Conclusion “Rules” for Radicals

You may already be an activist. Then again, maybe you’re just somebody who wants to find ways to keep your eyes open. In any case, I wanted to write a book for you that would relate cur- rent progressive activism to the educational and political strug- gles that underlie our lives today, struggles that have encour- aged broad identifications and alliances, as well as critical undertakings that have reimagined the past and the present in the name of a radically democratic future. I wanted you to have a book that provides a history of what you are noticing and maybe even experiencing. Thus, We Demand has shown that beginning in the twentieth century, the university has been a primary location for the waging of a host of battles. Addressing the university as an entanglement of bureaucratic, ideological, and security interests, this book has also been interested in demonstrating how this profile is an expression of neoliberal social forces—and how the university has consequently worked to establish student activism as a basis of suspicion rather than a chance for social transformation. Hence, this book has dealt

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with the question of what it means to put all of our intellect, imagination, creativity, and yes, hope into transforming and building institutions in a context of not only stubborn but vio- lent opposition.

In this conclusion, I set down some soft rules for dealing with where we are at this point in history, rules that I hope you will adapt and revise for your particular circumstances. The subtitle is a rif on the title of Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Prac- tical Primer for Realistic Radicals. Alinsky said he wrote his book as a way “to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man [sic] can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.”1 How to create a world in which all people live meaningfully, cooperatively, justly, and fully is a vital question, especially now.

Rule 1: All good radical politics require a thoroughgoing understanding

of one’s historical and institutional context. The great scholar-activist Angela Davis has said, “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’”2 For me, philosophical and theoretical investigations have been the means of getting at the root of things and thus embody my sense of what it means to do radical work. While I developed my identity as a theorist in graduate school, I was first introduced to the idea that theory could illuminate the foundations of power and inequality while I was an undergradu- ate at the historically black Howard University. My professors in philosophy and sociological theory courses there asked their students to put classic works such as Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Com- munist Manifesto, David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human

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Understanding, and Plato’s Republic alongside modern texts like Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civi- lization, Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality?, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, bell hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, and Man- ning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Prob- lems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. My teachers put these works together to get us to see that theory—like archival work for some, like fiction writing for others—was a way to answer the question of how we got to this grim and head-scratching present.

A historically informed theoretical investigation can be one way to get to the bottom of what you have been dealing with concerning the university. With various court decisions that have legally dismantled afrmative action programs and with the dismal decline in the numbers of blacks, Natives, and Latinx in academic institutions, our current moment shows that Ameri- can colleges and universities continue to restrict whom they will identify as “the people,” the ones with whom they will enter into social and intellectual contracts.

For Kant, the construction of “the people” as semiautono- mous, intellectually inadequate, and easily misled applied even more to people of color. In 1764 he argued,

The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. [David] Hume challenges anyone to cite a single exam- ple in which a Negro has shown talents and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported else- where from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though

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among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the diference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.3

As a figure with no capacity for artistic or intellectual engage- ment, the Negro—and, by extension, other people of color— could not possibly benefit from university education and consti- tuted an even lower order than the university’s “people.”

Constructing blacks and Natives as the antitheses of rational- ity and as even lower than “the people” enabled colleges and universities to accumulate and exploit nonwhite labor and land. As Craig Wilder states,

College founders and ofcers used enslaved people to raise build- ings, maintain campuses, and enhance their institutional wealth. However, the relationship between colleges and slavery was not limited to the presence of slaves on campus. The American college trained the personnel and cultivated the ideas that accelerated and legitimated the dispossession of Native Americans and the enslave- ment of Africans.4

History shows us that the modern Western university was erected as an institution fundamentally antagonistic to every- day people in general and people of color in particular. In a way, then, you and I are the children of this institutional inheritance, the beneficiaries of a history that—as far as this place is con- cerned—has always presumed the inferiority of various constit- uencies of “the people,” constituencies based on dif erences of ability, class, race, gender, and sexuality. And so we find our- selves in institutions that—for the most part—have never cared to fully imagine us.

