I’m not doing the students good if they’ve seen a film 10 million times already. I’m trying to introduce them to things. I’ll say, “You know there was some good s— made before you were born. And it might be black-and-white.” And “On the Waterfront” is one of my all-time great films. I got to be good friends with Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay.

By definition we teach Political Theory with this in mind. What would it mean to teach Racial Politics with this in mind? Black Politics? Urban Politics?

It seems to me that there is a massive decline today in compassion and in moral courage. And I think that, in some ways, both are connected. On social media, there’s an expectation that you will not get compassion: You tweet something, and then people are coming at you, even your friends. I think it makes people hold back. And then, of course, the moral-courage part of it is that there are people who could speak up, and they don’t. I think what’s happening now—the books that are not being published; you open the newspapers and often there’s someone who’s been dropped from something—it’s often not because those in positions of authority really believe that what has been said was bad.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in The Atlantic

I understand the turn to tweets as a certain type of proof. But this strikes me as yet another example of missing the forest for the trees.

Polarization in Congress goes back decades

I didn’t know Pava LaPere, but as a 2019 Hopkins alum, odds are I taught some of her friends. I know after graduation we travelled in the same circles. Sherrod Davis’ tribute to LaPere, who was tragically murdered last week, was poignant. We also lost “Chef Bill” last week. I wish some of the words spoken on his (and his partner Kevin Brown’s) behalf were printed.

Watching them win against Green Bay last night has me thinking. When I wrote on Ella Baker in Contemporary Political Theory I expressly juxtaposed her mode of leadership against the charismatic mode expressed by figures like Martin Luther King jr. I now think my argument was a bit too strong. I should’ve made a descriptive claim rather than a normative one. Why? Because I think the leadership expressed by figures like King do have more than an extractive role. Thinking about it in APD terms, charisma can reorient our interests, can heighten the role identity plays in our politics, and can either stabilize or destabilize institutions.

There are all types of problems in making the leap from politics to sports, but if we think about the Lions as an institution it becomes a bit less problematic to do so. I think the success of the Detroit Lions can be traced in part to the charismatic leadership of its head coach Dan Campbell. It isn’t solely due to Campbell–Sheila Ford (Lions owner) and Brad Holmes play a role as well. He’s been able to get buy-in from the players and then from the organization and that’s enabled the team to overcome the culture of losing they’ve experienced for the better part of three decades. Although it’s possible the Lions crash and burn–we’re only a quarter into the season–I think it’s highly unlikely.

 I didn’t get a chance to talk too much about this in the hour or so we had before we opened the (packed) event up to q&a, but there’s an element to this that reads like part of a religious conversion project. One realizes that one is racist the same way one realizes one is a sinner. One struggles against racist ideas the way one struggles against sin. 

Anti-racism to him was a religion…and he was its saint. Very few “saints” are good money managers. And while the best saints believe themselves accountable to a higher power, few work to ensure the type of accountability we’d recognize as being necessary to run an organization. Martin Luther King jr. for example ended up hiring Ella Baker when he realized it’d be difficult if not impossible to manage all of the money flowing into the Montgomery Bus Boycott without help.

In the wake of the rise of black student protests over the past few years, more than a few of us have been thinking about what could be called Black Studies 3.0.

So Black Studies 1.0 extends from the first Black Studies projects of the late sixties/early seventies until about 1991 or so. These projects took on a variety of different institutional forms (centers, institutes, programs) and included faculty trained in traditional departments (political science, sociology, etc.) alongside faculty who had no formal training. (To note but one example of this latter tendency Harold Cruse—author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Rebellion or Revolution, and Plural But Equal—was one of the most important figures of the University of Michigan’s Center for Afro-American and African Studies but not only did Cruse not have a PhD, he didn’t even have a college degree (having dropped out of the City College of New York.) This first period was a period of experimentation and institutionalization, with the first Black Studies journal (the Journal of Black Studies) and organizational entity (National Council of Black Studies) being formed during this time.

Black Studies 2.0 extends from two specific developments. (Bear with me. It’s possible that I’m fudging the dates a little bit.) One development is the creation of the first PhD granting department at Temple University under the leadership of Molefi Asante. A second development is Harvard’s decision to hire Henry Louis Gates jr. as the Chair of their own Department of African American Studies. Within a very short period of time Gates had successfully hired three of the nation’s best black social scientists (Larry Bobo, Michael Dawson, and William Julius Wilson) and two of the nation’s best philosophers (Kwame Anthony Appiah and Cornel West). Both developments came at a moment of rising black student enrollment and rising interest in black cultural production (popular and intellectual). The two departments were often pitted against each other in the popular press for ideological reasons, as Temple’s department under Asante was decidedly nationalist\ while Gates’s project was integrationist.

