Black Study, Here and Now with Fred Moten and Seulghee Lee

hi everybody um is [Music] [Music] moreover it demonstrates capitalization [Music] although it can and does happen in university it's not relegated by it and it certainly does not certainly rely on traditional academic practices [Music] [Music] such as retreat for attackers in new york and also it's inspiring and deeply motivating um [Music] his works constantly across [Music] [Music] he modeled this for other rising black scholars if you're in the community other fellow theories like cynthia hartman [Music] regenerative language and then it creates indicators for evaluators to stop artists to write better ways achievement and polishing by the athlete of the womenship and cultural society he also is a recipient of the university of iowa children awards um [Music] he says and that's what i mean to present to be transported out of yourself experience of interiority means and so this sent we're sent to one another we're sent by one another to 100. so i want to give a personal thanks and being so generous [Music] foreign maybe we'll talk for about an hour and then do about half an hour q a what does that sound okay i wanted to begin with this term that you've made popular in black studies comes from a manual cut condition of possibility this phrase and i want to make three quick points and then turn it into a question and then we'll go from there first thing is um our immediate condition of possibility is that we are on the ancestral and tribal lanes of the congaree and so we should acknowledge that uh the second condition of possibility i'd like to note is that we're in a building named after a an african-american dance popularized in the 1930s called the big apple uh which according to wikipedia was based on the ring shout and the big apple as a dance reminds puts me into mind of one of a phrase that i remember from one of your poems you found dances waiting for dancers your silhouette is patient form and so another phrase of yours black insurgent sociality is our condition of possibility for being here and sitting here and speaking together and then the third thing i wanted to note and this is our question one thing i really love about black studies and my commitment to it and my life in it is based on the idea that we understand our i call it like a symbolic filial piety but a sense of intellectual genealogy so if you've known me for more than 15 seconds you know who david is and abdul is they already know who you are usually but because of the pandemic you and i haven't had a chance to hang out since the 2019 passing of dr martin luther killson your undergraduate mentor among many other distinctions and his decades of service in the government department at harvard he was the first black person to receive tenure at harvard so i'd love to hear you begin by talking about dr killson and just your conditions of possibility okay well thank you thanks so much and um and thank you alana that was i feel like um the two best introductions i've ever had have been here i think i might just have to stay down here um so um i appreciate being so warmly welcomed by everybody um man so dr martin luther killson um was my was my teacher he was i took i first took a class from him my the fall semester of my freshman year at harvard in 1980 and i took a class from him every other semester that i could um actually and and i don't quite know what this means or how it happened but through the accident through set of accidents that have to do with my particular upbringing and schooling he was the first black teacher that i ever had um and uh and he just made a tremendous impression on me and on my not just me but also my my friend um you know really my best friend from from college stephan o'harney um and and so when we wrote our first book together the undercommons we dedicated it to professor kilson um and we we always kept in touch with him he um was just a major presence in our lives he he modeled for us what it not only what it was like well in a way i would say he modeled for us what it was what it should be what it could be to be uh an intellectual in the university you know a certain kind of ethics and practice of of reading and and and and writing and and and being committed to the idea that the work that you were doing as a scholar was supposed to have something to do with the world um and with improving the world but he also more than that kind of was an ethics of what it meant to be a teacher so we would just go to his office and just hang out you know he had he had a kind of office in this hall called coolidge hall and he had his own little private office but he had his big table he would he would he would just be sitting there usually a whole most of his writing he published lots of books and lots of scholarly articles most of his writing was letters to the editor of newspapers anything that bothered him and he had one of those old underwood typewriters and he would just be you know and he would and he made copies of everything he would he made copies of articles that he thought we should read you always left his office with a bundle of stuff to read you left his class with a bundle of extra things to read because he was just he there was this place called nomen copy he would come into his office every into our classroom with a with this blue double-breasted blazer that was must have been 35 years old that had long since become too small but somehow he managed to squeeze himself into it every day you know wearing a cowboy hat that he got from wyoming you know and smoking his pipe and and he he he's here mode here's something to read molten you read this hi guys you know he would talk like that we walk in there a lot of times strategically we would go to coolidge about 4 30 because we knew if we stayed there until 5 30 he would take us home for dinner and his first book was called a political change in a in a west african state it was on the sort of newly decolonized sierra leone he did a lot of work in ghana he used to he would say oh yeah come for dinner guys i'm gonna i'm gonna make a ghanaian dish you know and uh i'll never forget it so we were driving around with him and he stopped the kentucky fried chicken came back with a bucket of chicken he's like oh it's gonna be good you know and um and what i realized i didn't even realize it until years later like a few years ago he would make this kind of jollof rice right it was a ghanaian dish it was just with kentucky fried chicken in it you know and um it was he just it was to talk with him in class was like the books would become alive he taught politics in in africa but also black politics in the united states so i'll never forget there was a famous book called american negro politics written i think by a scholar named harold f gosnell from like 1940-something it was primarily now an analysis of the first black congressman from illinois william dawson and him we'd be he'd be talking about the book but he would do this thing where he would start telling you about the person who wrote the book and he had seen him you know harold foote gosnell a mousy little man you know and by the time you would you would just get peop the people he wrote about the people he talked about they they became alive for us you know so so yeah i i i know that if there are other people who are also conditions of possibility for me it's like more than i can count but certainly without him i never would have gone to just to i don't think i would have gone to grad school i don't even think i would have graduated from college frankly um this is another story i don't know if i should tell it but i i um this was so at harvard there was like about a three week period between the end of exams and when you graduate you sort of stay on campus for and i when i went to college i was so involved in you know i played football my freshman year i studied with kilson and i started hanging out with these friends we were very politically active and we were going to the the black working class section of of boston and you know we were tutoring at the walpole prison and working with this extraordinary woman named sarah small who ran a thing called the packard mance which was a kind of a really a kind of settlement house for young black women in boston and and and of course kilson was at the heart of all these things too but there was a guy named eugene