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Hello and welcome to the OHP African and South Asian Philosophy's music series.

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Please join us to let everyone think is right about the bodies of these African and

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South Asian recipes and the values and education of our public policy journalists.

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Ones in 10 to 11 May 2021, together,

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we as students begin to acquire our traditions and studied in your marriage in this institution

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is investigating and in a way our traditions present these philosophies and beyond.

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We intend to participate in ameliorating deficits in representation, respect and resources required to transform our lives.

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Taxation was snatched at ethically. Yes, that should be reported.

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Brilliant. OK. So for a quick introduction, Dr. George James is a professor of political,

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feminist and critical theory holding the Ebenezer Critchfield Fat Professorship of Humanities at Williams College.

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She's written extensively on incarceration and currently focuses on theorising captive materials as far as I understand to start off.

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Could you tell me a little more about how you came to political theory and to your particular interests and.

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Yes, I mean, I can try. I don't know, how does one come to political theory?

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I think, you know. Engaging or thinking about the world as a political place, right, is the contestation of power.

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I mean, even from late childhood, you know, you want to do something your parents say now, right?

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Or school, like, you know, the teachers have authority, you do not.

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So your agency gets limited or it's mitigated by the demands of others.

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And that's great when you're actually in line with them in terms of ethics and desires.

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You know, it's not great when they express power in authoritarian ways and you then

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become the subject object of their decrees or their rules and their policies.

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So I grew up in a military family. I was born in Frankfurt, Germany.

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My siblings were born in Texas and San Antonio, Texas, which if you think about it,

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it's kind of a could be looked at as a very large military base and.

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Growing up, a military base is mostly in the south, but Fort Monmouth, in New Jersey, in the north,

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right, and then my father retiring as a lieutenant colonel and our family settling in Texas.

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You know, the issue of power control, the role of the state as an employer.

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The backdrop of warfare.

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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.

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Some people would call them riots in Detroit. He's probably in a number of invasions.

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So even though you don't actually talk about power over the dinner table or like, where's dad?

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What's he doing right now? There's an understanding of policing as ingrained in the fabric of social life,

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and so social life then becomes personal life, which is, you know, by extension, political life and militarised.

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So I would say by the time I was a teenager, I was interested in rebellion.

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And, you know, and part of it started even before my teens. I think it was like 11.

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When I read, my father started to read his books. So E. Franklin Frazier is the black bourgeoisie.

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Which I believe you wrote when he was working for UNICEF in the 1950s.

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So African-American intellectual who understands the contradictions around power.

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And hegemonic political theory coming from the right schools, you I believe he was at University of Chicago.

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Perhaps he studied there.

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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.

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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.

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We just don't have their money, right? But we have the same aspirations in the contradictions.

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Like, if you come from a people who were enslaved for centuries and then after that had become the prison system where you

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died at faster rates than you had on the plantations because we were jointly owned by corporations in the state,

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in the rebuilding of the south and the southern economy, that was going to be integrated with these huge corporations,

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you know, emerging from the north around coal and steel.

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Then you faced Jim Crow legislation, prohibition to voting, voting at the costs of your life at times sharecropping.

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You know, you just go on up the stages to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

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Then the contradictions of being in the black middle class are all about politics, compliance or occasionally rebellion.

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So at 11:00, I'm reading this book, which shapes eventually my feminism in the future,

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my suspicion of the black bourgeoisie or the black middle class of academic elites like, who do we work for?

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Having grown up and had my braces paid for by somebody who worked for the state and its imperial, you know, aggressions and accumulations,

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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.

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So, you know, I start with the family because it's the side of contradictions, right?

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Not just around gender, adult ism, you know, infantilizing children and teens.

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But it's a sign of contradiction. If you work for the state, either private corporation, a corporate state,

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or if you work literally for the government or specifically for the military.

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And I've always been a reader,

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so trying to understand the world through books and admittedly not usually the books that people my age would have been reading.

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So it varies like from, you know what?

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Sorry, the black bourgeoisie to Shakespeare, to the hardy boys and Nancy Drew, I mean, it's like all over the place, right?

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But in a way, you're reading about power that you do not have because you're not allowed to possess it.

