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Professor Peter James Hudson is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His research interests lie in the history of the relationship between white supremacy, capitalism, and Pan-African thought. He has written a book called "Bankers and Empire" about Wall Street's expansion into the Caribbean. He is currently working on two projects, one being a biography of George Padmore and the other focusing on black people's engagement with Marxism and Pan-African thought. Professor Hudson grew up in Vancouver, Canada, where he experienced racism and developed an interest in indigenous land rights. So welcome to the Emancipatory Thesmologies podcast. Today we're speaking to Professor Peter James Hudson. I'm not going to give a traditional CV introduction, but I'm going to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, which we like to do on the podcast, so briefly, if you would, well, what do you do and why do you do it? Well, first of all, thanks for having me on and thanks for starting with a quite difficult question. I'm currently an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. I recently moved there from the Departments of African American Studies and History at UCLA. My academic training is in American Studies, but I've been flitting between African American Studies and History Departments, now Geography Departments, which I think gives you a sense of kind of where I'm at in a disciplinary sense. I think in the broader sense, my research interests are in the general history of the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism, on one hand, and the history of Pan-African thought as it's tried to grapple with how black people have had to deal with the history of white supremacy and capitalism. I have a book that came out a while ago called Bankers and Empire, How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean, which is a history of the expansion of Wall Street into Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama, other places in the early 20th century Caribbean, looking at a lot of institutions that you might know, like Citibank and JPMorgan Chase, and I'm currently working on two projects. One is a political and intellectual biography of the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore. The second initially began as a kind of history of racial capitalism, but has since morphed into a project tentatively titled Black Marxism's A Global History, which understands the kind of history, which is about the kind of history of engagements of black people with Marxism, and specifically how that's been dealt with through black nationalists and Pan-African thought, so from the early 20th century up to the present. The racial capitalism piece is just a section of that, as opposed to the project being all about that. How did I come to these questions? I think in the first instance, like a lot of people, if you're born black in this society, you kind of have a spiritual choice of either accepting the conditions around you and deciding you want simply a good job, and you'll acquiesce to the normative conditions of racism and capitalism that you're confronted with every day, which is I think what a lot of people do, or you have a crisis, and you realize that you're a perennial outsider in the world. But even beyond that, as an individual thing, you realize that there's these forces that are generating inequalities, generating difference in its most negative and violent aspects, and generating a world that is fundamentally, I think, unequal and unfair, and so you have, I think, to make a decision about how you're going to respond to those things, and sometimes that decision has to be very practical based on the fact that one needs to survive. I feel like I've been fortunate enough that I've been able to turn that decision into a kind of pursuit of trying to understand myself in the world and understand the world, and then as an academic, becoming someone who can devote myself not only to researching and teaching on those subjects, researching and writing on those subjects, but teaching on those subjects, and so hopefully creating a space for younger people to come in who are asking the same questions and to kind of support their work in that. Yes, that was great, and we're going to get to all the racial capitalism and Pan-African stuff, but maybe where did you grow up? Yes, good question. Situate the black man. Yes, yes, and that's an important part of the story. I was born in Edmonton, Canada, which is kind of the capital of the Prairie Province of Alberta, and then moved to Vancouver on the west coast of Canada in British Columbia when I was nine, I think, and just to give you a sense of what Vancouver is, I think there's some parallels between here and there, both settler colonies, the fact that the province is called British Columbia gives you a sense of its history, the city, the name Vancouver is after George Vancouver, the discoverer of the city, and almost every street name is after Trutch, and you name it, there's a settler or an English hero who's behind it, and Vancouver as a city and British Columbia as a province, I mean, obviously, there's an indigenous population of native Canadians, there's the white settler population in Vancouver over the last 30 years, there's been a growing