With Black Studies 2.0 comes two changes.

For the first time we see the modern development of a class of what could be called “superstar” black studies faculty. People like Gates and West were as well known outside of the academy as they were within it…in fact by the late nineties West had not only appeared in the sequels to The Matrix but Gates had become more known for his multi-media curation than for his scholarship. And as Black Student Unions at schools across the country began to receive large budgets Molefi Asante, Maulana Karenga, bell hooks and other scholars began to give well-paid lectures. As a result of the increased demand for black intellectual production, these figures and others likely made at least as much money outside of their universities as they did within it. Further, for the first time some black faculty members had the type of mobility their more well known white peers had. Henry Louis Gates for example moved from Yale to Cornell to Duke University before settling down at Harvard. Similarly West moved from Union to Yale back to Union to Princeton to Harvard…before then going back to Princeton and finally to Union.

We also see a significant rise in scholarship on and about black life. And this scholarship spills over its seventies era borders. Journals like the Journal of Black Studies and the Journal of African American History still exist, but it’s now possible to publish black studies scholarship in prominent academic presses and journals heretofore closed to black faculty and black studies. Several centers become departments (the University of Michigan’s CAAS becomes DAAS by the late nineties/early oughts (editor’s note–2007)), and other departments join Temple in the ability to award doctorates. And during this period it also becomes possible for black students and faculty trained in traditional disciplines to publish work on black populations (as well as on racial dynamics in general).

So perhaps for the first time in American history it’s possible for graduate students and faculty interested in black life to follow their interests in black subjects as a matter of course. I could, for instance, tell Hanes Walton (my dissertation advisor at the University of Michigan) that I wanted to study gender and political participation in Detroit without having to worry about whether it would be considered legitimate within the discipline. Similarly though I never ever thought about the job market as such until I really needed a job, I was able to get interviews at two of the best political science departments in the country studying the participation of black men and women.

These changes are pretty important. They change the landscape of black studies itself, making it more akin to other more traditional disciplines. And they indirectly change the traditional disciplines themselves.

But here’s the rub.

As Black Studies increasingly mimics its traditional counterparts the university itself is undergoing a process of neoliberalisation. Universities public and private are increasingly forced to rely on their endowment, with wealthy donors becoming more and more influential in shaping university agendas. What types of students universities recruit, what types of intellectual projects universities decide to take on, what type faculty the university decides to hire, becomes increasingly connected to donor desires. University faculty are expected to be more and more productive, and are expected to consistently go on the market in order to raise their profile and their salaries. The tenure track itself becomes more and more of a pipe dream, as the number of tenure track jobs decrease while the number of low paying adjunct faculty jobs increase.

The end result is that a small number of black faculty are now given the opportunity to make as much money as lawyers and wall street bankers, but are under pressure to move from place to place to place (and to consistently produce produce produce) in order to do so.

We’re now seeing a wave of black student protest that we haven’t seen since the years right before Black Studies 2.0 took hold. What might Black Studies 3.0 look like? What should it look like?

I’m coming up against my word count so i can’t go long. But instead of definitively answering this question I’ll pose a series of questions I think people interested and invested in this should ask.

First. Do we want to mirror the arms race that sees a small number of faculty members gain the lion’s share of resources or do we want to share resources equitably?

Second. Do we want to enhance our ability as individual faculty members to pursue our research and job opportunities where-ever they may take us, or do we want to enhance the likelihood of generating deep and enduring institutional changes where we are?

Third. Do we want to increase the potential black students have of constructing a rich concept of blackness that has room for queer and straight students from Detroit, Kingston, Johannesburg, Tamale…or do we want to prepare black students for the job market?

Fourth. In black studies centers in or near major urban centers, do we have a responsibility to bring scholarship to bear on the issues facing those centers, or do we primarily have a responsibility to our own individual research agendas?

Fifth. Should questions of political economy be “backgrounded” or “foregrounded”?

These and other questions all boil down to a very simple proposition. Are we to be part of a black radical abolitionist project?

Richard Iton’s In Search of the Black Fantastic is one of the most important book written about popular culture and politics ever written. Iton (who also passed way far too early—I wish he could’ve been here to write this piece) quoted Davis above to drive home the deep connection between popular culture and politics in black life. And Davis’ quote works as kind of a truism in black spaces. Of course all black music is political.
Of course.