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So as a dark skinned black girl in the south, you're being groomed to be an intellectual outsider.

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And then the charges, do you want in? Or do you want to break out?

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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,

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the principals, then the university professors, the dissertation director,

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etc., etc. And so how much do you want in to the extent that you're thinking?

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Is is just conformity, and then how much do you want in to the extent that your thinking becomes a rebellion against conformity?

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So those are kind of the I'm sure there are other options,

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but those seem to be the ones that I basically was struggling with in my early years, along with the general sexism, racism, patriarchy.

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Colourism, anti-Black aggression. You know, there's.

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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,

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well, do I how how much do I need to conform to remain here?

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And where can I go with this? Are there any like how did you deal with those obstacles?

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I don't, you know, I, you know, looking back over decades, I'm not.

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I can tell you, I'm not quite sure. I mean, there's the question. You know, you introduced me, Ebenezer, which?

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I'm who I'm sure was not an anti-racist feminist, whatever century Williams was founded.

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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,

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like all this stamps that say, Oh, you're real intellectual and you're real professor and you teach at a real school.

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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?

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So. I would argue that my whole intellectual development.

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Was. In some ways, I'm not going to I don't want to see literally a battlefield.

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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.

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And I would say, even at this point where I'm looking at retirement, it's getting closer and closer.

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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.

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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.

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You know, there's smart people in all economic classes and stations.

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It's just the ones that are allowed to have the leisure time to write and then have access

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to the most prestigious presses in order to publish and disseminate their thought,

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which usually seems to align itself with prevailing norms.

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Right? That those are the ones who almost become. This is goes back to E. Franklin Frazier and also W.E.B. Dubois.

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Before that, the notion of the talented tenth like, you know, the Dubois word of it as that.

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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.

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But that whole notion came from. The American Home Baptist Missionary Society, which were white philanthropists, wealthy people.

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During the era of the Civil War, and so after the war was fought, 200000.

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Formerly enslaved people, black Americans, African-Americans fought in that war, which helped the North to win to the extent that it did,

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I mean, we we have the resurgence of white supremacy as a norm in the United States.

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But after the war was won, just to use that cliched phrase, what do you do with the, you know,

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emancipated people and for the missionary society that was coming largely from the North included Henry Morehouse,

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and he's the namesake of Morehouse College, where Martin Luther King Junior graduated, right?

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And also, I believe Laura Spelman, who is the namesake for Spelman College, right, said the elite premier HBCU.

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Historically black colleges and universities the the tier one would be Morehouse and Spelman.

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But as white philanthropies, what they wanted was an educated Corddry that would steer a black mass that's impoverished,

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that's terrorised by the Klan that gains rights that are then stripped away through racist terrorism and these new Jim Crow laws.

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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.

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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

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can't have a rebellion for your rights and I'm sure people saw the protest around George George Floyd's murder by police.

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You know, the street protest is a form of rebellion for justice. Like if the point of having educated elites is to.

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Schooled them in a certain kind of civility and decorum that is compatible with existing democracy.

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I don't quite see how you get the other 90 percent free like under that construct, right?

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So in a way, it's almost like if you don't criminalise political rebellion and I'm not talking about burning down buildings,

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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.

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So in this recent election, this, you know.

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This promotion of the Democratic Party.

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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.

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Yeah, it's not funny. I just have this nervous laugh when things are going off the rail.

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But, you know, of course, Joe Biden is preferable to Donald Trump if you actually believe in democracy even as a concept, right?

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But in if you look at the specific policies that the Democrats have enacted, right, they have not.

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In large part, been beneficial and definitely not laboratory.

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You know, to impoverished, a working class African-American Native American, just go down the list, put every ethnic group.

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Communities, because the Democratic Party shares the same kind of obedience mandate to corporate power that the Democrats,

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I'm sorry that the Republican Party does. So that goes back to the issue of political theory.

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I mean, do you want to theorise democracy or do you want to just accept that it's the holy grail?

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For the liberation of LGBTQ, of children of, you know,

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treating the natural environment as if it had real value other than based on extraction of coal, oil and gas and oil.

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Or do you want to use political theory to unseat the norms, or do you think against the norms?

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So I don't think it's enough to be a feminist theorist or a critical race theorist or a socialist theorist.