Asian, especially East Asian population, so now the demographic of the city of Vancouver is about 50-50 Asian and white, and there's been historically a black population, but historically it's been a tiny black population, so it's been something like .05% of the entire province, and the first group of black immigrants to the city and to the region were African Americans, some who came up from Oklahoma during the 1920s and 1930s, during the Dust Bowl era, others who came from San Francisco, aboard a ship called the Commodore, who were fleeing racism in California, and who were also, I think, were kind of adjacent to the gold rush, and then there's been small groups of largely Caribbean people from the British West Indies who have arrived in the city over the years, and then most recently, I think in the last, again, 10 or, I'd say about since the late 80s, early 90s, you've seen increasing populations of East Africans and West Africans, mainly Somalis, a few Ethiopians, and then some Nigerians, so the black population has always been small, there hasn't necessarily been a large, a concentrated black population. In the 50s, there was a community in Vancouver called Hogan's Alley, but it was only about 500 families, if that, largely from the US, and that community was destroyed when they built a freeway, as they do through the city. So I grew up in an environment where, it's funny, because people know about blackness because it's in the media, but they don't know about black people, and so it's generally an all-white environment, and I have to say that my early understandings, or my early thoughts about race and racism came not, I mean, you know, you grow up, you experience racism, though, in a place like that, though you don't always understand what it is, and you don't have a sense of what the history of why these things are happening, or why certain labels are attached to you, and so for me, it was really, in the first instance, I think, trying to make sense, in a very half-thought way, of the conditions of indigenous people of the Native American people, Native Canadian people, excuse me, in the region, and trying to understand their experience of land dispossession, their marginalization in society, and the kind of general Canadian racism in popular culture in the state against the indigenous populations, and so not, you know, that was, I think, probably my first sense of difference, not simply as an individual thing, but as a question of structure and power, and then I think one of the profound things that happened to me was, I used to walk to school when I was in elementary school, through this alley, and elementary would be primary, primary school, exactly, exactly, so I must have been about, I mean, I think primary school would have gone to, like, what we call seventh grade, I think, so I would have been like, seven years old, or something, eight years old at the time, and I used to walk through this alley, and there was a guy who used to accost me, an older man in the alley, not a black man, no, not a white man, no, oh, an older Japanese man, okay, and I would be walking through, and he would always acknowledge me, and I would acknowledge him, like, okay, crazy old man, whatever, and then he would grab me, and he'd look at me, and he's like, you're not white, okay, and I'd be like, okay, you know, and I started talking to him over time, and then at one time in high school, interviewed him, and he was born in Japan, had come to Canada, was living in a little fishing village called Steveston, where the Japanese community kind of controlled, well, not really controlled, but had a big stake in the fishing industry, and then during the Second World War, they took all his property, put him, interned him and his family in camps, and he lost everything, and then when he got out, had to start again, and he was the first person who really explained to me, or talked to me about how racism operated, you know, and also made me realize, or think about racism that wasn't simply like an individual encounter with somebody, but there was an entire state apparatus that had been mobilized to dispossess this individual and his family, and there was, I think, you know, with the Japanese-Canadian community, a lot of shame, obviously, around the internment, to the point where, I don't know what percentage of Japanese-Canadians would not marry other Japanese-Canadians, they married white, you know, and tried to assimilate into society, and so, you know, those kind of moments, as a young person, had a kind of profound impact on me, but I really don't think it was until about 1992 that something clicked in my head that really led me on a certain pathway. At that time, in Canada, there was a massive confrontation between the Mohawk Warrior Society in Eastern Canada and the Canadian government over the attempt to expand a golf course on traditional Indigenous lands, and so there's a... It would be a golf course. Of course it's a golf course, what else would it be, right? And so there was a standoff there that all of Canada was kind of caught up in, and the average white Canadian, somebody had to take a side and to think seriously about Indigenous land rights, and this is a time where Indigenous groups across the country were contesting the reservation system and the land allotments that they had been given by the