Can America ever truly face its racism – both past and present – for what it truly is? Or is the history of forced migration, bondage and slave labor, legal apartheid, incarceration and horrific state violence too much for it to survive such a revelation? Can it endure the psychic shock and endeavor in some kind of pursuit of truth or reconciliation? Or will it simply implode, come apart at the seams and make way for something new? Something which, hopefully, would not have genocide running through its veins? Langston Hughes tells of a man urging us to “let America be America again,” but Hughes is not so sure such an America ever existed. Neither should anyone today.
These are just few questions conducive to a vast, intricate Black Radical Imagination. The concept is not a new one, but may raise more eyebrows now than in quite some time. With the Black Lives Matter movement insisting that the struggle for African America’s humanity is not over, there is incontrovertibly both more to fight for and more to imagine. The phrase itself is, as this roundtable suggests, amorphous, slippery. For some it might conjure up images of jazz singers decrying lynching. For others it might be young graffiti artists stealing across train tracks, leaving dynamic anti-police missives on walls. In all cases it is pregnant with dynamic, dangerous potential far more deserving and substantive than the vague, hollow promise of “the American Dream.”
Walidah Imarisha is an author, poet activist and educator who has taught at Portland and Oregon State Universities. Her writing has appeared in several books and anthologies. Most recently she has co-edited Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (AK Press/IAS) and is the author of Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption (AK Press/IAS).
Jonathan Horstmann is a recording artist, social justice activist, videographer, actor, and illustrator based in Austin, Texas. He is one half of the futurepunk group BLXPLTN. The group’s first album Black Cop Down was released in the fall of 2014 and received wide critical acclaim. Their new album, New York Fascist Week, will be released in 2016.
Robin D.G. Kelley is the author and editor of more than ten books on the subject of radical history, art, music and the Black struggle around the globe. These include Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press), Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (The Free Press), and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press). He is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.
The three were kind enough discuss with Red Wedge their takes on the meaning, history and potential of the Black Radical Imagination.
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Just starting out very broadly: using the term “Black Radical Imagination” can come off as somewhat nebulous to the uninitiated and practitioners alike. How would you describe the Black Radical Imagination? What comes to mind – both in a contemporary and historical sense – when you hear that term?
Walidah Imarisha: When I think of the term “Black Radical Imagination,” I think of that force that has kept Black folks not only alive physically, but able to dream of new and better worlds while their bodies dwelled in hell. It is the Black Radical Imagination that also gave our ancestors the fortitude to pull those better worlds out of the ether and painstakingly build them into our lived realities.
I also think about the responsibility, right, and privilege those who came before us claimed for us to do the same, to envision new just futures, and then do the hard work of bringing them into existence. We can’t build what we cannot first imagine, and so our survival is our Black Radical Imagination time traveling, bringing us the resistance of the past, bringing us the brilliance of the future. As was said in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, we are the dreamer and the dream.
Jonathan Horstmann: I think Black activists have always thought outside the box when it comes to organizing for radical equality. Think of hip-hop's origins. Think of Black Lives Matter tactics. We create global cultural movements, we shut down freeways. The Black voice is forced to be imaginative because otherwise it will be silenced.
Robin D.G. Kelley: By employing the phrase the “Black Radical Imagination” in my book Freedom Dreams, I was referring to the ways in which Black Leftists, some nationalists, feminists, surrealists, etc., envisioned collectively, in struggle, what a revolutionary future might look like and how we might bring this new world into being. Contrary to misreadings of my book, I was not referring to some kind of dreamstate but arguing that we cannot divorce critical analysis from social movements. It is not enough to imagine a world without oppression (especially since we don’t always recognize the variety of forms or modes in which oppression occurs), but understanding the mechanisms or processes that not only reproduce structural inequality but make them common sense, and render those processes natural or invisible. The Black Radical Imagination is not a thing but a process, the ideas generated from what Gramsci calls a “philosophy of practice.” It is about how people in transformative social movements, moved/shifted their ideas, rethought inherited categories, tried to locate and overturn blatant, subtle, and invisible modes of domination.