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Lisa Democratic socialist theorists. Which is more the norm in the United States than actual socialists.

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I don't think it's enough unless you're willing to. Understand the value of resistance and rebellion.

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Right. I actually I'm starting to think. In an environment in which uniformity.

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In thinking conformity and thinking is.

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Rarely challenged without being punished, and I'm not talking about the far right.

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In a way, they seem like they're such an aberration,

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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,

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their aggressions or non-Aboriginal, they're their norm is just like white people were largely the victim of their malfeasance and their lies.

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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,

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not the majority votes for the Electoral College, which actually in some part, is tied to rape the three-fifths clause, right?

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Three fifths of an enslaved person constitutes one unit of representation.

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So I've said often then Sally Hemings, who at 14 encountered Thomas Jefferson in France.

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Where she was supposed to go to kind of be a chaperone for her nieces.

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Who are white and because their mother was enslaved woman of African descent and Sally Hemings was not.

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But every time she had a baby by Thomas Jefferson. Every time someone got pregnant on a plantation, they were.

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Expanding the Electoral College base for southern white men who could be president, and if this kind of mass exploitation,

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mass rape is baked into your democracy like its origins, right, then they're going to be repercussions throughout generations.

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And so the way I look at it is that democracy cannot be a holy grail, at least not US democracy.

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The way you think critically has to have an aspect of dissent and rebellion in order

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to discover what is ethical and what is possible outside the official rulebook.

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Does that make sense? Mm. Yeah.

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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?

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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.

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For example, when you talk about academic abolitionism, how it's very there's almost this hegemony there.

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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?

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Is that something that you've always, always achieved or I don't know if I've achieved anything, right?

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I only know that I've tried. And when I hear other people, I know that.

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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?

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It's not as if again, like if we understand that the intent of our labour is to question,

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you know, like the cliche phrase in the 60s or 70s, I believe, was question authority, right?

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But if we understand that the reason? We're working is to actually point.

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To the contradictions in order to clarify the possibilities.

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That's not welcomed, right?

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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.

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We're just like going to question everything and we're going to challenge what we think is not ethical.

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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.

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And so it was.

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I've met so many people on all like undergrads, graduate students, people finishing their dissertation, mostly women, but also some men who.

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Just wanted to articulate what they saw.

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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?

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And who? Simply stay mute.

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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,

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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.

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But, you know, if I really irritate them, there's a possibility I'll be banned from these prestigious journals or,

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oh my god, I said something at a conference.

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And then, as you know, this senior professor calls me up and lectures me for three hours as a woman who is not tenured.

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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,

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hang up the phone, but they don't because they're disciplined for their discipline to be disciplined, right?

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It's just like, I'm like, Oh man, don't call me like, click rate. But that's not what.

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The majority do, and I'm not faulting them for that.

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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.

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But in their defence, they did leave the military to try to find a job.

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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.

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Right? So I see all of this as the zone of compromise.

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The question becomes, how compromised do you want to be in order to attain economic,

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security and some level of seeing yourself as a white collar worker?

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Maybe the next time there's a pandemic, you can stay home instead of being what I call expendable essential workers.

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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?

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But there's a lot of abuse and it's gendered and it's shaped by race and ethnicity.

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But what often is not talked about, it's also shaped by idle, logical, you know, mandates that.

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If you conform to a sort of corporate state norm, then your ethnicity and gender can be used to discipline those who refuse.

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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,

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like I was talking about Condoleezza Rice, and if I understand correctly, I'll just say allegedly in case I don't.

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But Rice's recruitment to Stanford was in part to, you know,

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discipline or curtail women's studies and ethnic and black studies, and a white man would have gotten a lot of flack for that.

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But a black woman doing it could probably get away with that.

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And then later, you know,

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if you're promoting which should have been an illegal invasion in Iraq under false pretences of charges of weapons of mass destruction.

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I mean, I don't know who that stuck to as much of it should,

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from Dick Cheney to George Bush to Condoleezza Rice to Colin Powell, but somehow being a black woman.

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That sort of becomes a shield to certain kinds of critiques around predatory ideologies and practises.

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Right. So the academy is the intellectual wing of the state.

