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Ones in 10 to 11 May 2021, together,
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Taxation was snatched at ethically. Yes, that should be reported.
Brilliant. OK. So for a quick introduction, Dr. George James is a professor of political,
feminist and critical theory holding the Ebenezer Critchfield Fat Professorship of Humanities at Williams College.
She's written extensively on incarceration and currently focuses on theorising captive materials as far as I understand to start off.
Could you tell me a little more about how you came to political theory and to your particular interests and.
Yes, I mean, I can try. I don't know, how does one come to political theory?
I think, you know. Engaging or thinking about the world as a political place, right, is the contestation of power.
I mean, even from late childhood, you know, you want to do something your parents say now, right?
Or school, like, you know, the teachers have authority, you do not.
So your agency gets limited or it's mitigated by the demands of others.
And that's great when you're actually in line with them in terms of ethics and desires.
You know, it's not great when they express power in authoritarian ways and you then
become the subject object of their decrees or their rules and their policies.
So I grew up in a military family. I was born in Frankfurt, Germany.
My siblings were born in Texas and San Antonio, Texas, which if you think about it,
it's kind of a could be looked at as a very large military base and.
Growing up, a military base is mostly in the south, but Fort Monmouth, in New Jersey, in the north,
right, and then my father retiring as a lieutenant colonel and our family settling in Texas.
You know, the issue of power control, the role of the state as an employer.
The backdrop of warfare.
So my father was in Vietnam and he was also in the 101st Airborne, which suggests to me that he was probably deployed to quell the uprising.
Some people would call them riots in Detroit. He's probably in a number of invasions.
So even though you don't actually talk about power over the dinner table or like, where's dad?
What's he doing right now? There's an understanding of policing as ingrained in the fabric of social life,
and so social life then becomes personal life, which is, you know, by extension, political life and militarised.
So I would say by the time I was a teenager, I was interested in rebellion.
And, you know, and part of it started even before my teens. I think it was like 11.
When I read, my father started to read his books. So E. Franklin Frazier is the black bourgeoisie.
Which I believe you wrote when he was working for UNICEF in the 1950s.
So African-American intellectual who understands the contradictions around power.
And hegemonic political theory coming from the right schools, you I believe he was at University of Chicago.
Perhaps he studied there.
And then he went to Howard University, which is also known as the alma mater of the incoming vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris.
So this way in which in the books, he questions how the black bourgeoisie or the black middle class is an imitation of the white bourgeoisie.
We just don't have their money, right? But we have the same aspirations in the contradictions.
Like, if you come from a people who were enslaved for centuries and then after that had become the prison system where you
died at faster rates than you had on the plantations because we were jointly owned by corporations in the state,
in the rebuilding of the south and the southern economy, that was going to be integrated with these huge corporations,
you know, emerging from the north around coal and steel.
Then you faced Jim Crow legislation, prohibition to voting, voting at the costs of your life at times sharecropping.
You know, you just go on up the stages to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Then the contradictions of being in the black middle class are all about politics, compliance or occasionally rebellion.
So at 11:00, I'm reading this book, which shapes eventually my feminism in the future,
my suspicion of the black bourgeoisie or the black middle class of academic elites like, who do we work for?
Having grown up and had my braces paid for by somebody who worked for the state and its imperial, you know, aggressions and accumulations,
that's of this world that turned me into the if you can call me a black feminist, that's fine, but turn me into the political thinker that I became.
So, you know, I start with the family because it's the side of contradictions, right?
Not just around gender, adult ism, you know, infantilizing children and teens.
But it's a sign of contradiction. If you work for the state, either private corporation, a corporate state,
or if you work literally for the government or specifically for the military.
And I've always been a reader,
so trying to understand the world through books and admittedly not usually the books that people my age would have been reading.
So it varies like from, you know what?
Sorry, the black bourgeoisie to Shakespeare, to the hardy boys and Nancy Drew, I mean, it's like all over the place, right?
But in a way, you're reading about power that you do not have because you're not allowed to possess it.
So as a dark skinned black girl in the south, you're being groomed to be an intellectual outsider.
And then the charges, do you want in? Or do you want to break out?
So it seems like a contradiction like you're technically not in, but you're governed by those who set the programme, like the teachers, the parents,
the principals, then the university professors, the dissertation director,
etc., etc. And so how much do you want in to the extent that you're thinking?