rivers an extraordinarily important figure and sort of contemporary black religious thought and religious practices and he was like a mentor for us but so i was doing all that stuff but i kind of was forgetting to go to class you know and and i flunked out i took uh you know i flunked my german because you had to take a foreign language first year so somehow i managed to not remember to to finish my second semester of german before it was time to graduate and i got this not an email letter you know you're not going to graduate because you still have to do your language requirement i'm like man my mama and them just got the tickets you know they're coming up here for grad school so i went to see kilson you know who else was i going to go to i'll never forget it because i think he was kind of disgusted like how come you how could you mess that up how could you not take care of that you know and um but then he looked at me and he said what mode you're not a sucker molten you're not you're not you're not you know he's basically saying it's worth it for me to do this last thing i'm gonna do for you and so he called his friend who was the dean of students who's a black man from from alabama named archie epps some of you might know his name just because when malcolm x did those famous sort of speeches at harvard archie epps edited the collection of malcolm x's speeches at harvard from 1963 i think and he called the dean of students at archie uh i got this you know kid here and basically i had to go to the dean's office and get talked about for a few minutes by rtfs but they sent me but they let me and it made me and the first thing i did when i got to graduate school was i took all this german you know and i i got to the point where i could repre i i wanted to i did i didn't have to do it but i just wanted to do it so i could tell them it wasn't because i was just a slacker you know i i just got caught up in something so um anyway he he did i'm sorry i'm going on so long but he he uh he was a great great great great scholar he was he was cornell west's teacher you know which is why like stefano and i we like to think of ourselves as cornell's little cousins you know we were part of that family part of that line and you know um professor kilson was he was a descendant of a you know he knew dubois you know he worked with dubois he he he knew in kuruma you know yeah i mean he you know when einstein came to lincoln he was there you know so because he went to lincoln university in pennsylvania so anyway um he was a great person and he passed away in 2019 and and he was in the he had written this multi-volume history of african-american intellectuals which is still eventually going to come out his widow who's also a great scholar herself marion kill since she is editing that work but he also wrote a memoir and and stefano and i were able to to help get the memoir published um last year by duke university press and we wrote a afterward for it and um yeah he's he's a he's a great great great person hey i'll never forget somebody posted a clip of cornell saying he had to change his schedule around to hear fred speak recently speaking of little cousins uh why don't we talk about on our way to talking about this splendid truncation black study that alana already evoked why don't we talk about where you stand on the and and how you see the formation of black studies so black studies is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution and on its edge well there's a way in which i think it's important to see that that black studies is an extraordinary achievement um as a as an intellectual discipline and in all of the different iterations of it not only in in universities but especially you know the the the the different kinds of obstacles that black studies had to face in order to to to have a place in the university um are very different go as one goes from institution to institution but but each institution has its own story of origins and and those stories are almost always the stories of heroic actions and those heroic actions are often the actions that are are are taken up by people who don't at least on the on the most direct level benefit from the institutionalization of black studies black studies is a is a is in is an eruption into the university um from uh modes of intellectual activity that the university has in general been designed to to exclude and and and when the university does include those forms of intellectual activity it's usually in order to regulate those forms of intellectual activity and that's the other side of this is that there's a there's a kind of triumphant story that we tell about how black studies operates at a university like this or at yale or you know bethune cookman or you know any number of places but but that's that story also is always shadowed by the ways that that black thinking and that the social force and the social sort of animus you know and and of black thinking is is in some sense placed in danger when it enters into the university space that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be here it just means that it has to be nurtured and and protected um not only from you know it has to be nurtured and protected even within the framework of of of of its having been welcomed and this this makes it a a complicated complicated proposition um a lot of times people talk about what it means to be you know about inclusion and now there's all this talk in university about diversity equity and inclusion and and we know what people mean when they say inclusion or we know some of what they sometimes mean and sometimes some of that is really good you know but i often wish that we thought about using the even though it's more unwieldy they would use the term non-exclusion because it's kind of like i don't want to be excluded from this particular set of resources from this particular set of chances from this particular set of responsibilities but i don't want to be included in the already existing form of those things right when i come in you know right as anna julie cooper says and paula gettings that goes where and when i enter speaking of black women it's got to change right it's not enough for you to welcome me into your thing you have to be open to the fact to the possibility and the fact that when we get there it's going to be different it's got to be different it can't simply be the same old structure that used to exclude us right and and this has to be something that you can be open to and it actually ideally it would be something that you would desire right um and so i think that's been the battle for for for for black studies you know that's that's one fundamental part of the of the history is is dealing with the the seemingly benign but often very malignant forces of inclusion and then another part of the problem has been um that the seemingly benign but often malignant forces of inclusion are often still accompanied by the same old brutal forces of exclusion you know so sometimes it's hard to know what and who you are confronting um and i think a lot of interesting work has been done over the last 15 years really thinking about what has historically occurred in the advent of the movement of black studies into the university and into you know predominantly white institutions especially in you know nick mitchell who teaches at university of california santa cruz has written about this but he but i think you know one of the first people to really write about well was uh an old uh sort of fellow of ours professor tulsa no leeway rooks um who was a graduate student also at university of iowa who teaches i want to say she's at brown now but but she wrote you know very you know good black black study white money you know black studies what does it mean to be put in a situation in which the resources that are necessary for the task that you do are being you know granted and doled out and in some ways restricted and regulated right by structures that are kind of antithetical to to your to your uh to your mission to the mission that you see so you know these are some of the issues that that black studies have faced you know over the last 50 years and and now they're being you know exacerbated and kind of you know made even more problematic by the fact that the university in general is being defunded you know i mean the old debates between dubois and booker t washington