Canadian government, and what turns out in the province of British Columbia, in particular, most of that land hadn't been ceded, so it was in the kind of legal ambiguity, and Indigenous groups were like, okay, we're going to take you to court to get our land back, effectively, and that's actually what happened with a lot of communities. How old were you in 92? You can't ask a gentleman a question like that. I'm just trying to... In 92, I was like 19 or something like that. Okay, so you were just out of high school. Yeah, yeah, and I just started... I mean, when I finished high school, I was kind of drifting. I had no idea what I was doing. I was at this time in a community college trying to figure it out. I thought maybe I would work in restaurants. That seemed like a good thing. So there was the confrontations with the Mohawk. There was the Iraq War, where in Vancouver, like around the world, there was huge protests against the invasion and the kind of... By YFN? Yeah, yeah, but I mean, everyone, yeah. There was also the LA riots that happened that year, after the beating of Rodney King and the LA Rebellion. And when I was in a community college called Langara, where again, I was just drifting, and I walked past this table, you know how students set up their tables. The drumming seems somehow appropriate. Yeah, well, it will be back on the... Do you want me to rap over it or anything? Can you? No, I absolutely cannot. No poetry will happen. I can file. Yeah, but I think it was in the spring of 1992, I was walking to class, and there was a group of students who were tabling. And one of them said to me, what are you doing for Black History Month? And I said, for what? Because I had literally never heard of Black History Month. And they're like, brother, it's February. Come into consciousness. Right, and it was literally like that. And so they're like, well, we're showing this video, a documentary. Why don't you come and join us? So they showed a documentary. It was, I think it was episode 10, I think, which is called A Nation of Laws. It's a documentary called Eyes on the Prize, which is a history of the civil rights movement. It's an amazing, amazing... We'll put on a link to that. Are they open access? Probably not, but I mean, I think on the PBS website, you can at least see what it is and get access to the episodes. I think on YouTube, you might be able to find some illegal copies of it. But you won't find any illegal copies. If you find your way there, you'll enjoy this. Exactly, but we don't. But so the episode they showed me was called A Nation of Laws. And the first part of the episode was about the FBI's war against the Black Panther Party. And the second part of the episode was about the Attica prison revolt, which you probably know about. And watching both of those blew my mind. Like, I'd never experienced or seen anything like that. And I think it put everything that I'd been kind of thinking about into a certain perspective. And it was really from that moment on, I was like, I need to read. I need to figure out who I am in this world. I need to understand this world. And so it was that moment of consciousness that, you know, inevitably, not inevitably, eventually led me to doing a PhD, led me to the kind of questions that I'm still working through. And really just changed my life. Were your parents in academia? My dad was an elementary school teacher. And my mom was a social worker. Two of the best professors we have out there. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So a lot of the reading that you did, did the literature have to come from outside of the home? Were you scouring local libraries, community library? I mean, it's funny. My dad actually had a small library that he somehow hadn't shared with me. My dad's from Jamaica. And when he was a student, he had read a little bit of Frantz Fanon. You know, he knew of Marcus Garvey. He had a copy of Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. But there was a weird disconnect that I, you know, when I remember after watching the video, I called him and he's like, yeah, you should go and read the philosophy that Piggy and Marcus Garvey. I'm like, okay, well, why did you wait until I was this age to give me this? And then after that, I think I worked at a bookstore in Vancouver called Spartacus Books. And that was, that served as a kind of library for a lot of activists and young intellectuals at the time, because they had everything from French theory to, you know, black radical stuff to feminist stuff. Is it still around? Yeah, they, yeah, they're still around. They're still around. They moved a couple times, but yeah, they're still there. So that, you know, Saturday mornings working in the bookshop when no one was there and just trying to read everything. A lot of the people I met at that time had, you know, read, they all had their personal libraries and they read more than me. And so every time, you know, they'd mention the name, they'd mention a book and I'd go to a used bookstore to find it, go to the library to find it, you know. And so it was really just the most kind of incredible period of learning that I think I've ever gone through because everything was new to me. And I found there was a good group of people, you know, doing different things and interested in different things, whether it was arts or literature or activist politics or prison abolition or anarchists or socialists. I mean, there was this whole group who just, it seemed, were teachers effectively. And I just, I felt like I tried to absorb everything I possibly could. Yeah. So if we could go back to the Japanese man just for a second. Because I'm just wondering if you think that the you're not white statement, how you perceived it, was it sort of a caution as in like the way you're moving through the world? You're about to get a rude awakening at some point and be disappointed or do you think, I mean, I just want to know what you think his intent behind that declaration was. That's a great question. And the way you framed it is fantastic. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what it was. I think, I'd like to think that for him as one of the few people of color in that part of Vancouver, he felt some affinity for me, just seeing me kind of walk through the streets. Maybe he, you know, I'm not sure. I mean, you know, it's funny because his son is this tremendously famous Canadian naturalist and broadcaster. He's probably, he's known around the world. But I've never seen his son say anything about being Japanese Canadian, talk about race. He can, you know, he can talk to you about, you know, the lifespan of the sperm whale or whatever it is. But, so I don't know what relationship he had with, I know his son bought him a house that I used to go by. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I can only really speak to what it meant for me in a kind of incipient or an early stage of consciousness in my life that, and I think it was only on retrospect that I even recognized the call or the question that he asked as something, you know, but I think, you know, I'm not sure what his intention was, but it propelled me in a way, you know. And you still have a friendship up until today? No, I mean, he passed away years ago and I'm not sure the last time, I mean, we did, I wouldn't even say we had a friendship, you know, that I think I saw him once during high school and then I left the area and this kind of thing. So, I mean, I have no idea if, you know, I thank him in my book, but I don't think he would have been watching me or, you know, maybe he wouldn't even remember me. I mean, it was that kind of interaction. So you're reading all the books, you're getting into Gavi, the Black Panthers, the Yoga Satya Shakur, and your consciousness is being radicalized and then you enter college to do an undergrad in? Uh, yeah, I guess I did that. No? You were still just loitering around for a few more years? I went to, so I was in community college and then I transferred to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, there's two major universities, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University. Simon Fraser University has a kind of history of a tradition of radicalism dating back to the 1960s and it protests against the conservative governments and different forms of activism and had been populated with a lot of, largely Americans, but also British people, radicals who had either fled the states or, you know, come to Canada looking for something different. But I was, at that time, still a fairly poor student. I had some great professors there, but I kind of dropped out for a while. I think the most important thing for me that I did during that time was I started a magazine, that's a very short-lived magazine called Diaspora, the magazine of Black consciousness and culture. That's amazing. Did you bring any copies with you? To South Africa? Yeah. Is there a digital footprint of this? I think some student somewhere has uploaded them online. Yeah, I think one came from them. It's called Diaspora? I think it's called the Magazine of Black Consciousness. That's amazing. So there was only two issues, but it was... He told me you went to Soul Writer. No, no. I mean, I wish I'd learned it would have been a lot easier. I mean, I had writers from, I mean, all over the place, a lot of Vancouver writers. But yeah, I mean, I tried to solicit articles from different people in the city. And so that was, and I really thought that this magazine could do something, and it was part of, I think, a larger wave of kind of self-publishing that had happened in the early 90s, where desktop publishing was more accessible. Printing was really expensive back then. It's a lot cheaper now. But there was a network of small presses across North America who would exchange with each other. And I think a lot of younger black writers and editors were realizing, okay, well, there's no... The existing venues aren't interested in us as black people. They're also not interested in the forms of writing that we're trying to do in terms of trying to think through genre and using theory in a particular way. Trying to write poetry in a particular way. So we just, we did our own thing. And I think for us, and I know talking to a lot of writers and a kind of handful of black writers in Vancouver, there was also this question of like, well, we're in Vancouver. There's no tradition of black writing here. So we tried to find anyone who had ever written about black Vancouver going back to the 19th century. We, you know, if there was a black writer who passed through Vancouver, we would claim them as our own. And then we would try to figure out