Robin D.G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams
But what makes it “Black Radical”? What is the Black Radical Tradition? Cedric Robinson describes it as “the revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people” and not merely formed by capitalist slavery and colonialism. It questions the capacity of racial capitalism to re-make African social life and succeed in generating new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. Black revolts, the expression of the Black radical imagination, were not necessarily formed by the logic of Western capitalism. But has modern racial capitalism formed in the afterlife of slavery so thoroughly shaped our consciousness as to make the kind of radical epistemologies Robinson identifies almost impossible to produce? Consider just how easy it is to fall into neoliberal logic of racial uplift, entrepreneurship, “branding,” or even the restoration of the liberal Keynesian welfare state as our movement’s main objective! This is why discovering and recuperating the Black radical tradition/imagination is so necessary – not in order to reproduce it but to understand its logic and fundamental demand: a complete critique of Western civilization and, as Fanon put it, a disordering of our current (colonial) social order.
That said, woman of color feminisms, certain autonomous and indigenous movements in the Americas, best grasp/exhibit the black radical tradition, what it means to go there, to the root. For example, The Combahee River Collective statement was not a call for a race and gender integrated social democracy but a deeper disordering of racist, capitalist heteropatriarchy that required a remaking of the whole of life, of centering life on multiple forms of reproduction and the body and pleasure. It argued that a non-racist, non-sexist society could not be created under capitalism, nor could the socialism alone dismantle the structures of racial, gender, and sexual domination. The struggle wasn’t just the public fight in the streets or the public fight for representation, nor was it just socialism defined as providing resources in a very public way – decent jobs, collective labor. The Statement made connections between production, reproduction, household labor, the exploitation of children, sexual violence and sexual freedom – issues that rarely find a place on the agenda of a lot of Black nationalist organizations, let alone socialist ones.
Over the past few years there seems to be a resurgent interest in wider circles about notions like Afrofuturism, the Afropunk movement, so on and so forth. What do you think this can be attributed to? Is it the rise of Black Lives Matter or are there other factors at play as well? How much do the cultural differences between our time and, say, the Sixties, shake out in terms of this current artistic moment?
Walidah: I think these pieces have always been there, these are just the names we have hung on them at this juncture. This is ancient knowledge, whether it is the non-linear way different African cultures thought of time as explored in the anthology Black Quantum Futurisms, or Sun-Ra’s Saturn ciphers. We have always manifested these ideas, whether it was W.E.B. Du Bois writing science fiction in his short story “The Comet,” or Bad Brains created hardcore. I grew up as a Black person listening to punk music and reading science fiction, and it felt to me these were the places where I had the opportunity to claim myself and make of me what I would. Where I could step beyond what I was being told I was by the larger society as a Black woman, and instead decide for myself who I will be.
Octavia's Brood, edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha
I think movements for justice always feed art and creativity, and vice versa. So absolutely Black Lives Matter is part of that. As my Octavia’s Brood co-editor adrienne maree brown talks about, even the name is visionary science fiction, because to the mainstream, Black lives don’t matter. But we can dream of that world, we can envision a world where they do, and then we connect with the ways that world has been dreamt of and build by those who came before us, and add our pieces to it. Black Lives Matter on their website a few months ago asked folks to submit responses to the prompt “In a world where Black lives matter, I imagine…” They were offering all of us the opportunity to engage in collective ideation, so we can begin to pull that world into existence.
Jonathan: Blackness has long been exoticized, and not with the most convenient consequences to say the least. I am wary of this resurgent interest in “all things Black” unless it translates into actions taken towards Black liberation.
Robin: I cannot say for sure, only speculate. First, I can’t see a direct correlation between Afrofuturism and the rise of Black Lives Matter because I am of the minority opinion that neither is so new. Versions of Afrofuturism were already here, embraced, debated, struggled over throughout much of the 20th century. My chapter on surrealism in Freedom Dreams gestures at this, but so does the first chapter “In Search of the New Land” which links Sun Ra and Marcus Garvey. Afrofuturism is wonderful; it is also a new word for a longer Black radical tradition of Marronage, seeking out free space, liberated territory. Read Neil Roberts’s remarkable book, Freedom as Marronage and you will see this pretty clearly.
Second, I don’t see Black Lives Matter as a sudden break from the movements that arose in the 1990s and early 2000s in opposition to Clinton-era neoliberalism. True, the eruption in Ferguson gave the movement against police violence a boost, but organized struggle against police violence goes way back, and many of those activists worked on a variety of racial, economic, social justice issue. I contend that they helped lay the foundations for the Battle in Seattle (1999), the U.S. Social Forum, Immigrant rights demonstrations of 2006, and ultimately Occupy. They include the Labor/Community Strategy Center and the various organizations they formed (i.e., the Bus Riders Union), POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), Critical Resistance, SOUL (School of Unity and Liberation), the Black Radical Congress, Organization for Black Struggle (St. Louis), the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the Los Angeles Community Action Network, Miami Workers Center, Domestic Workers United, to name but a few.