about the value of a liberal arts education versus a vocational education were were really it struck me you know years ago and i i know other people notice this too that those debates about you know about what kind of what should education be those have now become the prominent debates about education in general you know and all the talk about stem and all the talk about a kind of vocational education that's that's now those are the structures that are now in place for everybody and um and what's interesting and what's important is to know and what's really problematic is to note that that this turn towards a sort of vocationalization of education for everyone coincides with the defunding of education for everyone right um you know there's a there's a structure of political and economic power which uses the educational system for two primary things i think one is to to distribute money right when they say that the university is an economic engine you know what they mean tremendous amounts of capital flow into the university and they are redistributed and usually that redistribution is up right it's everyday working people's tax dollars being funneled into the pockets of developers right and that's that's a major part of what the university does it legitimizes that upward distribution of wealth and the other thing that it does is it legitimizes the class divisions that are structured by their upper division in the first place as an ideological formation the university is a place where people say that it's defined by meritocracy you know i mean we know all the different reasons that come into it why it is that people can be successful at the kinds of things you have to do to seem successful at a university and it much of the time it has to do with resources that you've been given very seldom doesn't have anything to do with so-called intelligence or even hard work right and we know that and we all know plenty of smart people who could never be at a place like this for a whole bunch of different reasons so the quest but the university creates a kind of social structure in which those divisions can be justified right and we even talk about those justifications within classes right that's what grading is for it's it's to create you know stratifications and hierarchies you know so you know when those things are happening at the same time that the university is being shrunk and defunded you know the question that we have to start to ask is what's going to happen to the really cool kinds of thinking that we sometimes get to do at a place like this where are we going to go for that now because it seems like they're trying to shut shrink this thing down you know so um where where are we going to go to do the kinds of things that it seems like we can only do at a place like this um you know so and i think that's you know um it's it's a question for black studies too but the question for black studies might be a little bit less severe if only because we sort of already know where we can go to do that kind of work you know back to the barber shop you know back to the beauty shop back to the you know uh to the juke joint to church you know where where it was always done you know and uh so this corporatization and the of the university and the funding of education specifically public education overall is roughly coterminous with the founding of institutional black studies specifically the field and prism known as black feminism and so i'd be curious to hear are you at all surprised by how much good stuff has come out of black studies in black feminism within institutional spaces given the extreme amounts of institutional duress we've been working under well you know black folks in general and black women in particular have been proven for about 500 years that it's possible to produce goo gobs of good stuff under duress you know that's you know so i'm not surprised by how much good work emerges but i'm always uh and i think it's really important to celebrate that good work and to and to avail ourselves of it but i'm also angry about when i think about all the good work that could happen if the duress weren't there right so so i think it's important to keep both of those things you know in mind and um [Music] you know the historical emergence of of black studies and and also i think women's studies in the university and then you know quickly on their heels you know um queer studies asian american studies latinx studies these were moments in which it struck i mean i was talking about this with my wife last night um the amount of of social insurgency um and and i also would even say more specifically kind of you know interracial social insurgency in the 20th century it's like a great it's become a secret to us that we no longer know but stuff was always popping off the you know when they talk about the red scare of the teens and 20s it's because they were it's because bosses were scared right they were scared about the fact that people were actively talking about alternative social arrangements that were not predicated on these extraordinarily rigid and vicious class divisions and those new social arrangements were you know economic and political social arrangements were always accompanied always driven in some sense by this ongoing black insurgency that goes back to before the end of slavery so there was you know revolt was was in the air and and in a lot of ways you know the the the the tremendous social insurgency that we associate with the 60s is really stuff that was the the the engine for it is in the 30s 40s and 50s and this is a story this is the the secret history of the 20th century is this history of rebellion and it was a global rebellion people were like and really it keeps going back further that that that illegitimate oligarchical power is always trying to suppress rebellion like i love shakespeare and i especially love shakespeare's history plays so henry iv part two and one richard ii henry v those are plays that were written and performed in the late 16th century but they were about the late 14th early 15th century and it's this tremendous anxiety in the late 16th century about social insurgency at that moment and shakespeare addresses that by talking about the tremendous anxiety that was also present about social insurgency in the late 14th and early 15th century there's just this history of revolt right it makes you think of clr james you know a history of pan-african revolt and that history goes back it's it's an almost unbroken history of insurgency and so it's sometimes you could say that it comes to a head you know in the 1960s but what ends up happening is it people in universities people in the government they began to say well may this this level of insurgency is so profound and so powerful it's impossible to imagine how we would fully suppress it other than by incorporating it right that will be the quickest way to regulate it and and again and i think african american studies black studies in the u.s in the u.s academy emerges at that moment it's folded into the university so that it can be regulated by the university it doesn't mean that a whole bunch of great amazing work doesn't come out of it at in the in the wake of that but it's work that but we see this it's a connection there's this connection between inclusion and regulation and that becomes another part of this battle that we have to to fight you know so um i really it's i think it puts us in in a complicated position it's not there's no simple thing to denounce there's no simple thing to disavow you know there are people who are doing great things in the university and they're people who are maybe not doing such great things and and we have to kind of judge it you know in this careful way and and in a kind of and with some humility because a lot of the times the problematic things that we might do might not be a function of our own intentions and you dog somebody else out and you think well wait a minute what was i doing here what did i do you know um and so you know but but i i believe that that black studies is a is an insurgent intellectual activity in practice and that that insurgency has to be it should be maintained um and and so you know this is what you know this is what we what we're thinking about all the time so your sense is that in the last 50 years the conditions are different for our our institutionalized ability to hear