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And if you have a state that is progressive and doesn't believe in empires and has a critique of monopoly capitalism,

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then I don't think that's a bad thing to be the intellectual wing of that kind of state.

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My position is the United States is not that kind of state. Hmm.

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Nevertheless, in sort of well, so far in academia have have there been any more?

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Well, positive surprises are just expectations that about where you thought you couldn't theorise something with.

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Well, what you? Have there been any positive surprises,

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developments and how far your your studies and your theorising can go that you didn't expect when you started out?

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Well. I have to pause because obviously there probably were not a lot of surprises.

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OK. Let me use not me, but another. Some colleagues are doubt, so afro pessimism, right?

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So I think I've said this a number of times. Anyway, when I was, I went to Brown University.

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As a full professor, I use my private research to bring former political prisoners political rebels to campus.

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That caused quite a stir. But also on the panels, I had to say about the tea, you know, speak from the panel.

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I had invited to graduate students who became the architects of Afro pessimism Gerard Sexton and Frank Balderson.

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I was surprised. Years later, what they and the black feminists and they're not all black,

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I've met white afro pessimist, Asian Afro batsmen's still kind of wrapping my head around the concept.

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But what they were able to do in the academy in terms of codifying a school of thought.

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That rejected the norms. Right? And to the extent that Wilkerson has a book out, which is sort of a popularised memoir.

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About Afro pessimism, about his formation development and has recently been named the chancellor chair.

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Then there, I thought that, well, that's unusual, you know, and actually people have said the same thing to me from.

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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?

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It's sort of like the like the presentation of our politics supposedly make us a pariah.

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And I'm going to say now I have the same politics as Afro pessimism,

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but I have the same appreciation for rebellion against what I see to be predatory cultures, right?

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And deception, right? You know, sort of people telling you that they're not harming you while they are actually harming you.

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You know, and getting you to believe that, oh, no, they're just trying to help me by making me a better person,

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by teaching me how to conform to these rules and regulations that actually do not serve communities, you know, mass communities, not in communities.

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So the surprise is that we are still employed, but we're not the only ones surprised by that.

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So I keep hearing and. Well, we're still employed.

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Because we care about our students because we teach not to be popular, but teach to be relevant.

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In a country full of crises in that because of its military and its budget can create crises in other countries, right?

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Like AFRICOM? And I've already mentioned, you know, destabilising.

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Parts of the Middle East through the invasion following nine 11.

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So the beautiful thing, I can't speak for other people, but the beautiful thing that I see in the academy.

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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.

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Not with grasping materials so that he can quote,

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master it and then become the expert and then move up the ranks and get their gig or additional degrees,

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but they're struggling because they really want to comprehend. The way that.

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Nothing fits the way they were told it would fit, right?

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Like, it's always when I think about. The university or the academy as a replacement for the parental authority.

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Right? That like while you're there, they're supposed to be raising you and polishing you off.

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So it's the last of the finishing schools that have been going on way too long.

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But. When you realise that a lot of what you were told was gruelling.

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And it wasn't necessarily. An accurate description of how much violence and corruption there is.

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And how hard we would have to work. To care about the world in which we weren't always the centre of.

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Right. That we would have like this is a thing when you have leisure time and wealth

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and privilege to read most of the day and then write the rest of the day.

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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.

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I mean, you live this way because you had access to resources and you plugged into structures now and the whether

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or not the structures actually divested from South African apartheid or Palestinian occupations or.

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The question is where do you make your money for your university? I mean, what's their portfolio look like?

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It's like forest devastation in the Amazon, like, those kinds of questions were not really encouraged to think about.

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Right? And the beauty to keep going back is when people realising.

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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.

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But we do have an intellectual capacity that can express not just compassion,

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but a certain kind of concern tied to a steely determination to do something.

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And I think once you see people wake up are they're already awake,

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but become more awake to the fact that they have the capacity to be political actors.

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But in order to do so, they have to have political philosophy and political theory.

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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,

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Oh my gosh, this is so f ing scary. But like, how do we talk about it?

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Do we even have a vocabulary that can describe what's going on?

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And then how do we address that? So the last thing maybe I'll say about the Afro pessimist?

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I mean. They created a vocabulary. Right?