Taking note of the ways that the history of the academy bears down upon us also implies something about the past. We

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cannot—as strange as it may sound—presume that the past is relegated to yesterday. So, Rule 2: The past does not stay still. From the first to the middle hour of the day and on to eventide, it creeps. The con- tinued narrowing of the public and the university’s relationship to “the people,” as well as the ongoing expansion of security and other repressive apparatuses, means that we have to situate the erosion of education as a public good within the history of the people’s opposition to the university system and within the con- struction of people of color and poor people as others to the pub- lic good. As I argue in The Reorder of Things, “ With the simultane- ity of prison expansion and academic exclusion, a new level of dispensability for blacks and Latinos was being born that would create opportunities for penal institutions and omissions for aca- demic institutions.”5 In this time when the academic options for students of color are being narrowed, marking them as people to whom the modern American university has no responsibility, the past creeps and forms a racial project in which the academy is the domain of exclusion and prisons are the domain of inclusion as far as black and brown bodies are concerned.

But “the past” isn’t just the bad stuf that washes onto the shore: historical and cultural riches also come in with the tide. Those riches are crucial to challenging dominant forms of power and creating alternatives to them. Learning the intrica- cies of dominant power can be overwhelming, but it’s always necessary, and as the historian Robin D. G. Kelly argues, “His- torical models may provide valuable insights for those seeking novel solutions.”6 If we are to challenge power’s pernicious forms, we have to—as best we can—figure out all its angles; cultural traditions and practices are key components of that struggle. Such components can be found in those instances in which someone took the time to imagine a place for us. So,

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Rule 3: Politics is not the science of resignation. It is the science of our acti-

vation, by ourselves and by others.

The history of institutions like my alma mater Howard Uni- versity is part of the riches from which we can draw inspiration and creativity. Ofcials from the Bureau of Refugees, Freed- men, and Abandoned Lands founded it in 1867. At that time, as you can imagine, there was considerable, even overwhelming distrust of the idea that black people were capable of any intel- lectual adventure, and so there was real opposition to the estab- lishment of liberal arts colleges and universities for African Americans. Indeed, the politician and political theorist John Calhoun stated, “If a Negro could be found who could parse Greek or explain Euclid, I should be constrained to think that he had human possibilities.”7

The initial goals for the school were modest. First it was envisioned as a seminary to train “colored preachers with a view to service among the freedmen,” then as a “Normal and Theo- logical Institute for the Education of Teachers and Preachers.” Finally, the founders struck upon the idea of building a liberal arts university for the education of those who were born free and those who were recently acquainted with that status. How a full-fledged liberal arts university became the final goal we don’t know, but the point is that someone dared to imagine and run with it. The great Howard historian Rayford Logan argues in his history of the institution, “It is probable that these limited early goals stemmed in part from doubt about the wisdom of establishing a liberal arts college or university for the education of Negroes. The belief in the ‘inherent’ inferiority of Negroes was widespread in 1866.”8 Historically black colleges and univer- sities, like Howard, were early attempts to push against the lim- its of what a university could be and which people it might claim

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as part of its imaginative horizon. The other time when minori- tized subjects challenged the university in this way was of course the 1960s and ’70s, when student movements demanded that women and people of color be seen as constituencies within the academy, not just bodies but bodies and minds that could help reorganize knowledge in ways that people had never imag- ined. This grand revision of minoritized people as the bearers of ideas, dreams, and visions is part of the cultural richness that we bring into the present day.

Rule 4: Choose intellection. The project of human recovery requires deep and committed thinking. This is an endeavor that allows no shortcut or slipshod work and has no room for anti- intellectualism. As the cultural critic Henry Giroux writes in America at War with Itself, “Ignorance is not simply about the absence of knowledge, it is a kind of ideological sandstorm in which reason gives way to emotion, and a willful limitation of critical thought spreads through the culture as part of a political project that both infantilizes and depoliticizes the general pub- lic.”9 With this comment and the history of the American uni- versity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in mind— and certainly after the 2016 presidential election—we might say that anti-intellectualism, not an accident but the intention of certain social projects, is the mature and defensive expression of dominant institutions, one that retaliates against past and present political and intellectual uprisings.

In the antebellum South, white property owners did not believe that laborers needed education; they were even less will- ing to pay for it with their taxes, insisting that education would make the exploitation of laborers “more dif cult; and that if any of them were really worth educating, they would somehow escape their condition by their own eforts.” The great African

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American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his monumental Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 that white laborers dur- ing the period of slavery rejected the idea of free public educa- tion as well, “accept[ing] without murmur their subordination to the slaveholders, and look[ing] for escape from their condition only to the possibility of becoming slaveholders themselves.”10

Here Du Bois shows that the rejection of free and public educa- tion was a central component of white racial identity across class divisions in the nineteenth century.