that insurgency to record it to be able to get a sense of the general intelligence always being rich rather than poor or as our old friend james ford would say the capacity for the general intelligence to be able to think through crisis in real time assess it assess the conditions in real time you know it's funny it's like 20 years ago i used to i used to teach it uh to she teaches duke it's hard for me to say that because i i anyway i used to teach there and uh i um it was during the i started teaching in 2007 right at the beginning of the last great sort of economic collapse crash and it was and sometimes i would ride on the shuttle bus do has to the north and south campus and sometimes i would ride and i would kind of listen to students talking and i would hear students saying stuff like well my dad told me that if i can graduate in three years instead of four you would buy me a car and what i be what i thought i was noticing from these and you've got to understand there was a moment when privilege became like almost like a slur you know check your privilege but my students at duke man they they never thought they would they didn't shy away from the idea of themselves being privileged they were completely okay with the idea that they were privileged because they were also completely committed to the idea that they deserved it right they deserved their their privilege okay but i think it was interesting moment to see these particular students begin to have anxiety about their capacity to maintain that privilege okay and they were feeling their parents have anxiety about that okay and what i noticed was the difference between these students who are seemed affluent and they were definitely mostly white and sometimes my black students i felt that they had this extraordinarily interesting advantage which they had some stories that they could tell themselves about why it is that they were no longer that they had no immediate access to privilege that we had we had and black studies was a place to to learn those stories and to refine those stories like we know why stuff ain't working out for us we know the history of that um and it struck me that some of these students that i'm talking about you know they didn't have a story they just but they had a real inkling that things weren't going to be good they knew like we talked about you know clr james obviously excuse me but he he loves thomas jefferson he loved the fact that for him thomas jefferson's intervention in political theory was absolutely crucial there was no theory of politics before thomas jefferson that asserted right the people's right to pursue happiness it's like that's an extraordinarily new phenomenon in the history of political theory for james who's this great great political theorists and activists from trinidad who you know lived late in the in the into the 20th century my students had given up the pursuit of happiness right these were students they were like they on the one hand they knew that as duke students they would have the privilege to maybe have easier access into investment banking right but at the same time they had completely lost any faith in the possibility of being happy being an investment banker right for them it was a scramble to maintain what it is that their parents were giving them in the face of their parents literally making deals with them about how we can give you a little bit less because we're strapped and and what got me is they didn't have any kind of story about why that was they didn't have any stories about it their stories were always about ascendancy and opportunity their story what they had was a discourse to tell you to stop complaining about your story right like my partner laura harris she was teaching james because he's writing a book about james and you know james had this idea that there should be universities on every corner right basically that that that high level public education should be so ubiquitous that you can't walk two blocks without having access to it and they would say stuff like oh he's just naive you know he's his 82 year old man living in london who you know the great thinkers of his day were coming to sit in his bedroom just to be around him for a couple of hours and they had you know oh he's naive right it's like no he's not naive you don't have any sort of story about how stuff could be different you have no you don't have any access to the idea of an alternative right so so one question is how do we you know generate and disseminate the history as well as the history of the continuing possibility of the alternative and universities have been places where that kid happened and they they have all they've been but meanwhile the people who run stuff i think they've sort of decided over the last 50 years under the under what they would conceive of as the duress of constant rebellion that came to a head in the 1960s they were like well if the university is a place where we can where the alternative for the idea that life could be different and better than this for everybody if the university is a place where that idea is being disseminated then we need to shut that down okay we need to tell people we need to tell kids that they should study more math and engineering right and and and and not have time for classes to talk about that stuff until we can figure out a way to get them on the track to replicate the already existing order of things without having to go to the university okay we're gonna we're gonna squeeze this i mean i it feels to me like that there have been clear indications in policy that this is what this is what educational policy has been doing over the last certainly over the last 50 years maybe longer than that one of the great important innovations of black insurgency immediately after the civil war was a development of public education in the south that was an invention of people who five years earlier had been enslaved and it strikes me that in the south that that there's been a kind of rear guard action against the idea of public education ever since then and it's coming to a kind of head now you know and um so it feels like something that we have to really think about and try to get ready to fight you know about does that fight occur within our undercommons relationship to the institution does it occur through the fugitive planning that you discuss in that book with stefano well i mean i think it comes into play at the level of these questions about do i want to be included in an already existing structure or do i want to you know do we want to to work through the mechanisms of non-exclusion to to change and and radically disrupt the already existing structure so you know many of the great figures in our intellectual tradition in sort of afrodisport intellectual tradition went to traditional universities and and and did graduate work but but many more of them didn't you know you know our i believe a good argument can be made that the greatest if let's say the greatest sociologist of the 20th century and also half the greatest black sociologist of the 20th century's w.b du bois the second greatest is richard pryor now what does it mean you know du bois's work is extraordinary um inimitable and it ranges over every possible academic discipline it seems to me that richard pryor's does too it's a fundamentally different discourse it out it operates in different places and it came from different places if he's a great sociologist then part of what that means is is that there are pool there were pool halls in the 1940s in in peoria illinois that were places of study and he talks about them as places of study um pool halls brothels you know restaurants juke joints you know after hours clubs so we know that that that that these forms of study are not just that that study can happen in these other places but we also know that those that the modalities of study took different forms and that they were they were and what it means is when you bring those modalities of study into the university how what how i'm not saying that they should stay unchanged but i am saying some elements of those modes of study have to be preserved and you don't accept the legitimacy of all of the protocols of the university in order to enter into it you can't you know so i kind of feel like i don't know if black study i know that black study is absolutely bound up with and compatible with and is