what is our aesthetic? Is it a Caribbean thing? Is it an African American thing? Is it an African thing? Is it some kind of hybrid? Are we Toronto? Are we in New York? Are we in LA? Are we London? And so we were trying to work out some kind of West Coast or black Pacific aesthetic, you know. Just speaking about the self-publishing and the printing. I mean, a friend and I just have a book that came out that we edited together. Did you bring a copy? Five years. No, I don't think I did, but I'll see if I can get you one. And absolutely all those things that you're speaking about, we've had to deal with now, you know. And not going with the traditional press and having to think about everything from the cost of paper. Are we going to print it on the riser? How are we going to do the binding? Like, you know. How are you going to distribute it? How are we going to distribute it? There's no marketing ring that's waiting to be like, here's this new fabulous book by these people. So it's been a journey over the five years, but we were just saying the other day that we wouldn't have done it any other way because the autonomy we had, the autonomy we could give our authors to write in a particular way, to keep certain conventions that we thought were helpful, but to dispel those that really have no purpose whatsoever, to not have to fit into some sort of like disciplinary boundaries. And at the time that we were starting to do it, there were a lot of friends and colleagues we had who were all starting to publish with like, Duke and, you know, etc. And a friend had actually sent me the review of his book that had gone through Duke and I just found them so violent, like insular. And this was meant to be like, you know, oh, Fred Moulton published with Jews, like they're doing all this radical Black Study stuff. And this is a South African author who's trying to write from their position in a particular place and theorize from there. And the bulk of the reviews was just like, you haven't cited sort of the Black radical canon from the state. So you can't speak about this without having cited the, you know, your Hartman, your Moulton, your etc. And basically forcing you into, you know, which is not the one he was trying to think with. And so for us, we were just like, it's a no-brainer. Self-publishing, you have to get funding. I mean, the Teleketa, so you didn't get to see Rangwatu's films on the Wednesday night, did you? No, I missed that night, yeah. But they're just like a small cultural organization in the city and they have one rival printer. But we were like, we'd rather capacitate an organization that's for us in our community to be able to do this type of work than to go for some big publisher who's basically going to try to fit our ideas into a sort of tradition that they want to represent. So it was a lot of work. But again, we don't regret it. Listen, I love that. And I remain, I'd like to think, a huge advocate of autonomous publishing projects, especially in, well, not just in the Black world, but anywhere, any group. I still, I work closely, pretty closely with the Black Agenda Report. I don't know if you know them. It's an online journal that was begun by Glenn Ford and a number of other people many, many years ago. Glenn has since passed. But it's, I think, really the only independent journal or weekly magazine of Black radical thought that's out there. And they, you know, it's not a commercial project. It's not an academic project. And I don't know where they get their money or how they're able to survive. I think it's fairly precarious. But I think, you know, you need those spaces. And I also completely agree with you with the kind of like Duke hegemony of knowledge, and particularly Black knowledge, where you have a bunch of white editors determining how Blackness and Black critique should be represented. And you have to- And who the pillars of that critique should be, right? Exactly. You have to gesture to Hudson to speak about these ideas. Exactly. And so, I mean, this is something that I'm still thinking about a lot of trying to figure out ways to get back into self-publishing, whether it's, you know, four-page journals or whether it's books or other projects. I think the autonomy of it is so important. And it's disappointing, I think, for me, because I think a lot of, you know, and I get the pressure, but the pressure is to a certain kind of publishing conformity for younger scholars, I think, because, you know, you need Duke for your career. You need the New Yorker for your career. It looks amazing on your CV. You need the monograph. It's in this international, reputable publishing group. Absolutely. But then for those of us who are with tenure or are already marginal within the academic world, why do we have to keep doing that? You know, putting our energies into peer review for journals that we don't necessarily read or just don't benefit us. And I'm not saying that one needs to have these publishing projects that directly benefit the Black community, but I think that they have, you know, going to some of your opening comments or what we talked about before the interview started. We want to almost pay homage to our ancestors and work within a long lineage of Black intellectual and aesthetic and political history that I don't think is recognized by those other places, and that's