, Mississippi, or Newark, New Jersey) and the
preservation of the earth against capital’s
environmental catastrophe. This is not to say that the
desires of working people not to be exploited have
diminished, but to recognize how freedom from everyday
misery and precarity is realized in so many subjugated
black communities through a neoliberal optic. This we
might call neoliberal “capture” of the culture, where
one emphasizes net worth, social capital, one’s “brand,”
getting paid by whatever means necessary, instead of the
old discourse around black charity, lifting as we climb
(elites assisting the poor), etc. Revolution is not part
of this.</p>
<p>And yet there is something very revolutionary about the
struggles around sex and gender, in part because they
reveal something I wrote about in <em>Freedom Dreams</em>:
“Another problem, of course, is that such dreaming is
often suppressed and policed not only by our enemies but
by leaders of social movements themselves. The utopian
visions of male nationalists or so-called socialists
often depend on the suppression of women, of youth, of
gays and lesbians, of people of color. Desire can be
crushed by so-called revolutionary ideology.” Again,
this reinforces my point that understanding the
struggle is the only way to understand the “freedom
dreams” as the collective product of movement and
contradiction.</p>
<h5>You also expand on your reflections in <em>Freedom
Dreams</em> in a more recent essay on student
movements on campuses and in the streets. In the <em>Boston
Review</em> essay “Black Study, Black Struggle,” you
highlight the intersectional nature of what it is to
engage in black radical movement formation in our time.
Building your analysis on a “mantra” to “love, study,
struggle,” you encourage students (in colleges and
universities, in prisons, in the streets) to deepen
their awareness of the responsibilities of subject
formation, of the need to recognize and cultivate forms
of agency that are comprehensive, that are informed by
their collective (not individual) dreams of freedom.
What are the specific practices within which
intellectuals and activists “learn” and nurture such
collective dreams of freedom? Do they also include
“economic” ones, and if so, what exactly are they?</h5>
<p>What a hard question! I don’t have a precise list of
practices in part because I’m suggesting that what’s
most important is that we proceed collectively,
critically, and by erasing the boundaries between those
we think of as either intellectuals or knowledge
workers and the rest of us. So an essential element of
that piece is about the relationship between students,
faculty, and university waged labor—that we love, study,
and struggle together as a much bigger (and oppressed)
community. I highlighted those student groups that
included campus worker issues in their overall demands.
Indeed, the university’s liberal conceits have long
masked its history of exploitative labor
policies—antiunion practices, outsourcing, and refusal
to pay fair wages to janitors, groundskeepers, clerical
staff, food services employees, and increasingly,
adjunct teachers, who make up between 70 and 75 percent
of faculty in higher education. University and college
CEOs are quick to blame fiscal austerity for keeping
wages low, breaking unions, and outsourcing labor from
private companies, despite the evidence that living-wage
increases constitute a miniscule percentage of their
overall budgets. Universities are corporations that have
amassed huge endowments, dominate much of the U.S.
economy, employ a workforce more likely to be female and
black and brown, and, as land-grant institutions, enjoy
massive tax breaks. Yale University is New Haven’s
largest employer, and the Yale-New Haven Hospital is the
city’s second largest employer. Both institutions have a
history of union busting, cutting health and retirement
benefits, and subcontracting with outside firms in order
to use nonunion labor to perform clerical, food, and
maintenance work. Years of experience and deepening ties
between organized labor and the community led to the
formation of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy
(CCNE). The CCNE became a powerful force against the
gentrification of working-class neighborhoods, rising
rents, declining wages, deportations and protections
for undocumented workers, and the hospital’s planned
expansion that would have displaced a section of New
Haven’s black community. From this powerful labor
community, they not only strengthened organized labor
but built New Haven Rising, a significant political
movement to contest Yale’s power in the electoral
arena. To me, this is one model of the “specific
practices” you asked me about.</p>
<p>So underlying that piece is a kind of skepticism toward
the university and a critique of its role in the