constantly produced in reading and writing but i don't know that black study is is is compatible with the reading and writing of term papers or or the giving of exams that i don't know right but we organized intellectual protocols in the university around evaluation and the evaluation corresponds to stratification so if we could detach evaluation and stratification right from from intellectual activity what what does that open up for us you know and when you've got you know when you've got when you're operating within an intellectual tradition which is constantly producing a critique of evaluation and stratification what does it mean to then impose evaluation and stratification on that tradition that's a contradiction so that's something that we would have to then think about we you know why are we giving people grades why are we why do we organize ourselves around this the specific you know time that the university imposes you know um is that stuff really conducive to study what are you getting ready for when you do it that way when you submit yourself to those kinds of temporal arrangements and those work arrangements you know what are you getting ready for what are you being prepared for um but what do you say to the student who would say back that the desire for both recognition and inclusion are authentic desires to them that it's part of who they are part of their socialization you and i could do the pr the pedagogical process of having them unlearn that or try right and and give them stuff to think about on that front and we're doing that for ourselves all the time but it seems to me that i mean like like judith butler always says right the passionate attachment to power is right so well you said the desire for what for recognition and inclusion well i'll say well see here's or unfortunately one becomes a teacher you know in trouble with teachers they always think they know better you know um so you have to sort of how you regulate your your how do i you know as a teacher regulate that that horrible you know tendency to think that i know better try to ask a question you know try to put it in the form of a question and be open to the possibility that the answer might not be what you want but you sort of say well what if the terms that we've been given for what we want are imprecise what if recognition is an imprecise term for what it is and maybe what we really want is friendship right um inclusion is a imprecise sermon what we really want us to be is not to be excluded right yeah um now if it turns and what if it turns out that the imprecise names that we've given to our desires have a negative impact on the way we understand and enact and carry out and attempt to achieve those things that we desire so that would be my first question is what is there a better way to describe what it is that we want you know um and i think that friendship is a better way to describe what it is that we want than recognition um and and then you can ask okay well how can we build that how can we is there a way we could do that that's a little bit better than what we've been doing you know um because what if it turns out that the things that we've been doing have been structured in order to get us recognition and turns out recognition ain't always cracked up to be you know inclusion is not always cracked up to be so maybe maybe we mischaracterize what we want right in a way that deviates get that has created a situation which it gives us it detours us around what we want so so let's think a little bit more about what we want and see if we can name it a little bit more clearly a little bit more sharply and then see what we can see try to get at it again in the opening paragraph of souls of black folk and that strange meaning of being black that you're writing on before he introduces the definition of double consciousness even du bois is talking about that moment of being rejected as a little boy trying to give that card to the white girl right is that a desire for recognition is it or is it a desire for friendship right it's certainly a moment of their election that inaugurates everything and you know in our in our tradition well i'm trying to see that's one where i'm trying to take my own advice and pause before i answer because this phrase that my mom and my grandma always just say is just running through my head rampantly through my head so i'm just going to say it because if i don't say it it's not going to get out of my head the old people yourself my mind told me you know my mind is telling me that it was a desire for recognition for friendship not recognition but oh it's a totally beautiful and interesting thing what it makes you want to go through the entire history of the the custom of giving cards giving visiting cards or naming cards what right some of y'all i tend to want to think of it as a victorian phenomenon like i associated with thackery you know with you know and and in in a way that you know and and there's something about that protocol which in a way is a kind of plea for for recognition so so on the one hand maybe maybe the mechanism maybe the protocol that he was engaged in was designed for recognition but that doesn't mean that the original desire from which it you know that out of which the which which which you know which produced the protocol was for recognition it's it's i always associate the giving of cards with some with a kind of semi-desperate attempt to move up a step socially right like leaving your card at you know the duke of omnium's house you know or something you know and and and and the card being rejected or thrown away you know this is not a person that i could ever receive show socially or something you know but it was like why do a card why what is the card meant to indicate you know what what do people do when they read first of all you're the kind at least you're high enough to produce a card you know like my tendency would be to want to say well you know i kind of want to hang out with people where i don't have to give them a crying right you know you know so i don't know there's there's a kind of it means your boys didn't have that six-year-old du bois didn't get to have great barrington who knows you know where how does that work how how does any of that work um there's more to be what makes me realize i need to go back in and read that big levering lewis biography again because maybe he's got something in there about that what where did this practice of giving call you know um what does that already mean so you so stephen young the actor beautiful boy last year said when he was promoting minari right this breakthrough korean-american film sometimes i wonder if being asian-american is when you're thinking about everyone else but nobody's thinking about you right as a kind of duboisian formulation based on this notion of dereliction based on this notion of of contending with your desire for recognition from the outset right dealing with the management of that in an anti-black world and a xenophobic condition and so what as i'm thinking about you know what asian-american racialization how it riffs off of the anti-black conditions right that dubois is talking about it raises these questions of what it would mean to kind of totally subsume or totally suspend that desire for that maybe even forms a friendship in the bad world it's like see this is one of those questions where you start to try to answer it and it's such a struggle as such a grapple you know a battle intellectually even to to frame the question and then to try to address it and you try you begin to try in my head and i'm like i i want there to be a different question um you know why okay because sometimes i think we we like we imagine that the human social life is on the most basic level at its most sort of fundamental moment before any further elaboration it's some sort of relation between one subject and another okay and then immediately all kinds of complications ensue because it's not really about a relation between one subject and another it's about a relation between one subject who sees that other as an object and that's already a problem you know and of course the resistance to being objectified meets its own resistance [Music] but the fact that they can't ever really feel like subject right happened firstly which is know my ridiculous position i'm your master but why would you need to ask me that well