Is is just conformity, and then how much do you want in to the extent that your thinking becomes a rebellion against conformity?
So those are kind of the I'm sure there are other options,
but those seem to be the ones that I basically was struggling with in my early years, along with the general sexism, racism, patriarchy.
Colourism, anti-Black aggression. You know, there's.
Aspects of life. And I guess I mean, so, yeah, you've just you've just mentioned a lot of sort of barriers there and also thought process about,
well, do I how how much do I need to conform to remain here?
And where can I go with this? Are there any like how did you deal with those obstacles?
I don't, you know, I, you know, looking back over decades, I'm not.
I can tell you, I'm not quite sure. I mean, there's the question. You know, you introduced me, Ebenezer, which?
I'm who I'm sure was not an anti-racist feminist, whatever century Williams was founded.
You know, he was the 18th century. So like for me, it's a bit ironic, and it's conflicted, meaning these titles in these accumulations,
like all this stamps that say, Oh, you're real intellectual and you're real professor and you teach at a real school.
The emphasis is on real, like what? Who gets to define what is real and why does it always look like another manifestation of elite ism, right?
So. I would argue that my whole intellectual development.
Was. In some ways, I'm not going to I don't want to see literally a battlefield.
Having grown up in a military family where they actually went to war, where people died, but I would say it was, it was a constant struggle.
And I would say, even at this point where I'm looking at retirement, it's getting closer and closer.
I don't think it's ever been resolved. Like, to what extent do you just give in and go with the programme, even if you believe it to be unethical and.
To some extent, it feels like a Ponzi scheme. You know, like the smartest people are not in academia, they're just smart people who got the job.
You know, there's smart people in all economic classes and stations.
It's just the ones that are allowed to have the leisure time to write and then have access
to the most prestigious presses in order to publish and disseminate their thought,
which usually seems to align itself with prevailing norms.
Right? That those are the ones who almost become. This is goes back to E. Franklin Frazier and also W.E.B. Dubois.
Before that, the notion of the talented tenth like, you know, the Dubois word of it as that.
I'm sure he didn't think of it at 10 percent only, but that elite lead amongst African-Americans who are going to lead the other 90 percent.
But that whole notion came from. The American Home Baptist Missionary Society, which were white philanthropists, wealthy people.
During the era of the Civil War, and so after the war was fought, 200000.
Formerly enslaved people, black Americans, African-Americans fought in that war, which helped the North to win to the extent that it did,
I mean, we we have the resurgence of white supremacy as a norm in the United States.
But after the war was won, just to use that cliched phrase, what do you do with the, you know,
emancipated people and for the missionary society that was coming largely from the North included Henry Morehouse,
and he's the namesake of Morehouse College, where Martin Luther King Junior graduated, right?
And also, I believe Laura Spelman, who is the namesake for Spelman College, right, said the elite premier HBCU.
Historically black colleges and universities the the tier one would be Morehouse and Spelman.
But as white philanthropies, what they wanted was an educated Corddry that would steer a black mass that's impoverished,
that's terrorised by the Klan that gains rights that are then stripped away through racist terrorism and these new Jim Crow laws.
They wanted a kind of obedience and adherence to the rule of law, even if you even if law was corrupt and anti black and its expressions.
So. I what I'm speaking to is the fact that to be educated to attain these degrees for me was always problematic because if you
can't have a rebellion for your rights and I'm sure people saw the protest around George George Floyd's murder by police.
You know, the street protest is a form of rebellion for justice. Like if the point of having educated elites is to.
Schooled them in a certain kind of civility and decorum that is compatible with existing democracy.
I don't quite see how you get the other 90 percent free like under that construct, right?
So in a way, it's almost like if you don't criminalise political rebellion and I'm not talking about burning down buildings,
but I do know that happens. If you don't criminalise it, then you see it as a lack of civility and a lack of sophisticated politics.
So in this recent election, this, you know.
This promotion of the Democratic Party.
As a necessity, and I would agree it's preferable to what the former it's still the current administration, they haven't even Trump has not conceded.
Yeah, it's not funny. I just have this nervous laugh when things are going off the rail.
But, you know, of course, Joe Biden is preferable to Donald Trump if you actually believe in democracy even as a concept, right?