neoliberal order, and that means resisting university
roles in R&D that promotes militarism, exploitation,
environmental destruction, etc., as well as creating
institutions outside of campuses altogether to give our
communities critically free, quality education that the
communities themselves help design.</p>
<p>And finally, I make a case for the classic study group
(not to pass an exam but to read and debate toward
movement building). All of this requires a qualitative
leap from our current atomizing neoliberal culture of
market thinking. We are all pushing back against this
idea that we’re individual actors at the university in a
competitive world and that the point of education is to
enhance our social capital, our value, improve our
“brand,” etc., which plays into the general assault on
any kind of collectivism and social solidarity. This has
been the cornerstone of neoliberal thought, and it plays
out in the language of “self-care” and “selfhelp” and
entrepreneurialism as the proper response to everything.</p>
<h5>Coming back to the important contributions of
Robinson’s work and of your own, you should know that
both of us were deeply affected, perhaps for different
reasons and contexts, in the early to mid 80s by the
book <em>African Philosophy: Myth & Reality</em> by
the Benin philosopher Paulin Hountondji. You probably
know this book. Hountondji had been a student of Louis
Althusser, and we dare say that our work, and that of
many of those connected to the journal <em>Rethinking
Marxism</em>, was likewise indebted to Althusserian
ideas and concepts. Hountondji, writing in the late 60s
and 70s, was adamant against what he described at the
time as a destructive mythological notion of the
“unanism” of Africa, a common epistemological outlook
and a common ontology from which that epistemology
derived. He called this “ethnophilosophy,” and he
believed its emphasis on a shared negritude and
collective African values stood in the way of the free
thought and expression needed to continue developing
diverse strands of a scientific African philosophy. In
your work, you often cite Robinson and others who, in
contrast to Hountondji, refer to a shared
epistemological and ontological outlook and set of
experiences from which these “African” collective values
grow. Yet in <em>Africa Speaks</em>, you also often
come down on the side of experimentation (as with jazz)
and freedom of expression in music, culture, and
politics, perhaps within but also in conflict with
existing “tradition.” We wonder if you might comment on
what we see as this tension in your work?</h5>
<p>I remember hearing Hountondji speak at the African
Studies Association meeting in Los Angeles in 1984, the
year <em>African Philosophy</em> was selected cowinner
of the Herskovits award. Then it was very controversial,
not only for his critique of the ethno-philosophers but
because he was (wrongly) perceived as imposing
Euro-centric epistemological and ontological frameworks
on Africa. What I remember about the book puts him more
in line with Cedric, who I don’t think was a proponent
of ethno-philosophy. I think he was doing something
different, which will take a minute to explain.</p>
<p>First, one of Hountondji’s main complaints about
ethno-philosophy wasn’t just the assertion of a unity of
beliefs but that their “philosophy” is only evident in
cultural practice; they don’t need to “think” and
reflect since it is embedded in everyday life. Cedric,
too, had issues with this presumption. He was influenced
in grad school by W. E. Abraham’s <em>The Mind of
Africa</em>, which examines the Akan and can probably
fall under the category of ethno-philosophy. But in a
paper he wrote assessing the book for an African
politics course he took at Stanford, Cedric insisted on
the historical specificity for modes of indigenous
thought, while being skeptical of the idea that core
belief systems change in correspondence with
institutional changes. He wrote:</p>
<p><em>The exaggeration of the importance of institutional
differences is a perversity that arises from the
conception of method as being concerned with the
immediately overt, and from the conception of
explanation of all societies as the apotheosis of its
quite static and inertia-ridden institutional
framework as its essence, as that in terms of which,
rather than simply by reference to which, striking
features of the society must be explained. The effect
of this is to treat the institutions as though they
were self-mandated, and were only subject to an
internal evolutionary principle</em> (Robinson 1969).</p>
<p>So despite his assertions about the unity of African
culture, he was not claiming cultural or philosophical
sameness or timelessness but was rather rejecting all
universalist theories of political and social order.