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And they keep saying, we won't tell you what to do about it.

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But I think just the fact that.

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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.

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How much you want to engage in that or other forms that of thinking right, that trouble the water, you know, has sort of.

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Black spiritual culture uses that refrain like trouble the water,

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right things have to be turbulent sometimes in order for you to be able to move forward.

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That that sometimes is the best that it gets.

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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.

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Like basically I've had, you know, I can get a book contract. The other two not really like that becomes a highlight.

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And I'm like, Good, that's great. But when I see people become very conscious of contradictions.

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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.

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Don't really care. It's none of my business, but I have a sense that they know they need to do something.

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They need to learn more, and then with that learning, be able to contribute more.

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Again,

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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.

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Do you have any advice to? Well, I guess, undergraduate students or any student of political theory really in dealing with those compromises?

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And yeah, that's it. You know, I'll be honest.

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Yeah, don't don't take advice from me, OK? I mean, I literally was so offended when I was getting.

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My dissertation and I wrote on Hannah Arendt, right? A feminist critique of her analysis of communication.

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Right. Democracies, communicative. I was so offended when I was trying to talk at the time about the apartheid in South Africa,

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where the questions that came to me and in the way I was challenged, not just by my.

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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.

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And so I would say, of course, I passed not just because I had the degree, but I knew I would.

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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.

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So never had a black studies course in my life, white and never had black faculty teach me until I did a post.

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I did a postdoc. I went to seminary to work with Cornel West and James Caan.

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There was my first black professors and I've been decades of schooling,

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but I was so offended by these challenges that I considered to be so unethical.

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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.

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So that's why you don't take advice from me, because if you.

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You're so indignant that you just like forget this. I mean, you know, this is.

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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?

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I mean, I eventually I did get one, but I ended up working for your NGO.

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And you know, the U.N. for a while, the U.N. Women's Centre in Manhattan calls to the United Nations.

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I taught in seminaries part time, and then I went to seminary after a trip to Nairobi, you know,

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and reflection on international politics and attempts to have nuclear détente and, you know, women's rights, advocacy, children's rights, advocacy.

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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.

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But you know, I I'm not the only one who did something like that.

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There are a number of people who just quit the academy who were disgusted.

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That's the verb I was. That's the what I was looking for. It's like, discuss, you know, the noun.

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Just like, What are you feeling? What's the emotional register? It's disgust.

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I mean, it's yeah, I read everything honorary ever wrote.

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Now, it wasn't always fun, you know? And then to read other people's you was really but.

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There's an integrity to the intellect,

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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,

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you know, standard. It's the integrity that.

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You're thinking this is my position, you're thinking has to have relevance to the well-being of community and the community,

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can't be your small group of Nazi friends.

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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.

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And if all those years that you toiled as a graduate student?

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You know, basically, you know, a second class citizen in the academy, right?

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If there's years of sacrifice, which it sounds like that seems like a contradiction because it's all you,

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you'd be in the library, you have the leisure time do white collar labour stuff.

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But yeah, but it's also.

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Without being literally the military, it's a highly disciplined sector which demands conformity and deference to people in higher ranks.

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So like, what's the difference between a sergeant and a lieutenant and a captain and lieutenant colonel?

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Like clearly these are ranking, you know,

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metrics that are not always shaped by the integrity or the value or the intellect of the people who made it to sergeant,

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lieutenant, captain, lieutenant colonel. It's just like you have to follow the rules because quote, they're in charge.

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So, you know, all those years of deference to faculty who probably were sexist and racist and classes,

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and I could add some more iced teas in their descriptors.

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That was the objective and not just getting the degree, but being a good potential colleague for the future or a good graduate student,

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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?

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And so it's like, you know, hide six feet all these years doing all this,

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showing up to class when I'm bored and listening to all this racist drivel here and

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like having to read these conservative political theories who clearly were white,

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chauvinist, if not white supremacist. And then the dissertation, where I'm just like an inside sideline just trying to say apartheid is bad.

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It just becomes problematic. And I was like, I don't want your letter.

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But other people said, I don't even want this job. And so I think that we've.

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I think the academy has probably lost some brilliant thinkers and passionate.

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You know, people who care about the world just because they couldn't stomach the environment.