But in if you look at the specific policies that the Democrats have enacted, right, they have not.
In large part, been beneficial and definitely not laboratory.
You know, to impoverished, a working class African-American Native American, just go down the list, put every ethnic group.
Communities, because the Democratic Party shares the same kind of obedience mandate to corporate power that the Democrats,
I'm sorry that the Republican Party does. So that goes back to the issue of political theory.
I mean, do you want to theorise democracy or do you want to just accept that it's the holy grail?
For the liberation of LGBTQ, of children of, you know,
treating the natural environment as if it had real value other than based on extraction of coal, oil and gas and oil.
Or do you want to use political theory to unseat the norms, or do you think against the norms?
So I don't think it's enough to be a feminist theorist or a critical race theorist or a socialist theorist.
Lisa Democratic socialist theorists. Which is more the norm in the United States than actual socialists.
I don't think it's enough unless you're willing to. Understand the value of resistance and rebellion.
Right. I actually I'm starting to think. In an environment in which uniformity.
In thinking conformity and thinking is.
Rarely challenged without being punished, and I'm not talking about the far right.
In a way, they seem like they're such an aberration,
but I would argue if you looked at the way black and indigenous people have been treated in centuries for centuries in the United States,
their aggressions or non-Aboriginal, they're their norm is just like white people were largely the victim of their malfeasance and their lies.
Right? So now that white people are becoming more, you know, realising, Oh, the democracy doesn't work the way we thought it did an Electoral College,
not the majority votes for the Electoral College, which actually in some part, is tied to rape the three-fifths clause, right?
Three fifths of an enslaved person constitutes one unit of representation.
So I've said often then Sally Hemings, who at 14 encountered Thomas Jefferson in France.
Where she was supposed to go to kind of be a chaperone for her nieces.
Who are white and because their mother was enslaved woman of African descent and Sally Hemings was not.
But every time she had a baby by Thomas Jefferson. Every time someone got pregnant on a plantation, they were.
Expanding the Electoral College base for southern white men who could be president, and if this kind of mass exploitation,
mass rape is baked into your democracy like its origins, right, then they're going to be repercussions throughout generations.
And so the way I look at it is that democracy cannot be a holy grail, at least not US democracy.
The way you think critically has to have an aspect of dissent and rebellion in order
to discover what is ethical and what is possible outside the official rulebook.
Does that make sense? Mm. Yeah.
Yeah, I guess I wonder how for you, how you and your kind of how you've come to where you are now in academia, how have you?
Well, you've mentioned now and you've also mentioned in the past how sort of academic academia can be very or is just very limiting.
For example, when you talk about academic abolitionism, how it's very there's almost this hegemony there.
And how have you dealt with kind of the limits of how far you're theorising within the academy can go and how how you would like to go beyond that?
Is that something that you've always, always achieved or I don't know if I've achieved anything, right?
I only know that I've tried. And when I hear other people, I know that.
Well, what we have in common is we talk a lot about our isolation. And I guess there would be a form of loneliness in the academy, right?
It's not as if again, like if we understand that the intent of our labour is to question,
you know, like the cliche phrase in the 60s or 70s, I believe, was question authority, right?
But if we understand that the reason? We're working is to actually point.
To the contradictions in order to clarify the possibilities.
That's not welcomed, right?
And I don't even think that wasn't even in the job description when we were hired, like we brought in saying, Oh, this is a plus and a bonus.
We're just like going to question everything and we're going to challenge what we think is not ethical.
We think it's like racist or sexist, homophobic. We're going to call it out and we were like, That's not what we hired you for.
And so it was.
I've met so many people on all like undergrads, graduate students, people finishing their dissertation, mostly women, but also some men who.
Just wanted to articulate what they saw.
In terms of power, in terms of betrayal and in terms of the need for greater ethics and to be disciplined to a higher standard, right?
And who? Simply stay mute.
Because it's, you know, I've heard things like, I need a letter to get a job or I need this person to say,
stay on my dissertation committee or I need to get published and I've pissed off this really important scholar who I don't even agree with.
But, you know, if I really irritate them, there's a possibility I'll be banned from these prestigious journals or,
oh my god, I said something at a conference.