fine. I don't want them to recognize them. I don't think we or they need that recognition, but we do need our autonomous spaces to invite them down. Yeah. And I think also going back to the conversation we had before, something my mentor, Baby Jesus Peterson, was big on is also this idea that the work that you do will find its time, like, organically. And I think a lot of what happens when you're in this sort of journal, these big publishing places, is that, oh, Black studies is trending now. Or like, oh, everyone is a Black radical feminist. And just, you know, so if you can fit your manuscript into that, that would be amazing. And also another purpose of starting the podcast, what was like your own story of how you come into these questions, is because I think for all of us, the moment our consciousness is ignited is normally a really intimate moment that has nothing to do with, you know, this moment in Duke when all these Black studies books were coming out, et cetera. And I mean, to give you an example, he wrote an article on Kwaito, which is a type of music here, in 1919. He was like, when he wrote it, all his colleagues were like, what are you doing? No one takes Kwaito seriously. It's not even a genre of writing, et cetera. And basically the article died in some corner somewhere. And so when I enter the university, all my peers are like into it now. And they're all trying to go back to Kwaito and what it says about masculinity and about their spatial planning and sort of like the relationship between men and women in the township. And everyone is writing this article. And he was like, I wrote it 14 years ago. No one cares. But it's found its time and it's found its people. Right. And I think a lot of people want to go with what's trending now. So everyone's a decolonial scholar. Everyone's a radical, whatever it is. And I think if we spend more time just caring about what we care about. Absolutely. And just writing from there, we will find our time and our people. That was important for me in Vancouver, because we all realize that Vancouver was the most marginal place on the planet. No one knew where it was. There's no black people there. There's no genres of music or writing that came out of it. So we were like, OK, there's six of us. Who are we writing for? And so in the first instance, I think we're all writing for each other just to make sense of what that place was. But then in the second instance, kind of following what you're saying, we were like, well, somebody hopefully will find this writing a decade from now, 50 years from now and say, oh, there's a tradition here that will help me make sense of where I'm at now. And in some ways, it's funny. Because a lot of the writing that I and other people did in the early 90s is now being discovered by another generation. And they're kind of arguing with it and critiquing it. And so that's gratifying. But again, I think you're right. You can't always chase the trend or chase the money or the prestige. And you've got to have a kind of ethical commitment to the place where you're at and not always look to the centers. For us, it was to Toronto or L.A. or New York or London, even though I eventually left Vancouver. But it was important to do a certain kind of local work while I was there. Yeah. So you had Black Consciousness in the title of the magazine, which we're going to get our hands on. Was Steve Biko, who for us is our compass for Black Consciousness, a part of how you guys were conceiving Black Consciousness then or not really? Not for me. I think he came a little bit later. I think my touchstones at that time in the magazine, I think, were Du Bois and the kind of double consciousness of Du Bois and also trying to work through Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask. OK. And do you remember, of the six of you, sort of where people were from? Diasporically, like, were you all Black people from Canada or were there people sort of who found themselves in Canada from other places? I mean, there's more than six. I think there was some, you know, I'm thinking of one guy. I think his father was African-American, but he was born in the States. I remember one Kenyan guy who had arrived when he was a youth. Quite a few African-Americans, actually, whose parents were African-American. Number of West Indians who have kind of come across. So, yeah, it was really diasporic. And that was, again, the thing for us in Vancouver, where I think given the size of the Black population, I mean, it was really just about Blackness. There was very little way that you could kind of try to make some kind of ethno-nationalist claim for the West Indies or for America or from, you know, there was so few of us that it was just like, you know, we just all got to make something work here. And then there was also a lot of kind of non-Black people of color that we were adjacent to as well. Okay, so we've mentioned Du Bois and Fanon. Sort of just moving with how your interest develops beyond then, and then you get into interracial capitalism. I think some of the big names people know is Robinson, it's C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, maybe Robin DiGiglia as well. But who have been some of the sort of seminal thinkers for you around racial capitalism, whether they're in the academy or outside? Yeah, I mean, I think I'd say that