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Yeah. The thought. Makes one is awful, but but makes sense in that.

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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.

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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.

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Is that possible or is that something that you I mean, I've done it. I've always done it in different ways.

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I've been doing this job for decades or this is your retirement.

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But like when I was teaching women's studies at UMass Amherst and then,

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you know, the women's studies classroom and the students were complaining like,

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why are we reading all this literature by women of colour as if they were not women?

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And who is like, Look, I mean, I've got limits to right, so.

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I'm going to give you the option because you're speaking as if this is predominantly obviously white students,

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you know, dominated the campus and women's studies at the time,

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I believe I was the first black hire and women's studies at UMass Amherst,

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if not the first woman of colour to be hired in the history of their department.

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And so I was teaching a lot of memoirs, right?

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Many Native American women, Latinos, Asian women, African-American women,

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particularly political ones such as Angela Davis autobiography and Assata Shakur as autobiography.

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And so and I was also teaching white women as well. So it's like a month we're doing multicultural, multiracial.

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That's just like basic liberalism, you know, get over it.

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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.

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But if the point here is to learn and you're saying that there's an impediment to

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your learning and somehow you feel that I as a black progressive that I will,

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you know, negatively judge you by the racist things you say in the classroom and to the few students of colour who were here,

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then I'll just like, Here's your it's like Donald Trump, right in the pardon.

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It's like you're free pass, right? You can show.

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You cannot show. I mean, you obviously, you can't use racial slurs here, but you all get an A.

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And then let's see if you're committed because you say you're so committed, but I'm impeding your learning process.

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Well, after they all got their 80s, I can tell you everybody else.

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I mean, the all the class did not return, but the people who stayed were amazing because they weren't there for the great.

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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.

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And I don't have any carrots because I just gave them all out, right? So you each got an organic carrot called A.

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And now you can come and actually be an intellectual.

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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?

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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.

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Because. If she actually said what she believed in terms of how white supremacy and misogyny operated, she would no longer have a family.

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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.

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And ethical beings, I do not know how to comfort them in terms of their loss.

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Because I don't believe you can evolve into a more ethical political being without having losses.

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Without being ostracised, without being marginalised in some ways.

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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.

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That was. That was kind of amazing, too, because I was also learning from them at Brown.

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Well, first at the University of Colorado Boulder, I read about doing a prototype for critical resistance at the request of Angela Davis.

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So organising with the undergrad students there, the black students to really found the campus,

376
00:48:50,590 --> 00:48:55,930
which was mostly elite and quite problematic because of its racism.

377
00:48:55,930 --> 00:48:59,710
But we were determined that this conference was going to go off well.

378
00:48:59,710 --> 00:49:09,280
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.

379
00:49:09,280 --> 00:49:19,150
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.

380
00:49:19,150 --> 00:49:24,820
They'd been donating their their labour, but they're like, We're going to miss class or something.

381
00:49:24,820 --> 00:49:31,510
And they were actually skipping classes to organise so. And I was and I was like, What's the problem?

382
00:49:31,510 --> 00:49:35,680
Thinking that white, affluent people don't have problems, right?

383
00:49:35,680 --> 00:49:39,520
Use of its rhetorical? What's the problem like many white shirt to class?

384
00:49:39,520 --> 00:49:46,040
And they explained that the FBI wanted to interview them.

385
00:49:46,040 --> 00:49:49,310
It's not that they want to the FBI wants to talk to you, talk to the FBI,

386
00:49:49,310 --> 00:49:55,920
so they had to go into the Denver office, to the Denver office because they had.

387
00:49:55,920 --> 00:50:05,670
Known people who were doing environmental liberation activism, so left the Environmental Liberation Front,

388
00:50:05,670 --> 00:50:10,410
I believe the United States classified most progressive left,

389
00:50:10,410 --> 00:50:16,140
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?

390
00:50:16,140 --> 00:50:27,780
But they had been, yes, assaulting property, late trophy homes, being built in pristine environments, the devastation of lands and water.

391
00:50:27,780 --> 00:50:32,440
And I was like, Oh yeah, so weight of fluid.

392
00:50:32,440 --> 00:50:40,900
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.