And then, as you know, this senior professor calls me up and lectures me for three hours as a woman who is not tenured.
And I was like, Well, why don't you just say, Oh, there's a lot of static, I can't hear your heart and then like,
hang up the phone, but they don't because they're disciplined for their discipline to be disciplined, right?
It's just like, I'm like, Oh man, don't call me like, click rate. But that's not what.
The majority do, and I'm not faulting them for that.
And I'm going back to my origin story. I grew up with people who fought wars for an empire that is not the most ethical geek.
But in their defence, they did leave the military to try to find a job.
And even with a college degree, which was kind of rare actually for African-Americans at the time, could not, except for washing dishes somewhere.
Right? So I see all of this as the zone of compromise.
The question becomes, how compromised do you want to be in order to attain economic,
security and some level of seeing yourself as a white collar worker?
Maybe the next time there's a pandemic, you can stay home instead of being what I call expendable essential workers.
So I think there's a lot of abuse in the academy. I'm not saying it's like the abuse that happens in certain churches, right?
But there's a lot of abuse and it's gendered and it's shaped by race and ethnicity.
But what often is not talked about, it's also shaped by idle, logical, you know, mandates that.
If you conform to a sort of corporate state norm, then your ethnicity and gender can be used to discipline those who refuse.
Right. Because it's you know. This is what SAD said when I think I was on with you guys earlier for the Oxford conversation,
like I was talking about Condoleezza Rice, and if I understand correctly, I'll just say allegedly in case I don't.
But Rice's recruitment to Stanford was in part to, you know,
discipline or curtail women's studies and ethnic and black studies, and a white man would have gotten a lot of flack for that.
But a black woman doing it could probably get away with that.
And then later, you know,
if you're promoting which should have been an illegal invasion in Iraq under false pretences of charges of weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, I don't know who that stuck to as much of it should,
from Dick Cheney to George Bush to Condoleezza Rice to Colin Powell, but somehow being a black woman.
That sort of becomes a shield to certain kinds of critiques around predatory ideologies and practises.
Right. So the academy is the intellectual wing of the state.
And if you have a state that is progressive and doesn't believe in empires and has a critique of monopoly capitalism,
then I don't think that's a bad thing to be the intellectual wing of that kind of state.
My position is the United States is not that kind of state. Hmm.
Nevertheless, in sort of well, so far in academia have have there been any more?
Well, positive surprises are just expectations that about where you thought you couldn't theorise something with.
Well, what you? Have there been any positive surprises,
developments and how far your your studies and your theorising can go that you didn't expect when you started out?
Well. I have to pause because obviously there probably were not a lot of surprises.
OK. Let me use not me, but another. Some colleagues are doubt, so afro pessimism, right?
So I think I've said this a number of times. Anyway, when I was, I went to Brown University.
As a full professor, I use my private research to bring former political prisoners political rebels to campus.
That caused quite a stir. But also on the panels, I had to say about the tea, you know, speak from the panel.
I had invited to graduate students who became the architects of Afro pessimism Gerard Sexton and Frank Balderson.
I was surprised. Years later, what they and the black feminists and they're not all black,
I've met white afro pessimist, Asian Afro batsmen's still kind of wrapping my head around the concept.
But what they were able to do in the academy in terms of codifying a school of thought.
That rejected the norms. Right? And to the extent that Wilkerson has a book out, which is sort of a popularised memoir.
About Afro pessimism, about his formation development and has recently been named the chancellor chair.
Then there, I thought that, well, that's unusual, you know, and actually people have said the same thing to me from.
How did that you even have a job to like? Oh, that's unusual that you you got an endowed chair somewhere or that the Ivy League hired you, right?
It's sort of like the like the presentation of our politics supposedly make us a pariah.
And I'm going to say now I have the same politics as Afro pessimism,
but I have the same appreciation for rebellion against what I see to be predatory cultures, right?
And deception, right? You know, sort of people telling you that they're not harming you while they are actually harming you.
You know, and getting you to believe that, oh, no, they're just trying to help me by making me a better person,
by teaching me how to conform to these rules and regulations that actually do not serve communities, you know, mass communities, not in communities.
So the surprise is that we are still employed, but we're not the only ones surprised by that.
So I keep hearing and. Well, we're still employed.
Because we care about our students because we teach not to be popular, but teach to be relevant.