The media is not interested in the genesis of movements or history; spontaneity gets higher ratings. But if you just scratch the surface a little, you’ll find that members of these organizations had some relationship with the current uprising – either as mentors or leaders of the new movements, including Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers and 67 Suenos, We Charge Genocide, the Dream Defenders, The Black Youth Project 100, and the Community Rights Campaign in L.A. Indeed, just consider the fact that the three women who founded Black Lives Matter were movement veterans and had led organizations that specifically focused on immigrants and undocumented workers. Opal Tometi, herself the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, runs Black Alliance for Just Immigration; Alicia Garza, formerly director of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), went on to join the staff of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is made up of mostly Caribbean, African, Latina childcare and household workers; and Patrisse Cullors, a former lead organizer of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and founder of the Community Rights Campaign, which defends Latino and black students from police harassment and the increasing use of the criminal justice system to manage student behavior. Patrisse is now founding director of Dignity and Power Now, an organization is dedicated to protecting incarcerated people and their families in Los Angeles.
I can imagine that my answer might be read as an evasion of the question. On the contrary, I think we often err on the side of seeing movements erupting from elan or cultural trends without paying attention to organizing. We continue to do this at our peril, and when we do we follow the bourgeois media’s lead.
Of course, as with anything that is created by people of color, there is a massive pull to sanitize African or African-American artistic expression and place it within a context that is very safe for a culture industry that likes to present itself as “color blind.” Would you say that’s a danger with this new artistic wave too? Do you think there’s a way in which the Radical Black Imagination bristles against being metabolized in such a way?
Walidah: I think the word “radical” is incredibly important in the phrase Radical Black Imagination. As Angela Davis tells us, radical literally means to get to the root of things. To understand something on a foundational fundamental level. If that is truly in practice, that cultural manifestation can’t be sanitized, because as I said before the roots of our Radical Black Imagination are in the vast cultural galaxy that has and does exist in Africa, in the freedom dreams of enslaved Black folks and the cultures and communities of visionary resistance they built, in the Black Liberation-era imaginings of what self-determination and global autonomy would look like. We know our roots have been grown in blood; it is an integral part of its essence and once we know that, it cannot be removed.
Still from video for BLXPLTN's single "FEMA"
Jonathan: The danger lies in allowing yourself or your work to be sanitized. Radical critique is woven into the fabric of what this project does, and if that is taken away you no longer have BLXPLTN. That's not to say that we don't want to create work that is light and fun, but even then I believe a rock band comprised of people of color is a political statement in and of itself. Every day that we live through without being arrested or killed is an act of revolution. We're not making any deals with the devil. In the end standing as Black and proud will always make you more than a few enemies, but having enemies is nothing new to our people.
Robin: Not sure I understand the question, nor do I think there is such a thing as a singular Radical Black Imagination. Nor do I believe the culture industry sees itself as “color blind.” Often the most reactionary elements of the “culture industry” plays into racist representations with all deliberate speed and no apology, if they believe there is money to be made. I’m less worried about how radical artists try to negotiate the culture industry or how that industry manages political content than with our continued investment in the industry itself and the kind of abject individualism that so many of us subscribe to in the name of being “radical.” First, there are valuable lessons from the Black Arts Movement and other movements of the need to withdraw from the industry, to create actual (and virtual) spaces outside of control or commodification. This is happening and worth talking about, but most of the folks I know would rather talk about Kendrick Lamar. That’s fine but limited politically.
Second, I keep coming back to collective movement, collective art, movement identities. We’ve come to believe that social media is, ipso facto, an expression of the “social” or the collective. Yes, it is a remarkable tool for making global connections, organizing, and seeking out alternatives to corporate media. However, there is a counterproductive tendency in social media and the “blogosphere” to not think and struggle collectively, but rather make pronouncements from one’s perch, and when there is push back or critique, to call the critic a “hater.” This is a new American phenomenon I can’t get my head around. And the implications for art are enormous. It basically means that artists need not be accountable, and they protect themselves from critique by having a following on Twitter or Facebook that function like a kind of gang. For example, when I published my essay “Empire State of Mind” that delved into Jay-Z’s entanglements with sweatshop labor in producing his clothing line, or his unwitting backing of privatizing water in Africa under the guise of philanthropy, or Alicia Keys’ refusal to join the cultural boycott of Israel on the specious argument that her music will bring Israelis and Palestinians together in a big lovefest, I received much push back for “dissing” artists who are doing such good. Really? I guess I’m old school and can’t separate the material realities of exploitation from art.