you need me to tell me who you are so can you the ability to manipulate and control an [Music] it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so what i'm trying to say is what we want from socialite okay is through which sociality operates we are enjoying we know [Music] and there's a massive body of [Music] i would like to see if it's possible to start from a different purpose but um and that's where we go back to professor cancer for all of our conditions as possible right because this especially here with all of y'all in this place you know all this history you know i feel filled and overwhelmed is a little um by very serious people and and i believe that the understanding of sociality the subject is an accurate distribution at all for this condition in which we gather together of all of us being filled with and overcome by overwhelmed by our conditions you are with us all the time um the experience is should we open it up for questions new questions uh is well it's um well this goes this is a so um [Music] it's actually connected some of the questions about the origins of black studies believe it or not um so when i was in my freshman year i would say noam chomsky was like the essential part of my curriculum you know although none of it was ever assigned in class you know which is part of my trouble but but chomsky was also a real physical you know active presence you know in cambridge massachusetts because he taught in mit so you could hear him speak he would speak a lot at the first church congregational church in cambridge because and this was during the height of you know you know americans american intervention in central america was already very much underway we often want to associate that with reagan but it was a carter operation in nicaragua and el salvador and and that was that the you know noam chomsky's political critique was was very was always directed towards u.s intervention and particularly u.s intervention in in latin america and the books that he was producing at that moment particularly with the books he co-wrote with this other uh with a collaborator of his name edward herrmann there was a two-volume study called the political economy of human rights which was absolutely a critique of of of the jimmy carter foreign policy which i know y'all don't remember but i remember it was predicated on on the advancing of human rights okay and chomsky just was pillaring it and and here's why so i remember reading some of this stuff where chomsky was like look in the 19 early 1970s the the trilateral commission which was a kind of huge globalized think tank of western and then eventually japanese leaders who were trying to organize some new basically the origins of what 25 years later we would begun to call globalization right they commissioned a study that was written by killson's colleague in the harvard government department samuel huntington who eventually was made more infamous by a book he wrote called the clash of civilizations but the book that he and some others co-authored it was i think published in 1975 is called the crisis of democracy it was a direct response to to student and worker insurgency in the 60s and the crisis of democracy as they outlined it was essentially that there's too much democracy there's all these people in the in the world students um you know workers union organizers women racial minorities who for some reason started to come come get the temerity that have they started to come up this notion that they should have some way say in the decisions that went into the organizing of their lives right and and and reading chomsky say that it immediately for me it dovetailed with my own experience it dovetailed my experience of watching my mom and the political activism that she was engaged in and i was like this is somebody who understands what's what's going on you know chomsky had all these ties to to to obviously to the anti-war movement in the united states in the 60s to the black panthers he you know he supported fred hampton you know he you know he so so for me chomsky was absolutely crucial as a as a as a as a as a political analyst and and his political analysis was based eventually i came to understand on you know the sort of tenets and ideas of anarchism and it was fundamental to my own you know uh sort of political formation but it was not separate from the linguistics because because you know chomsky was a a humanist and a universalist his id his belief that everyone should have something to say was all bound up with the fact that he thought that every human being as a function of their biological endowment should be treated a certain way and that any violation of that treatment right was was a violation of of of fundamental moral and ethical you know truths and his belief in human universality was i think very much bound up with his belief and his theories of a universal grammar he thought that there was chomsky was committed to the idea that there was this amazing thing that human beings could do which is that they could utter a sentence that could that had never been said before in human history and will never be said again right and what chomsky believes still because he's still working he's like 94 years old he's still working you can see him on youtube he's on youtube giving talks about ukraine you know so oh he whispers now almost but he's still working but he believed that this ability to create new sentences what he called the creative aspects of language use could not be explained by experience right that children are not made don't have access to enough experience to explain this capacity they have to generate new sentences right he calls it he called it the poverty of stimulus there simply isn't enough stimulus right so so this amazing ability we have it must be something that we're born with and if you're born with that i i mean i'm saying this in ways that he probably wouldn't put it but if you're born with that that means you're supposed to also have a whole bunch of other resources that are allow you to cultivate that food shelter clothing freedom from abuse freedom from tyranny right right so his belief his political beliefs were predicated i think on the on on a j on on about as genuine an idea of human universality as it's possible to produce right you know i don't know that there's a perfect notion of human universality that can stand up right but his was the most genuine and the most perfect that i have ever much more but his universality makes kant's universality seem like well like like the racist lie that it is okay but you know um so so yeah he was really and remains you know for me i uh and even look man to the extent that i have like the temerity to disagree which i was getting about something which is ridiculous right okay but even my disagreements with him only exists as a function of reading him like i can't organize my thoughts to disagree with him without him you know so so so he was very important for me and and my crazy little nerdy friends you know um yeah another question history can you can you can you elaborate on the distinction thank you very much i figured you would and i'm waiting throughout history it has been news even now to suppress to let people not know and learn the truth about what happened and also how african-americans are alone with others who have made conscious movements despite the odds of gifts to make this country the way it is now for growth for invention creativity knowledge ability not only here but over to other planets as well because of our subconscious there was an opportunity to gravitate to consciousness and beyond a great demonstration of all races but still have love joining me together as one but yet that too has constantly been suppressed now i see because of fear i wonder do you see that same truth if so and what is the best way is people here who wants to make a change and yet they may be fearful to participate so what in your opinion is a way that can unite together without the fear but yet because it's the right thing to do knowing that there are people who have no fear who have no problems together and working together as well because we know how universal laws work and how universal law works gravitational good or evil you cannot stop doing it law of physics is i mean well the fear factor as it were excuse me i'm almost over this call and uh like i always feel like i got to