In a country full of crises in that because of its military and its budget can create crises in other countries, right?
Like AFRICOM? And I've already mentioned, you know, destabilising.
Parts of the Middle East through the invasion following nine 11.
So the beautiful thing, I can't speak for other people, but the beautiful thing that I see in the academy.
Is and it doesn't happen every day, right, but there is a beauty to it when you see students ask you questions that sound like they're struggling.
Not with grasping materials so that he can quote,
master it and then become the expert and then move up the ranks and get their gig or additional degrees,
but they're struggling because they really want to comprehend. The way that.
Nothing fits the way they were told it would fit, right?
Like, it's always when I think about. The university or the academy as a replacement for the parental authority.
Right? That like while you're there, they're supposed to be raising you and polishing you off.
So it's the last of the finishing schools that have been going on way too long.
But. When you realise that a lot of what you were told was gruelling.
And it wasn't necessarily. An accurate description of how much violence and corruption there is.
And how hard we would have to work. To care about the world in which we weren't always the centre of.
Right. That we would have like this is a thing when you have leisure time and wealth
and privilege to read most of the day and then write the rest of the day.
I mean, the understanding that most people in the world don't live this way, that you live this way now because you're exceptional.
I mean, you live this way because you had access to resources and you plugged into structures now and the whether
or not the structures actually divested from South African apartheid or Palestinian occupations or.
The question is where do you make your money for your university? I mean, what's their portfolio look like?
It's like forest devastation in the Amazon, like, those kinds of questions were not really encouraged to think about.
Right? And the beauty to keep going back is when people realising.
You know, there's we're not super, we don't have super powers like all that Marvel stuff that keeps coming out on a regular basis.
But we do have an intellectual capacity that can express not just compassion,
but a certain kind of concern tied to a steely determination to do something.
And I think once you see people wake up are they're already awake,
but become more awake to the fact that they have the capacity to be political actors.
But in order to do so, they have to have political philosophy and political theory.
Then that's like a good day. Because the conversation's shift from being the zone of consumption or mastery to being intimate in some ways like,
Oh my gosh, this is so f ing scary. But like, how do we talk about it?
Do we even have a vocabulary that can describe what's going on?
And then how do we address that? So the last thing maybe I'll say about the Afro pessimist?
I mean. They created a vocabulary. Right?
And they keep saying, we won't tell you what to do about it.
But I think just the fact that.
They took the time to be architects of a certain kind of political fury that refused to compromise with existing norms that became the gift itself.
How much you want to engage in that or other forms that of thinking right, that trouble the water, you know, has sort of.
Black spiritual culture uses that refrain like trouble the water,
right things have to be turbulent sometimes in order for you to be able to move forward.
That that sometimes is the best that it gets.
In the academy, I know other people would say, and it's nice to to get a book contract, to get a book award to hit the bestseller list.
Like basically I've had, you know, I can get a book contract. The other two not really like that becomes a highlight.
And I'm like, Good, that's great. But when I see people become very conscious of contradictions.
I for me. That's reassuring, because I actually believe they're going to do something, I have no idea what's going to be.
Don't really care. It's none of my business, but I have a sense that they know they need to do something.
They need to learn more, and then with that learning, be able to contribute more.
Again,
you've mentioned again the sort of the compromises that students and also academics have to face and grapple with and constantly are confronted with.
Do you have any advice to? Well, I guess, undergraduate students or any student of political theory really in dealing with those compromises?
And yeah, that's it. You know, I'll be honest.
Yeah, don't don't take advice from me, OK? I mean, I literally was so offended when I was getting.
My dissertation and I wrote on Hannah Arendt, right? A feminist critique of her analysis of communication.
Right. Democracies, communicative. I was so offended when I was trying to talk at the time about the apartheid in South Africa,
where the questions that came to me and in the way I was challenged, not just by my.
Intellectual, you know, performance. And I just put that the air quotes, but also about my ethics that I was like, OK, when this is done, I'm done.
And so I would say, of course, I passed not just because I had the degree, but I knew I would.
I knew what I was talking about, right? And it was a liberal it's not like it was like black militancy, anything like that that was like, prohibit it.
So never had a black studies course in my life, white and never had black faculty teach me until I did a post.