By contrast, he argued that it was slaves who best understood the power of critical thinking and who demanded it in the form of a system of public education. In fact, enslaved and free blacks demanded free public education for all people in the United States, and as Du Bois explained, “It was this demand that was the efective force for the establishment of the public school in the South on a permanent basis, for all peoples and all classes.”11

As he shows, the Freedmen’s Bureau, missionary societies, and black reconstruction governments helped to establish the mod- ern public school system, built on the idea that education should be available to all persons regardless of racial or class status. As the abolitionist and author Richard P. Hallowell argued, “The whites had always regarded the public school system of the North with contempt. The freedman introduced and estab- lished it, and it stands today a living testimony.”12 Understand- ing the life of the mind as a public good was—to follow the his- torian David Roediger—part of the slave community’s vision for “self-emancipation.”13 A radically democratic vision of the life of the mind is part of what we have inherited from those who knew bondage, and we may measure our anti-intellectual- ism in terms of our alienation from this community of the dead.

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I invoke the freedpeople’s dream of public intellection to illustrate the fact that this country has catastrophically and con- sistently said no to intellectual progress, especially when a con- dition of that progress has been a serious reckoning with issues of race in particular, as well as matters of gender, sexuality, dis- ability, and ethnicity. It’s important to remember, though, that while saying no to real progress has been a hallmark of US power, saying yes has been part of its power too. Rule 5: When

institutions say yes, that is also a moment of jeopardy. As this book’s discussions of diversity suggest, we are living in a time when institutions such as state, capital, and university do not exert their power simply by excluding us and saying no. They do that—certainly. But beginning in the 1960s, modes of power did not simply recoil from diference but instead learned how to bureaucratize it and thereby divest it of its radical and trans- formative potentials. This has engendered a political crisis for minoritized intellectuals and activists and prompted the kinds of campus activism that we now see, responses to the jeopardy in which the bureaucratization of diference has put us.

Part of that jeopardy for minoritized intellectuals and activ- ists has to do with the ethical crisis in which the American uni- versity now finds itself: whether it will be a place that encour- ages or discourages genuine critical thought and transformation, especially where minoritized communities are concerned. This ethical crisis has wide implications and again raises the question of what it means to be an insurgent intellectual within the uni- versity. The question applies not only to students but also to fac- ulty. The postcolonial theorist Edward Said captured the crisis produced by intellectual surrenders in Representations of the Intellectual:

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The question remains as to whether there is or can be anything like an independent, autonomously functioning intellectual, one who is not beholden to, and therefore constrained by, his or her af liations with universities that pay salaries, political parties that demand loyalty to a party line, think tanks that while they ofer freedom to do research perhaps more subtly compromise judgment and restrain the critical voice.14

Remaining independent and functioning autonomously in the university is necessary, especially for the critical intellectual who does not see institutional favors, decorations, and promo- tions as the goal of our work but understands that the creation of critical masses of minoritized subjects of all types within this stubborn place and others like it is the prize.

What would it mean for those of us who claim various forms of minority diference—race, gender, sexuality, disability, and so on—to recognize when those systems of power appeal to our diferences, calling out to us like sirens on the rocks, promising to recognize our cultural and embodied dif erences without ever taking real steps to provide a place for those dif erences to be expressed, reimagined, and embodied by the greatest number of minoritized people? What would it mean to produce a politics of minority diference that revolves around the will to create such places for such people, recognizing that verbal and bureau- cratic appreciations of diversity are never enough? It would mean wrestling with Frantz Fanon’s insight about the ways that storytellers reimagined their craft during the anticolonial revo- lutions in Africa:

The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and

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to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons.15

Forms of minority diference can be tools of such modifications, but only if we refuse to let them reside in the mouth of administration.

Forms of minority diference are not the playthings of domi- nant institutions. They are the burnt oferings of communities in struggle. In this regard, Vincent Harding’s distinction between institutional certification and the historical resources provided by black communities strikes a note that all of us—no matter our identities—should hear:

Black scholars must remember their sources, and by this I mean no technically historical sources. I mean human sources. I mean that they were not created as persons, as historians, as teachers, by Pur- due University or by UCLA or by the AHA [American Historical Association] or the OAH [Organization of American Historians] or any other set of letters. They are the products of their source—the great pained community of the Afro-Americans of this land. And they can forget the source only at great peril to their spirit, their work, and their souls.16

Modern institutions would be nothing without their practices of certification, acts that imply they have the power to elevate us and to—in Harding’s words—create us as persons. So powerful is this ruse that we often imagine that we amount to very little without their certifying brands. But what Harding suggests is that these powers of certification are never matches for the politi- cal, intellectual, and ethical depths of the minoritized communi- ties—the dēmos—that inspire us. Appreciating that we are occa- sioned as intellectual, ethical, and political beings by those communities rather than by the administrative procedures of

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academic institutions leads us to a bit of counterintuitive wisdom—Rule 6: Assume you don’t belong.