393
00:50:40,900 --> 00:50:52,350
They also take risk as well. And so these were all educational moments for me, and then Brown was probably the capping.

394
00:50:52,350 --> 00:51:01,240
Well, the capstone, so coming out of that conference, as I've said before, I.

395
00:51:01,240 --> 00:51:11,470
Do an anthology states of confinement had, you know, works by a number of those people who attended largely academics Inception and Davis,

396
00:51:11,470 --> 00:51:19,780
who was both academic and a former political prisoner? And I got 50 copies to mail inside to incarcerated people.

397
00:51:19,780 --> 00:51:26,290
So inside the prisons and got a letter back from the Black Panther Black Liberation

398
00:51:26,290 --> 00:51:33,520
Army detainee who actually got out last October after serving 49 years in prison,

399
00:51:33,520 --> 00:51:42,370
saying that the academic work that I thought I was the very useful and helpful in producing was not that relevant.

400
00:51:42,370 --> 00:51:54,070
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.

401
00:51:54,070 --> 00:52:00,040
Those people were disappeared into prisons and who were being tortured and who presumably were going to die there.

402
00:52:00,040 --> 00:52:07,390
I don't agree with all their choices, but I understood they saw themselves as more and based on my COINTELPRO was doing,

403
00:52:07,390 --> 00:52:15,640
which was, you know, illegally killing activists and nobody was, you know, going to jail around any of this.

404
00:52:15,640 --> 00:52:22,000
They made certain choices. And so it was a brown. I think that I took the greatest risk.

405
00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:29,190
That's when. I decided to invite people who been in the weather underground,

406
00:52:29,190 --> 00:52:34,920
people who had been the Black Panther Party, people who had been in the Republic of New Africa,

407
00:52:34,920 --> 00:52:41,790
people aligned with American Indian movement, people who'd been in the Puerto Rican independence system movement, you know, stone and so forth.

408
00:52:41,790 --> 00:52:47,250
And as I said when we started, use my personal research funds to do this,

409
00:52:47,250 --> 00:52:54,180
and the Afro pessimist graduate students came from California, and that's my students helped organise that invite.

410
00:52:54,180 --> 00:53:00,450
And the two to three anthologies that came out of the years that I stayed at Brown and I left because,

411
00:53:00,450 --> 00:53:11,510
you know, the political climate was not hospitable. That was driven in part by student intellect and student agency.

412
00:53:11,510 --> 00:53:23,330
So if you look at imprisoned intellectuals, they did the biographies on George Jackson, on other people pacifist and non pacifist.

413
00:53:23,330 --> 00:53:31,940
And I think that would be the height of teaching in which students taught me.

414
00:53:31,940 --> 00:53:38,110
And taking the risks, like even talking to some students who.

415
00:53:38,110 --> 00:53:42,630
We're interested in the world, and I would say, well, have you thought about?

416
00:53:42,630 --> 00:53:45,040
Visiting Cuba as well, it was legal.

417
00:53:45,040 --> 00:53:53,040
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.

418
00:53:53,040 --> 00:54:01,170
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,

419
00:54:01,170 --> 00:54:08,070
that my my era and even suggesting that that's why I'm saying I don't give advice, right?

420
00:54:08,070 --> 00:54:15,080
So. I think that the students that we have.

421
00:54:15,080 --> 00:54:22,970
Are aware of the contradictions in the betrayals from the climate devastation.

422
00:54:22,970 --> 00:54:33,440
To these ongoing wars, to the differential death rates around COVID, to new forms of authoritarianism,

423
00:54:33,440 --> 00:54:39,440
I think, you know, they're quite bright, they actually know what's going on.

424
00:54:39,440 --> 00:54:43,130
I think the question becomes whether or not they feel somebody needs to give

425
00:54:43,130 --> 00:54:49,160
them permission or give them advice to act on the knowledge they already have.

426
00:54:49,160 --> 00:54:59,920
I don't give advice because I only know smart people, including people who never went to college, right?

427
00:54:59,920 --> 00:55:08,860
And the best they can do is listen and maybe echo back to them some of the things that they've expressed,

428
00:55:08,860 --> 00:55:17,870
which are of concern to them, where some of the things that they're willing to challenge, I I don't.