I did a postdoc. I went to seminary to work with Cornel West and James Caan.
There was my first black professors and I've been decades of schooling,
but I was so offended by these challenges that I considered to be so unethical.
And it's not just I considered they were, and it was racist. I watched with a degree, and I never asked for a letter.
So that's why you don't take advice from me, because if you.
You're so indignant that you just like forget this. I mean, you know, this is.
I don't even have the words for it, I'm surprised I'm still really upset by this, but yeah, I mean, how would you get a job?
I mean, I eventually I did get one, but I ended up working for your NGO.
And you know, the U.N. for a while, the U.N. Women's Centre in Manhattan calls to the United Nations.
I taught in seminaries part time, and then I went to seminary after a trip to Nairobi, you know,
and reflection on international politics and attempts to have nuclear détente and, you know, women's rights, advocacy, children's rights, advocacy.
So I went to seminary and then after seminary, I tried again and I got my first academic job in women's studies at UMass Amherst.
But you know, I I'm not the only one who did something like that.
There are a number of people who just quit the academy who were disgusted.
That's the verb I was. That's the what I was looking for. It's like, discuss, you know, the noun.
Just like, What are you feeling? What's the emotional register? It's disgust.
I mean, it's yeah, I read everything honorary ever wrote.
Now, it wasn't always fun, you know? And then to read other people's you was really but.
There's an integrity to the intellect,
and it's it's in fact not surely an abstract notion of integrity like you just have to be coherent and do work at an above average,
you know, standard. It's the integrity that.
You're thinking this is my position, you're thinking has to have relevance to the well-being of community and the community,
can't be your small group of Nazi friends.
It can't be your drinking buddies who have a proclivity to sexual abuse and raping people like you who the community has to be this larger formation.
And if all those years that you toiled as a graduate student?
You know, basically, you know, a second class citizen in the academy, right?
If there's years of sacrifice, which it sounds like that seems like a contradiction because it's all you,
you'd be in the library, you have the leisure time do white collar labour stuff.
But yeah, but it's also.
Without being literally the military, it's a highly disciplined sector which demands conformity and deference to people in higher ranks.
So like, what's the difference between a sergeant and a lieutenant and a captain and lieutenant colonel?
Like clearly these are ranking, you know,
metrics that are not always shaped by the integrity or the value or the intellect of the people who made it to sergeant,
lieutenant, captain, lieutenant colonel. It's just like you have to follow the rules because quote, they're in charge.
So, you know, all those years of deference to faculty who probably were sexist and racist and classes,
and I could add some more iced teas in their descriptors.
That was the objective and not just getting the degree, but being a good potential colleague for the future or a good graduate student,
which, you know, it's kind of cheesy, but it's like being a quote, good girl, which is really creepy if you think about it, right?
And so it's like, you know, hide six feet all these years doing all this,
showing up to class when I'm bored and listening to all this racist drivel here and
like having to read these conservative political theories who clearly were white,
chauvinist, if not white supremacist. And then the dissertation, where I'm just like an inside sideline just trying to say apartheid is bad.
It just becomes problematic. And I was like, I don't want your letter.
But other people said, I don't even want this job. And so I think that we've.
I think the academy has probably lost some brilliant thinkers and passionate.
You know, people who care about the world just because they couldn't stomach the environment.
Yeah. The thought. Makes one is awful, but but makes sense in that.
Well, like the way you've explained it, well, you teach undergraduate students, right as well and you've already said to not not take advice from you.
But is there is there anything that you? Deliberately do as a as a teacher, as a professor to kind of break out of this very disciplined.
Is that possible or is that something that you I mean, I've done it. I've always done it in different ways.
I've been doing this job for decades or this is your retirement.
But like when I was teaching women's studies at UMass Amherst and then,
you know, the women's studies classroom and the students were complaining like,
why are we reading all this literature by women of colour as if they were not women?
And who is like, Look, I mean, I've got limits to right, so.
I'm going to give you the option because you're speaking as if this is predominantly obviously white students,
you know, dominated the campus and women's studies at the time,
I believe I was the first black hire and women's studies at UMass Amherst,
if not the first woman of colour to be hired in the history of their department.
And so I was teaching a lot of memoirs, right?
Many Native American women, Latinos, Asian women, African-American women,
particularly political ones such as Angela Davis autobiography and Assata Shakur as autobiography.