After leaving Howard and making my way to the University of California at San Diego’s Sociology Department for graduate school, I found myself in a disciplinary setting that didn’t know what to do with my interests in literature and race. One of my best friends at the time was a Greek woman named Alexandra Halkias. Alex was ahead of me in both age and graduate progress: I was in just my second year of graduate school, and she was close to finishing her dissertation, which later became the book The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern

Greece. We taught in the same writing program and shared an ofce. One day, during the period when all the instructors were busy grading students’ papers, I was worrying aloud about my marginal position in my department and considering a transfer: “Alex, maybe I don’t belong in sociology. Maybe I really belong in literature!” I said as she was trying to get through a stack of students’ final papers. Having had enough of my kvetching, she replied, “Rod, just assume you don’t belong!” To my surprise, her advice was liberating, because I realized that much of my anxiety was the result of trying to belong to a discipline on terms that I never got to determine, to be certified without ever having any say about the components of that certification. Her response helped me to see that being in sociology (or any other discipline or institution, for that matter) didn’t mean that I had to belong to sociology. From that day forward, I resolved that I would never again cry out for an institution’s certification.

Alex’s advice also allowed me to exercise another bit of advice, which I had gotten while a sophomore at Howard. Still striving to figure out how to be a radical intellectual, I sought out Walda Katz Fishman, who taught some of the social theory

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courses in the Sociology Department. She was popular among the students as the main Marxist on the faculty, “the Wildcat,” as one of the of ce staf admiringly referred to her. Unbeknown to me at the time, Walda was also a cofounder of the progressive leadership-development organization Project South. After maybe two class sessions with her, I showed up to her of ce hours and promptly said that I wanted to be a radical intellec- tual and to use her as a model. So she invited me to accompany her to of-campus events and presentations. After giving a pres- entation on racial and class inequality at a high school in Wash- ington DC, she said to me, “Rod, I’m flattered that you’re look- ing to me as a model for radicalism, but you know, you really have to be your own model.”

Rule 7: In all things, be your own model, but one with historical ties.

We can connect this rule to the theory of minoritized commu- nities that this book has put forth. Minoritized communities are not static but dynamic entities, “constantly dancing between the past, the present, and the future.” Harding argues that those of us who are inspired by this dynamism and who are committed to multiplying it must “be alive to the movement of history and . . . recognize that we ourselves are constantly being remade and revisioned.”17 Walda’s advice, then, can be taken as a nod to transform ourselves through the inspirations produced by dis- franchised communities.

In order to engage that kind of transformation—one that requires a commitment to hearing other people’s voices and perspectives—we have to be always ready to experience infor- mation and inspiration. Rule 8: You can learn something from every- body. While radicalism can be a really inspiring standpoint from which to imagine and transform the social world, it can also be deceptive, in making us believe that the only knowledge we

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need to care about is the knowledge that we and others like us possess and produce. When I was trying to invent myself as a young intellectual in high school, one of my favorite teachers, an older white woman from New Orleans named Mrs. Virginia Scott Joiner, gave me a bit of advice. She was one of those people who could read by the age of three. Recognizing her precocity, her father told her while she was still a little girl, “Remember, Virginia, you can learn something from everybody.” When she gave me that advice, she was telling me to remember the same thing that her father meant: that my budding sense of myself as an intellectual could help me to engage others who were dif er- ent from me rather than dismiss them because of their dif er- ences. This insight joins hands with something Audre Lorde said about the 1960s: “Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other’s diferences because of what we feared those dif er- ences might say about ourselves. . . . But any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve.”18

Standing by this homespun principle of learning from one another is also a way of challenging one of the primary levers of historical violence, the lever that turns people and the planet into abstractions, rendering them objects that are not worthy of human consideration, distorting the living and the breathing into simple means to an end. This has been a failure not only of liberal and conservative formations but radical ones too. After the Soviet Union massacred Hungarian communists—specifi- cally, students, workers, and soldiers whom Stalinists called “anti-Soviet Soviets”—for demanding greater freedoms in 1956, the progressive historian E. P. Thompson wrote, “Stalinism is socialist theory and practice which has lost the ingredient of humanity.”19 This is an ingredient that we have to add over and