On the other hand, do you think there’s possibility for these types of radical, Black and proud narratives to reach across and shift non-Black folks’ (Arabs, Latinxs, radical white folks, etc.) ways of thinking? What’s the difference between this and what we would call co-optation?
Walidah: With Octavia’s Brood we came up with the term visionary fiction, which is fantastical writing (whether it be sci fi, fantasy, speculative fiction, horror, etc.) that helps understand existing power structures and helps us imagine new just futures. We also came up with principles of visionary fiction – that change is collective, decentralized, that it focuses on people. That it centers those who have been marginalized, especially those who sit at the intersections of identity and oppressions (like queer and trans folks of color, like differently abled undocumented immigrant folk). If we are operating with shared principles, and have a mutual dream of freedom, then we will always have a center to return to.
I think dreams of freedom resonate with all those who want justice. This is where multiplicity comes in, and why I believe science fiction becomes incredibly helpful, because it allows us to see that instead of one “right” future, there are infinite futures, in a universe that is infinitely expanding. Instead of the one “right” way to liberation, there are as many paths are there human beings past, present, and future.
Jonathan: The shifts are already taking place. If you look at the BLM movement, the non-white allies totally get that they have skin in the game. In the fight for liberation we must prop up the most oppressed. We must work towards that end. There is something very encouraging about a lot of today's kids. They seem to understand a bit better than our generation that until Black trans folks are liberated we are all oppressed.
Robin: Embracing, acting on, and furthering radical thought is never cooptation. No one should have a copyright on a radical critique of the world and visions of how to enact that critique. What we think of as the Black Radical Imagination or the tradition has not only informed other struggles –Palestinians, Egyptians, indigenous movements, movements across Latin America and Asia, as well as “radical white folks,” but one must also acknowledge that those movements elsewhere have informed what we think of as Black radical movements and thought. I can’t go into it now, but it is hard to imagine T. Thomas Fortune, Lucy Parsons, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, etc., without Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Trotsky, or Che Guevara, or Rimbaud, or M. N. Roy and Sen Katayama. Consider George Jackson’s identification with Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qaseem’s “Enemy of the Sun,” one of several poems he wrote out from a book he read in prison? A book, incidentally, published by the Black run radical Drum and Spear Press out of D.C.? None of this is cooptation. This is called solidarity.
Solidarity is becoming increasingly distant in a political atmosphere that can only see white people at “allies” and not comrades, or only see anti-Black racism as the only thing worth fighting for, or questions whether or not Black people should support struggles of people who have not succeeded in quashing all vestiges of anti-Black racism. It is a high standard, especially since our own communities – I’m talking about Black people – have continued to reveal lingering signs of anti-Black racism. Comradeship is not built on some metaphysics of race or some shared experience of oppression. Comrades are made in struggle, and they are never numerous and they don’t necessarily look like us. Comrades recognize that white people are a fabrication – and for that matter, so are we as Black people, and indigenous people, as Latinos and Asians. Yes, we’re real with real desires and cultures and (contested) beliefs and histories, but we are forced to always remake ourselves in relation to Others, to whiteness, to racism/sexism/homophobia. People of Color is not an identity but a relationship defined by racism, dispossession and imperialism. I’m not saying we’re just “people” or making some claim to universalism, but rather we need to recognize that as long as “difference” is structured in dominance, we are not free and we are not “made.” Making revolution requires making new identities, and that means new relationships and learning from each other. That is not cooptation.
This interview appears in Red Wedge No. 2, "Art Against Global Apartheid," available for purchase at the Red Wedge shop.
Walidah Imarisha is an author, poet activist and educator who has taught at Portland and Oregon State Universities. Her writing has appeared in several books and anthologies. Most recently she has co-edited Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (AK Press/IAS) and is the author of Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption (AK Press/IAS).
Jonathan Horstmann is a recording artist, social justice activist, videographer, actor, and illustrator based in Austin, Texas. He is one half of the futurepunk group BLXPLTN. The group’s first album Black Cop Down was released in the fall of 2014 and received wide critical acclaim. Their new album, New York Fascist Week, will be released in 2016.
Robin D.G. Kelley is the author and editor of more than ten books on the subject of radical history, art, music and the Black struggle around the globe. These include Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press), Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (The Free Press), and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press). He is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.