And so and I was also teaching white women as well. So it's like a month we're doing multicultural, multiracial.
That's just like basic liberalism, you know, get over it.
But the complaints kept going, and I like, Look, I'm going to give everybody in a way you can show up or you can leave.
But if the point here is to learn and you're saying that there's an impediment to
your learning and somehow you feel that I as a black progressive that I will,
you know, negatively judge you by the racist things you say in the classroom and to the few students of colour who were here,
then I'll just like, Here's your it's like Donald Trump, right in the pardon.
It's like you're free pass, right? You can show.
You cannot show. I mean, you obviously, you can't use racial slurs here, but you all get an A.
And then let's see if you're committed because you say you're so committed, but I'm impeding your learning process.
Well, after they all got their 80s, I can tell you everybody else.
I mean, the all the class did not return, but the people who stayed were amazing because they weren't there for the great.
They were actually there to learn like, so if this is a kind of carrot sticks saying, I don't even have a stack because that would be abuse.
And I don't have any carrots because I just gave them all out, right? So you each got an organic carrot called A.
And now you can come and actually be an intellectual.
Who has ethics and figure out how we collectively do this and the people who stayed, I remember some of the narratives, none of the names, right?
But you know, one white woman who is near tears saying that she was learning so much, then she dreaded going home for the holidays.
Because. If she actually said what she believed in terms of how white supremacy and misogyny operated, she would no longer have a family.
And. You know, I was honest, I don't I, you know, I could not, I don't know how to comfort people who have evolved into more conscious.
And ethical beings, I do not know how to comfort them in terms of their loss.
Because I don't believe you can evolve into a more ethical political being without having losses.
Without being ostracised, without being marginalised in some ways.
But, you know, that struck me like that and killing some of the black women who were at the university interacting with them outside of the classroom.
That was. That was kind of amazing, too, because I was also learning from them at Brown.
Well, first at the University of Colorado Boulder, I read about doing a prototype for critical resistance at the request of Angela Davis.
So organising with the undergrad students there, the black students to really found the campus,
which was mostly elite and quite problematic because of its racism.
But we were determined that this conference was going to go off well.
It was the largest one that Siebold or had done at the time, but who, as a working class black students felt first generation right.
College University totally alienated on campus. But then there was a cadre of white, affluent students who came to me and said, We're organising.
They'd been donating their their labour, but they're like, We're going to miss class or something.
And they were actually skipping classes to organise so. And I was and I was like, What's the problem?
Thinking that white, affluent people don't have problems, right?
Use of its rhetorical? What's the problem like many white shirt to class?
And they explained that the FBI wanted to interview them.
It's not that they want to the FBI wants to talk to you, talk to the FBI,
so they had to go into the Denver office, to the Denver office because they had.
Known people who were doing environmental liberation activism, so left the Environmental Liberation Front,
I believe the United States classified most progressive left,
you know, put it on as some kind of terrorist list the way they've been trying to do that with Black Lives Matter, right?
But they had been, yes, assaulting property, late trophy homes, being built in pristine environments, the devastation of lands and water.
And I was like, Oh yeah, so weight of fluid.
You know, this is the way I get blinded sometimes to, and I don't see as clearly white, affluent students are engaged in struggle as well.
They also take risk as well. And so these were all educational moments for me, and then Brown was probably the capping.
Well, the capstone, so coming out of that conference, as I've said before, I.
Do an anthology states of confinement had, you know, works by a number of those people who attended largely academics Inception and Davis,
who was both academic and a former political prisoner? And I got 50 copies to mail inside to incarcerated people.
So inside the prisons and got a letter back from the Black Panther Black Liberation
Army detainee who actually got out last October after serving 49 years in prison,
saying that the academic work that I thought I was the very useful and helpful in producing was not that relevant.
So then when I left the boulder to go to Brown, I was determined to write about in anthologised the most vulnerable of the radicals.
Those people were disappeared into prisons and who were being tortured and who presumably were going to die there.
I don't agree with all their choices, but I understood they saw themselves as more and based on my COINTELPRO was doing,
which was, you know, illegally killing activists and nobody was, you know, going to jail around any of this.
They made certain choices. And so it was a brown. I think that I took the greatest risk.