Robinson drew on the evidence he had available of how
Africans responded to the Middle Passage, to plantation
life, to revolts and marronage. And what he drew from
the evidence were actions and thoughts and ways of being
that don’t correspond with Western rationalism; ideas
and practices that place the collective “we” above the
“I,” as well as that challenge axiomatic assumptions by
political theorists about authority and leadership. What
he observed was a <em>shared epistemology among diverse
African people</em>. The first waves of African New
World revolts were not governed by a critique structured
by Western conceptions of freedom but were a total
rejection of enslavement and racism as it was
experienced. All of this cut across lines of
ethnicity/nationality in the African diaspora, and
Robinson proves it through specific examples (the details
of which are often buried in a long footnote). However,
with the advent of formal colonialism and the
incorporation of black labor into a more fully governed
social structure, there emerged a native bourgeoisie,
more intimate with European life and thought, assigned
to help rule. Their contradictory role as victims of
racial domination and tools of empire compelled some of
these men and women to revolt, thus producing the
radical black intelligentsia, whose critiques tend to be
more legible to Western political theory. In other
words, Robinson’s entire argument is premised on
listening to the so-called “subaltern,” on recognizing
that people think, and that they think about their
freedom, the world, and their place in it.</p>
<p>Robinson’s discussion of Tonga consciousness in his
book <em>The Terms of Order</em> is a brilliant case in
point that I can’t summarize here, but I urge your
readers to check out. His main takeaway is that the
Tonga—a group in Southern Africa—embraced the principle
that “all are equally incomplete.” Therefore, they
require each other and all of life itself, land,
animals, plants, to become complete. The result is a
metaphysics of the relatedness of things, of the
indivisibility of life. Now, Robinson suggests that
such a metaphysics was not alien to the West and, in
fact, flashed up on occasion, but usually as a
“transitional function for the political or an
antagonistic relationship to [the political].” What he
meant were things like collective revolutions or, say,
what the anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued about the
instinct of mutual aid developing into a stage of
ethical morality, etc. Studying the Tonga or African
“consciousness” in general became a way for Cedric to
critique Western political theorists’ failure to
comprehend notions of political authority that don’t
look like what emerged in Europe. It is more than ironic
that intellectuals can speak so confidently about a
“Western tradition,” teach millions of students about
this tradition along the way as if it is a thing with a
few countervailing (counter<em>veil</em>ing?)
tendencies, but can’t do the same anywhere else. But he
points out: (1) the construction of a Western tradition
also obscures thought within Europe deemed heretical;
(2) most importantly, it sees the world through a
limited epistemology grounded in European
history/thought. As he puts it, Western social thought
is not merely ethnocentric but epistemocentric as well.
And here, I think, he has more in common with Hountondji
and Mudimbe. In one of his first essays, he took the
Scottish historian George Shepperson to task for
ignoring native cultural and ontological bases for John
Chilembwe’s rebellion in Malawi in 1915 and imposing a
European (specifically a Scottish nationalist) lens
masquerading as universal. Robinson wrote wryly,
“Chilembwe was not a Cromwell; he never could be. But
most importantly he never had to be. His movement had
its own quite special and remarkable integrity.”</p>
<p>Finally, for Robinson, trying to determine indigenous
epistemologies and ontologies is more than an
intellectual practice but is a matter of life and death
for the victims of colonial domination. One of his
biggest critiques centers on the nation-state, which he
sees as a peculiar and specific product of European
modernity whose main function is as an instrument of
power and repression. Nationalism is inextricable from
the state and is potentially lethal. He wrote an essay
in 1996 titled “In Search of a Pan-African
Commonwealth,” which made a distinction between what he
called political Pan-Africanism and cultural
Pan-Africanism, privileging the latter as a more
authentic expression of people’s struggles and the
former a dangerous by-product of Western hegemony. I
apologize for doing this, but his insights are so
valuable for your question, he is worth quoting at
length:</p>
<p><em>Even a casual glance through our historical era
will confirm that the domestic political cultures of
nation-states are animated by irrational impulses
which tend toward ethnic domination or in the extreme
ethnic cleansing; and their most constant external
impulse is expansionism. This deceit was the second
modernizing mission appropriated by political
Pan-Africanism, so it should not be surprising that we
can now add the names of numerous African tyrants to
the list of their Western counterparts. But it is
clear that political Pan-Africanism was an
insufficient if not mistaken mission, so no matter the
particular perversions of the Charles Taylors [former
Liberian dictator] of today, more profoundly they are
the heirs of a flawed, misconceived past. Our
contemporary rapacious hyenas are not blameless but
they did not organize the feast … the black middle
class has hybridized freedom with material ambition.
They possess no cultures grounded in the historical
struggles against oppression, only the costume of
political independence … In an historical moment
which is no longer than an instant, they are necessary
to the struggle, but because they are the darker-faced
familiars to those forces which extract wealth and
life from Africa, the West Indies and the exiled
communities, the black middle classes have an
unnatural duration … For just as the destiny of all
nation-states appears to be the descent into
militarism and barbarism, the black modernists seem
fated to spawn men and women of insatiable greed</em>
(Robinson 1996).</p>
<p>Now, I know you asked about these tensions in my own
work, but, if anything, my work is modeled on Cedric’s
insights—which is to say, recognition of historical
dynamics generating ideas and identities,
antiessentialism, and decentering Western epistemologies
as the only way to see these processes. So, in <em>Africa
Speaks</em>, I do speak of a particular African or
Third World modernity—an alternative to a specific form
of European modernity (which itself is not unified but
whose outlines are pretty clear). If anything, the
cultural actors in my book are also the authors of their
conception of modern jazz and its relationship with
Africa and its diasporas, but we don’t take their
theorizing of modernity seriously (which is why I wrote
that book).</p>
<h5>Let’s talk about diaspora and its histories, futures.