But this explains everything and nothing. That is to say if black art (and by extension popular culture) is and has always been political, if we can simply lump together John Coltrane’s Alabama and I don’t know….Ace Hood’s Hustle Hard as both being statements about the black condition—then we’re still left unable to either explain the nature of that condition or to prescribe the precise solution to that condition.

Prince is dead. Fuck.

Because it’s hard for me to imagine Prince in the past tense, much less take all 39 studio albums (this counts none of the albums he produced under pseudonyms much less the thousands of records in the Vault), over 100 singles, and more than a dozen EPs, in a single post, I’m not going to spend a great deal of time talking about Prince’s politics. Now that the embargo he imposed on his friends has been lifted, we know that Prince routinely spent resources on progressive causes including but not limited to Black Lives Matter. And it doesn’t take that much digging to find evidence of progressive stances on war (Dirty Mind’s “Partyup”, Controversy’s “Ronnie Talk to Russia” , 1999’s “1999”) corruption (Controversy’s “Annie Christian” contains a reference to Abscam) the environment (Planet Earth’s “Planet Earth”) liberation (Controversy’s “Sexuality”, 1999’s “Free”, Emancipation’s “Emancipation”) and sex (INSERT ANY TRACK HERE). Further we don’t have to look hard to find evidence that he stood for artist’s rights against corporate extortion and expropriation (he was a union member for almost forty years, he went so far as to change his name in an attempt to get out of his contract with Warner Bros).

So instead of doing that what I want to do is take a different approach.

One of the questions people have asked of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street before them can be boiled down to this: The odds are dead against you. Why do you try?

Answering this question the right way has obvious political import. In as much as the two movements have done more to not only bring our attention to anti-black police brutality on the one hand and rampant income inequality on the other, it’s worth figuring out why people did what they did, and why they continued in the face of long odds.

I think the people asking this question misunderstand the role of public action. It’s likely some of the people involved with both movements believed they could win, not all did. In fact I think it’s likely most of the people involved didn’t have “winning” in their calculus. That is to say, they didn’t fight because they thought they could win.

So why did they fight?

While they fought for as many reasons as there were people, I think many of them fought because they understood the power of public action. They knew if they fought in a way that was visible and public, they would do two things. First they would increase the likelihood that other people in the same time and space would join them. Second they would increase the likelihood that other people in different times and different spaces would join them. These two actions would increase the possibility of resistance in other spaces and other times, and would increase the nature of resistance in that time.

What does this have to do with Prince?

If we’d have conducted a survey in 1977 or so, just asking one simple question: where are you most likely to find the center of 1985 black culture….you’d probably get four or five answers, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and then maybe some would say either Atlanta or Detroit. If you’d have asked that same group of people to tell you the most important pop culture figure of black masculinity you’d have likely either gotten Isaac Hayes, Teddy Pendergrass, or Jim Brown. There’s no way in hell even a significant number of folk would’ve located the center of black pop culture life in Minneapolis. And definitely no way that we’d have thought that the person who’d do more to change and reify our understanding of what black masculinity was and could be would stand 5’6 in heels, would appear so effeminate it’d at first be hard to tell whether he was a boy or a girl.

Here’s another take on it. If you’d have asked Prince himself when and where he’d have garnered his most support…he’d probably have said either NYC (before hip-hop made it hard for his more fluid concept of black masculinity) or L.A. (who was seemingly more open to fluidity, sexuality, and racial integration). Perhaps one of the last places he’d have mentioned would’ve been Detroit. Trying to think through his perspective I imagine he’d have thought it too “black power black” and not cosmopolitan enough. He wouldn’t have known that a local DJ by the name of Charles Johnson (stage name: Electrifying Mojo—you think Prince was mysterious, Mojo was so mysterious most of the thousands of listeners never knew what he looked like) with an eclectic listening palette would be drawn to Prince’s music. And among those listeners would be the mother of a little boy who’d fall so in love with his music that when Purple Rain was finally released in theaters he walked 4.9 miles to see it with his best friend.

In 1941 Richard Wright published 12 million Black Voices. The book documented the lives of black people during the Depression using a combination of photography and text. There hasn’t been a lot written on it (in fact one of my grad students hipped me to it), but I think one of the things he was trying to do with it was drive home how heterogeneous black life was even in the presence of back breaking poverty. In the contemporary moment there are a number of things to take from Prince’s life. And one of them is the fact that black life is far richer, far more powerful, far more beautiful, than any of us can possibly imagine.

But for someone with my politics, with our politics? My takeaway is pretty simple.

Prince is dead.

Fuck.

And organize, and plot, and plan, and think, and strategize, and dissent.

Not so we can win.

But because sooner or later someone will come along who can.

And they’ll need us.