That's when. I decided to invite people who been in the weather underground,
people who had been the Black Panther Party, people who had been in the Republic of New Africa,
people aligned with American Indian movement, people who'd been in the Puerto Rican independence system movement, you know, stone and so forth.
And as I said when we started, use my personal research funds to do this,
and the Afro pessimist graduate students came from California, and that's my students helped organise that invite.
And the two to three anthologies that came out of the years that I stayed at Brown and I left because,
you know, the political climate was not hospitable. That was driven in part by student intellect and student agency.
So if you look at imprisoned intellectuals, they did the biographies on George Jackson, on other people pacifist and non pacifist.
And I think that would be the height of teaching in which students taught me.
And taking the risks, like even talking to some students who.
We're interested in the world, and I would say, well, have you thought about?
Visiting Cuba as well, it was legal.
You know, I had gone a couple of times and they're saying to me, I'm going to go to law school or graduate school at Harvard.
I mean, they already knew before they got in. And my father will not pay for it if I go to Cuba and they're saying, OK,
that my my era and even suggesting that that's why I'm saying I don't give advice, right?
So. I think that the students that we have.
Are aware of the contradictions in the betrayals from the climate devastation.
To these ongoing wars, to the differential death rates around COVID, to new forms of authoritarianism,
I think, you know, they're quite bright, they actually know what's going on.
I think the question becomes whether or not they feel somebody needs to give
them permission or give them advice to act on the knowledge they already have.
I don't give advice because I only know smart people, including people who never went to college, right?
And the best they can do is listen and maybe echo back to them some of the things that they've expressed,
which are of concern to them, where some of the things that they're willing to challenge, I I don't.
Think other than like a career officer or official is supposed to help you climb the rungs of the ladder.
I don't think advice is useful. I think solidarity is.
That's I think that's a good that's a good place to finish this.
Well, I don't want to keep you for any longer,
but you've said so many interesting things and I'm going to listen back to this and probably have lots of things to think about.
It's one thing I would add, Charlotte, because I know like when I'm talking, it's really like Graham and Ryder die kind of thing.
In an interesting way. That's my word is interesting. I am hopeful.
No, I am confident that we will respond to the crises, whether or not it's as many people as we would hope, you know, to be in solidarity with us.
Yeah, that's not on the hopeless. But the certainty list is that we.
In different sectors, like the affluent students, you're working on environmental issues because they understand the existential threat of that.
The other students who were working on police killings of civilians because they understand the existential threat of that right,
the sex trafficking of women and children like we're all labouring include on both the intellectual and the
physical level to sort of stabilise the world that we have to live on and to allow it to be a more beautiful one.
And I see that happening all around. So as much as I have a critique of the academy, it has allowed me the leisure time, the extra time.
Because I do have a roof over my head, I can like buy my groceries.
I stable economic cushion. Or foundation?
It has allowed me to use my time for social justice.
And that actually is the most beautiful thing about the academy, that whatever skills you acquire, you can redirect some.
Right. To help people in ways that do not reproduce the cage.
And so that OK, so I'm glad we're doing this because that's actually like, oh yeah, that's why we had this job for decades.
Right? It's that it's allowed me to practise my beliefs without being consumed right by a machine.
And I've met beautiful people, and so the black internationalists unions, which is mostly black women, academics, we're on the abolition collective.
So we have this site like since COVID started, we've been organising and writing and trying to amplify the voices of the most vulnerable people.
And it's like if I've emailed you back and forth, you'll see, like in blue, the bayous dot com under me, that's where the link is.
And those sisters are fierce and they're mad.
Most of them are much younger than I. I'm.
I can't help smiling because, you know, it's a good time to receive because all the young people and the young women,
the young black women who are stepping up. Are very principled, and they don't compromise just because they've been intimidated.
They compromise because it's a necessity as a political strategy in the moment.
Before you have another strategy that will garner greater benefits for the greater good.
Yeah, that's OK. And even an even better point, and I think.
And yeah, thank you for those last last words.
I yeah, like I said, I have a lot to think about, I think.
But thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me and also for taking the time to to speak to op last term.
Yeah, I hope in the current mess that everything is that the things things go OK.
Thanks. And I wish you well. Take care, Charlotte. Thank you.
Bye. I'll be in touch.
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