Diasporic communities are not natural ones. Rather, to
talk about a black diaspora is to talk about the history
of a particular kind of human vulnerability and then to
seek to understand the conditions of life of those who
experience that human vulnerability as “their problem.”
In her essay “Race and Globalization: Racialization from
Below,” Leith Mullings argues,</h5>
<h5><em>Four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade
and the racialized subordination of people of African
descent produced a construction of race throughout
much of the world. As a result, many regions of the
world were dominated by what one could call a racial
mode of production—involving not only exploitation of
labor, but also the skills of Africans and their
descendants—to build the modern world system. In many
areas of the world race became a world-view that
rationalized domination and privilege, on one hand,
and dispossession of land, labor, wealth and rights,
on the other. Scientific racism, which emerged in the
18th century, provided a pseudoscientific patina for a
set of beliefs that categorized people into different
races, each endowed with unequal capacities, and
alleged not merely that biological and social
differences were fixed, inheritable and unchangeable,
but also that races could be ranked hierarchically,
with the white race as the pinnacle of civilization</em>
(Mullings 2008).</h5>
<h5>Clearly, Mullings would agree with Robinson that white
supremacy is already in existence and part of the feudal
order that gives way to nascent capitalism, making
racial capitalism from the beginning. And Mullings
grounds “diaspora” in/as the historical and material
experience of Europe’s impact on “the rest” by treating
white supremacy as a cultural and material export good
that accompanied all trade, conquest, and appropriation.
Diaspora is a political and historical community rooted
in resistance. White supremacy is an element of the form
of the racial regimes of European colonizers and
settlers that diasporic communities formed to oppose,
resist, survive. Diaspora, then, might be constituted as
well in the cultural and material experience of
racialization from below. Unanism isn’t natural or
preexisting. It is made in the rise of global
capitalism. Your thoughts?</h5>
<h5>Despite the insistence on denaturalizing diaspora,
there remains the risk of reductionisms or
essentialisms that elide important differences of place
and time, setting up failed alliances. Help us clarify
your understanding of diaspora and community among
those who, racialized from below, respond to the
challenge to remake our world anew?</h5>
<p>I think I answered some of this in my above response.
Of course, I agree with Mullings, and her essay is right
on point. I tend not to use diaspora much anymore, and
when I did, I often made a kind of Marxist distinction
between “diaspora in itself” and “diaspora for
itself”—the former is a structural relationship based on
migration and forced dispersal, the latter is when those
populations form political and social movements
recognizing a shared plight and shared identity. I think
an African Diaspora framework, as capacious as it is,
cannot account for the full range of black identities
and transnational histories—especially those that do
not fit within a Pan-African imaginary. In some of my
earlier writings, I challenged prevailing identity
politics that treated identities as matters of
culture—or, worse, matters of biology and/or
inheritance—when, in fact, some of the most dynamic and
transnational identities originated in the realm of
politics: i.e., in the way people seek alliances and
political “identifications” across oceans and national
boundaries. Instead, I argued that by focusing on these
kinds of identifications and their international
contexts, we can discern the contingent, malleable
nature of identities and the limits of a diasporic
framework that centers primarily on Africa and African
dispersal. Expanding our sights from Africa-centered
movements of racial solidarity to multiracial,
transnational, and international political
identifications opens fresh paths for constructing a new
global history. I think such an approach opens up new
possibilities for writing a world history from below. In
other words, as useful as the Diaspora might be as an
analytical framework and as a metaphor for
understanding black world experience, it can still be
used to erect boundaries rather than topple them.
Africa—either real or imagined—is not the only concept
that has been a source of “black” internationalism, even
for those movements that embrace a nationalist or
Pan-Africanist rhetoric. This, too, I learned from
Cedric Robinson.</p>
<hr>
<h6>Interview conducted by <span><span>Jack Amariglio
and </span><span>Lucas Wilson for <em>Rethinking
Marxism</em>, vol. 30, issue 4 (2018)</span></span></h6>
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