429
00:55:17,870 --> 00:55:26,630
Think other than like a career officer or official is supposed to help you climb the rungs of the ladder.

430
00:55:26,630 --> 00:55:33,640
I don't think advice is useful. I think solidarity is.

431
00:55:33,640 --> 00:55:38,390
That's I think that's a good that's a good place to finish this.

432
00:55:38,390 --> 00:55:41,440
Well, I don't want to keep you for any longer,

433
00:55:41,440 --> 00:55:50,200
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.

434
00:55:50,200 --> 00:56:02,260
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.

435
00:56:02,260 --> 00:56:07,610
In an interesting way. That's my word is interesting. I am hopeful.

436
00:56:07,610 --> 00:56:21,580
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.

437
00:56:21,580 --> 00:56:28,570
Yeah, that's not on the hopeless. But the certainty list is that we.

438
00:56:28,570 --> 00:56:38,590
In different sectors, like the affluent students, you're working on environmental issues because they understand the existential threat of that.

439
00:56:38,590 --> 00:56:48,610
The other students who were working on police killings of civilians because they understand the existential threat of that right,

440
00:56:48,610 --> 00:56:59,050
the sex trafficking of women and children like we're all labouring include on both the intellectual and the

441
00:56:59,050 --> 00:57:11,140
physical level to sort of stabilise the world that we have to live on and to allow it to be a more beautiful one.

442
00:57:11,140 --> 00:57:24,120
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.

443
00:57:24,120 --> 00:57:28,200
Because I do have a roof over my head, I can like buy my groceries.

444
00:57:28,200 --> 00:57:34,530
I stable economic cushion. Or foundation?

445
00:57:34,530 --> 00:57:42,250
It has allowed me to use my time for social justice.

446
00:57:42,250 --> 00:57:52,930
And that actually is the most beautiful thing about the academy, that whatever skills you acquire, you can redirect some.

447
00:57:52,930 --> 00:58:00,640
Right. To help people in ways that do not reproduce the cage.

448
00:58:00,640 --> 00:58:11,410
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.

449
00:58:11,410 --> 00:58:25,250
Right? It's that it's allowed me to practise my beliefs without being consumed right by a machine.

450
00:58:25,250 --> 00:58:33,980
And I've met beautiful people, and so the black internationalists unions, which is mostly black women, academics, we're on the abolition collective.

451
00:58:33,980 --> 00:58:43,850
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.

452
00:58:43,850 --> 00:58:51,860
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.

453
00:58:51,860 --> 00:58:56,190
And those sisters are fierce and they're mad.

454
00:58:56,190 --> 00:59:01,990
Most of them are much younger than I. I'm.

455
00:59:01,990 --> 00:59:11,770
I can't help smiling because, you know, it's a good time to receive because all the young people and the young women,

456
00:59:11,770 --> 00:59:23,770
the young black women who are stepping up. Are very principled, and they don't compromise just because they've been intimidated.

457
00:59:23,770 --> 00:59:29,320
They compromise because it's a necessity as a political strategy in the moment.

458
00:59:29,320 --> 00:59:38,040
Before you have another strategy that will garner greater benefits for the greater good.

459
00:59:38,040 --> 00:59:46,140
Yeah, that's OK. And even an even better point, and I think.

460
00:59:46,140 --> 00:59:51,870
And yeah, thank you for those last last words.

461
00:59:51,870 --> 00:59:56,340
I yeah, like I said, I have a lot to think about, I think.

462
00:59:56,340 --> 01:00:04,350
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.

463
01:00:04,350 --> 01:00:13,830
Yeah, I hope in the current mess that everything is that the things things go OK.

464
01:00:13,830 --> 01:00:17,610
Thanks. And I wish you well. Take care, Charlotte. Thank you.

465
01:00:17,610 --> 01:00:32,610
Bye. I'll be in touch.

466
01:00:32,610 --> 01:00:41,970
Thank you for making room and the possibility of strengthening or contesting our interpretive frameworks and your consideration.

467
01:00:41,970 --> 01:00:55,240
Many thanks to the entire BPP HRC charge, allows teams to enquire with you and we find you next, possibly next Wednesday.

468
01:00:55,240 --> 01:01:07,494
See you then.