make sure everybody knows it ain't that coffee it's another cough but but but um what if what if we say not only fear because fears fear is an interesting word right because it it implies that people are are scared maybe of a new way scared of another story scared of maybe scared that maybe the things that that they have grown accustomed to might have to change okay um but and i believe that all those fears are operative you know fear that all the stories that have been told to me that helped me to develop some sense of my identity those might be wrong right or you know that even though we were not better than almost everybody we were better at least than them and so you know and i can't give that up you know right or some something like those kinds of fears and i think those are real um and and those are and we can think about how that might work both on an interracial and an intra-racial level right but then there's also just terror as in the people who run this will kill you if you don't exceed to the already existing order of things and so i think it's a combination of fear and terror and the terror is induced by terrorism right um and and there's a long i remember i had his friend um you know good friend in graduate school i was hanging out with him and he had this friend from england he came to visit and he was like i was like what are you working on he's like well i'm interested in you know why it is that a labor party never formed in the united states you know he had this like whole elaborate kind of underst you know question you know theory of it that it all seemed smart you know but it was real complicated or you know pretty complicated and i remember once and i started reading some stuff and i read one thing was like well because the the violent suppression of labor by capital they kill people right they shock folks okay so you understand that's terror that's not just fear okay so so it's a war is what i'm saying you know it's i got this really good friend who's like a brilliant you know thinker and an activist named manolo callahan and he has got me and some other friends really reading yvonne ilitch and it's ilitch talks about what is it the war against subsistence okay it's like there's been a historic war against subsistence and it and and and what manola also does he invokes du bois he talks about the democratic despotism was the term du bois use where where the sort of forms of democracy and the rhetoric of democracy is actually used to produce terror and despotism in certain places especially in in in the third world and and certainly here we know that we know that the regime of of of jim crow was is a form of democratic despotism and and the forces who engaged in that are still alive and they're still trying to organize it right so it's still going on and so there's this long history of of democratic despotism this long history of the war against subsistence and it's a law and it's a history of conquest it's the history of the conquest of this continent right and and the history of the conquest of this continent is an extension of the history of conquest in europe right the history of the suppression of those moments of social insurgency that shakespeare is writing about right well if we think what is subsistence well you say well subsistence is the is the capacity to you know to to live to to produce and to organize a livable life for oneself to to be sufficient for oneself in a certain way he said but no that that's not what subsistence is because because you can't because there's no such thing as self-sufficiency we we need other people you know richard ii in shakespeare talks about this i i thought i was a king i thought i had absolute power it turns out i need food i need friends that's his great red rebel there's this great british actor named uh uh uh milsick dude his name yeah he played in wolf hall and oh man i can't think of his name but if you get on youtube just look up richard ii speech at pomfret castle it's it's beautiful and pitiful the king is on the ground crying i need friends i need you know i'm vulnerable i can't do it by myself my sovereign power is is a lie right so so subsistence isn't about self-sufficiency it's about this capacity that we all share to live beyond our means as a function of sharing right you know i don't i don't just you know i'm not self-sufficient i i you know and what people bosses the owners they want to monopolize the capacity to live beyond your means right you know they know they need a nanny maybe too for their little kids but they don't want you to have not a nanny they don't even want you to have a grandma and aunt you know well yeah it takes a village for me to raise my kids you do it by yourself right you know right they they they wanna they wanna they wanna hold the the they know that to subsist to survive they are not sufficient to themselves and they want access to other people who will give them what they need so that they can have their life but they don't want but they don't want to share that okay so what i'm saying is it's a war against subsistence which is a war against sharing okay and and the people who are prosecuting this war they use all means at their disposal to prosecute this war okay um and some of the means are idiot ideological and that produces fear and some of the means are just straight up brutality right and that's and that produces terror um and i feel like the first thing we got to do okay is kind of come to grips with the fact that it's a war and we might have all kinds of commitments to i don't want to kill anybody i don't i'm not sure that i'll get through life without having done so but i don't want to okay you know but but but i do want to kill this this system i wanted to to be dead um and that means i can't call myself a non-violent person okay my commitment not to killing does not equal a commitment to non-violence it's a commitment to the most fundamental radical disruption not just of like not taking other people's stuff not just that but really at the level of this fundamental question about what is the nature of sociality right so so it's it's it would be and and i feel like what black study is is this lovingly violent commitment to the thoughtful disruption of the ridiculous ideas upon which this already existing structure of the world is predicated that's what black study is and black studies in the university needs to always maintain its relationship to that fundamental mission of black study and if being in the university means you have to give up that disruptive mission then it's better to not be in the university okay um if you can't figure out a way to maintain that you know so um because it's a war right and and and it feels like they're trying to kill everything you know like they're trying to eat everything own everything destroy everything um so you know we have to fight that um and we have to recognize that so he um about social insurgency revolt being in the air and their way to come and protect the from the incorporation of their vote um so i guess that was two questions and i'm sorry but the first thing is there's something that that the owner can't get it earth could be um and i heard you kind of speak about you know the rules because of all that consumption but then i wonder if there's something that can do well it feels like the human beings who run things on the earth are committed to a to a set of practices that seem likely to end in in but maybe not likely um but could potentially end in destruction of the earth's capacity to sustain human life right um it's what adorno and horakon will call it instrumental rationality run amok right you you you make a set of decisions in the interest of accumulation that eventually will lead to the absolute eradication of the ability to accumulate right um uh the reason i say it like that is because my again my mind is telling me to say no there's there's but they can't get everything they can't get everything but actually i i kind of feel like on a strategic level we should probably assume that they could get everything just because because this man is dangerous you know and we are not underestimated so we ought to assume that they can get everything or a better way to put it would be that from our perspective they can get everything but there's another perspective from which it does seem to me that they can't so when i was playing yesterday