Historian Robin D.G. Kelley discusses navigating the anti-Black racism of universities.
“I don’t believe universities are inherently sites of opposition, though spaces have been created in the past and present for oppositional work,” historian Robin D.G. Kelley remarked in our recent conversation about anti-Black racism and our role as Black intellectuals working within the university setting. “How do you avoid becoming a functionary, a cog in the neoliberal machine?”
In the conversation below, we blend philosophical analysis, historical insight and autobiography in our discussion of the social, political and existential realities of our contemporary moment.I would like to discuss with you the importance of keeping a critical discourse about racism alive.
The contemporary bills are equally ridiculous . The Iowa bill signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds criminalizes teaching anything considered “divisive,” including subject matter that might make “any individual . . . feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.
Your observations, as usual, are critically insightful, and straight to the point. The draconian legislative maneuvers that you mention to repress critical discussion about the history of and current reality of U.S. racism also reminds me of McCarthyism, something out of the dystopian nightmare ofwhere you draw from the work of political theorist Wendy Brown. I think that liberal multiculturalism fails at being radical.
Historically, the field of philosophy is dominated by white men. This reality impacts how Black people and people of color are perceived within the field. It was only later that I discovered that many prominent European philosophers were racists. Many Black philosophers did the critical work to expose the contradictions within the thought of these white philosophers, especially in terms of the ideals that they held and how those ideals were never intended to apply to Black people.
So, in graduate school I studied with Cedric Robinson , Robert Hill , and Mazisi Kunene . However, when I switched my major field from African history to U.S. history because I could not get into South Africa to conduct research , I started to bump up against the liberal version of the canonical racism W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about in his final chapter of, “The Propaganda of History.” I remember vividly taking my written qualifying examinations in U.S. history — having only takencourse in the U.S.
Right. Hard questions. Before I try to answer, I want to give credit to other scholars who had come to see Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness as a way of seeing “white” and “global” racial consciousness long before Charles Mills. The historian Thomas Holt had begun to make the case in his 1990essay, “The Political Uses of Alienation: W.E.B.
The everyday expression or performance of institutional power, or put simply, the racial education of what it means tobe white. The spectacle of racism in practice teaches white people the consequences of being Black or Brown. Hyper-policing, premature death, caging, deportation, relegation to segregated neighborhoods and dilapidated housing, houselessness, job insecurity, racially segmented occupations .
It is here that I’m more of a pessimist. In fact, while it is true that racial capitalism entails the “capture” of exploited white workers, as you put it, and situates white workers as junior partners, I would only add the fact that exploited white workers were also deemedunder white supremacy. There is a deep anthropological investment in whiteness, one that also has deep theologically symbolic implications. After all, to be white was to resemble Adam and Eve.
Yes, I’ve encountered my share of white men — and they are always men — who say they wish they were Black, but to quote the title of a book edited by the late great Greg Tate, they want “everything but the burden” of being Black. Still, I encountered way more Black people, especially growing up, who said they were happy and relievedI don’t want to diminish this sense of personal dread. It is real, especially when the consequences of being Black means persistent vulnerability to premature death.
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