that song for y'all relaxing by a creek where the woman was singing a song to a creek about the creek with being accompanied by the creek you know in new guinea the music will persist even if she's not there to sing okay so i don't think that this man can kill the earth okay but but there's this and you know i mean man i hate the this almost seems like this kind of thing that well i mean i guess i gotta keep saying it you know i mean you know i it it probably won't get to that point so what we have to do is we we you know these are like you were saying sir these are cosmological questions these are physics questions now right um and we're we're really interesting and beautiful human beings we can do like that beautiful thing with language and we can do all kind of other stuff too and we make a lot of beautiful stuff you know but we're not nearly as interesting and beautiful enough to justify our destructiveness there's a whole lot of other interesting beautiful stuff too and you know matter and energy are conserved newton teaches us that so it's going to always be something here but what we ought to see it feels to me like what we need to do is to see if we could earn the right to be here for a little while longer and the way we could do that would be by not stomping all over what it is that that ultimately we are just step more lightly right so so yeah something will persist and something of us will be in what persists but but we have a chance to to make that more interesting and more beautiful um but we have to overcome some of what it is that makes us truly truly dangerous okay um and you know i'd like to think that we can you know um well i have another great old teacher another condition of possibility missal miyoshi um who's my teacher my first year in graduate school and by the end of his life he had become he was always a curmudgeonly kind of dude like he would i remember class he used to say always complain you know for him that was like an ethical imperative you know never you know but but he started writing this really beautiful stuff on ecology and at the end of his life he was saying well you know now that i'm 80 years old he says what gives me comfort is the idea that the earth will outlast us you know and um i i would like to you know i i i'd like for us to hang around as long as we could but you have to you have to earn that you know the earth is only going to take so much so and we are earth it's courageous we're two from the good black dirt right so so we have to you know the the biggest insult prospero hurls at caliban is when he says thou earth okay well in your mind that's an insult i'm a cl you know me i am whatever you say i am it's a quote rockin you know right um so we could claim what it is as fundamental in us as earth and develop an ethical comportment towards earth that is predicated on the idea of like preservation and gentleness rather than ownership you know then you know we we have a chance and everything that falls under the rubric of anti-blackness of misogyny of the the brutalization of indigenous people it's all goes back to that you know it is both it's it is it's essential to that and at the same time it's it's an effect of that so so these are all this is what we have to study this is what we have to practice um and obviously you know it's hard but but it's not like we don't know okay so oh my god so um so i have a question kind of relating back to kind of the concepts of the war against selectiveness and the word against attorney so one thing that uh is i am not self-sufficient and so it made me think of something i had heard someone else say and they were saying that i am not easy to love and then that is a good thing that is okay that is okay that my community has to work to love me um and so i kind of want to just know what your thoughts on that position are do you think those two make sense together so the i am not easy to love on the one hand and what was the definition i am not self-sufficient i need other people it's funny how the brain works because now it's like how can i how can i address the question because my head is just filled with like billie holiday singing easy to love so i'm like what is what does this mean keep going yeah help me so i'm thinking about if i might have forgotten what i was gonna say but if we're thinking about the fact that you need community survive right if that is you know like an aspect that is just necessary as a whole then isn't it in our benefit to be easy to love right doesn't that help us out because then we have a community who can love but right that also doesn't make sense because then your community isn't really loving you right because you're changing yourself so that your community all of you so that was kind of it feels counterintuitive i guess that's why i wanted to ask this question um well i no i i well i would say i do i absolutely believe in the necessity and also the general possibility of being easy to love you know um i was in the airport in in in dc yesterday on my way here it was it's just typical airport thing and you see this young couple there and they had two little kids and the little boy was just running through the airport and this lady was sitting on the other side of him at another table and she was just smiling and i was like okay well that for her that little boy was easy to love you know what see this produces tremendous ethical dilemmas because what we seems like what we would want to do is we want to try to make an argument for for the general recognition of what's easy to love right like you you want to figure out is there a way for me to look at people that enhances it doesn't make them easier to love but that enhances my capacity to recognize that they are easy to love how can i pro can i is that a skill i can acquire can i learn to look at people different so that they're becoming but then but then it produces a dilemma well are you saying you want to learn how to look at putin you know or at you know whoever you know it's complicated you know but i do think i don't know it's that's a tough i i feel like see my my trouble is i think y'all talking about always something he's friendly so generous that's another that's a really nice way of saying he talks too and and then i'm like what and i can't stop myself you know it's like i i know but i'm like but this i'm i ain't gonna be able to sleep tonight because because do i want everybody to be easy to love how much bad stuff do you have to do before we want to revoke you know your capacity to be easy to love right like these are these real what makes it what is it what makes people do the kinds of things that they do that makes them no longer easy to love usually the answer is pretty simple lack of love right so so what look this is why you know the the the the major religions in the world across the board are deeply committed to a set of formulations about the nature and capacity and the work of forgiveness right that's why that's why people work on that because it's basically like within the tradition that i was raised in we are sinners you have to be forgiven you know and what is it that has to be forgiven you know great french philosopher jacques derrida forgiveness ain't really forgiveness unless it is forgiveness of the unforgivable easy forgiveness ain't nothing you have to be able to forgive the unforgivable i mean we're in south carolina and i when i think of south carolina i think of you know mother bethel right and i remember some of my colleagues in black studies you know were mad at the families of those people who were killed because they forgave i was like as if they suffered from some sort of ignorance or false consciousness or that they were pressured politically i'm like well well you know what if it's just that they had a deep deep deep deep understanding of the necessity of this practice of forgiveness and what if at a certain point their forgiveness actually is needs to be understood by some of us as that which we must forgive right it's deep now see it's just deep i don't know i don't know i do know that it just feels better to imagine being easy to love and uh and and i think that that feels like something we should all attempt to to cultivate and it feels like we should all not only try to be easy to love but try to give other people as much help as we could possibly give them so that they can be easy to love too you