the term was probably my first encounter with it, like I think a lot of people with Sussex or Robinson. And when I wrote Bankers and Empire, I think, you know, the last chapter of the book is called Racial Capitalism. And my understanding of the term was through what I thought my understanding of Robinson was at the time. I had also been, there's an essay that was really influential by I think a Jamaican, I think he's Jamaican, scholar named Norman Gervon, who wrote this pamphlet called Aspects of the Political Economy of Race in the Americas or something like this, which is really brilliant and under read accounting of the production of racial difference in kind of North America, South America and the Caribbean region and explaining how the different geographies of the region combined with the kind of demographics of the region work to produce certain modes of capitalist reproduction and racial reproduction in the entire region. So that was something I would say influential for me. And I think also Frantz Fanon's writing in The Wretched of the Earth and particularly the chapter concerning violence, but in particular the subsection of that chapter on violence in the international context. And somewhere in that, he has that line, you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. And you have to, every time you use a kind of Marxist approach to the colonial situation, it has to be stretched. So that kind of thinking about race and class or racism, capitalism, white supremacy and capitalism was important to me. But also I think Malcolm X fundamentally as somebody who was very clear about those dynamics and he had a line that I think appeared in an interview he did with Alice Haley in Playboy magazine where he says something like, the entire American economy is based on white supremacy. And so to think of- We knew Playboy got that deep. Back in the day, I mean, I heard that their interviews were actually fantastic. Like they interviewed like a lot of NASA public figures and they were very in-depth interviews. So yeah, that's a whole other- You need to revisit all Playboy ads. Absolutely. So Malcolm X, Gervon, I think W.E. Du Bois in The World in Africa. But so after I wrote Bankers and Empire, though, I realized that I wasn't completely satisfied of how this racial capitalism thing was working or how I had used it. It seemed like it was fairly thin. And so I started rereading Cedric Robinson. And as I was rereading Cedric Robinson, I both became kind of increasingly dissatisfied with his account of what he called racial capitalism. But I also started realizing there was a whole other genealogy of racial capitalism that preceded Robinson. You know, Robinson publishes Black Marxism in 1983, and there's a chapter in that book called Racial Capitalism and where he talks kind of- he tries to describe what racial capitalism is doing. But there's this- Before 1983, there's this lineage, and I'm sure you know this and many of your listeners will know this, through South Africa. For me, that lineage, it's in part a kind of response to both communist and liberal accounts of apartheid. So liberal accounts that would say that apartheid can be reformed by reforming capitalism. If you have a better capitalism, it will kind of be- the kind of racial practices of apartheid will dispel. Communists who are saying that, well, apartheid will only end if we abolish capitalism. Then there's a strain of black nationalists who are like, well, this is about race, obviously. But I think we also have to look back to the impact of Pan-African socialism as a kind of early substratum of the kind of growth of ideas of racial capitalism in South Africa. So first, George Padmore's Pan-Africaner Communism, which is a book that's influenced by Du Bois, but also by Edward Norton, but also by Edward Blyden. But then it's a book that has a profound influence on Robert Sabukwe and the kind of birth of the Pan-African Congress and the initial statements on the Pan-African Congress explicitly cite Padmore, right? And so there's that genealogy from Padmore to Sabukwe. But then the term gets kind of explicitly used within the kind of national student movements. And I think it really gets codified by Neville Alexander in his speeches. And he's, you know, a lot of his early, a lot of his writings up until the 1980s, he's very clear that to, you know, to end apartheid, we have to abolish the system of racial capitalism that puts the Black working classes at the kind of bottom of the heap. And so I've been slowly trying to go through that material and make sense of that and make sense of that writing in terms of the history of South Africa. And I think the other person there is Bernard Magubane, whose work has been, whose work I'm going through very slowly and trying to understand it. I also just think that what becomes important, you know, when I see people like Alexander or Sibukwe or the white scholars, Legassic and Hampson, who wrote a really important pamphlet called The Foreign Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa, is that they're, you know, when they're looking at the apartheid system, they're looking at it in terms of its kind of local formations and the very specific histories of capital accumulation in South Africa. And that's how that's contorted and created a black working class and created modes of segregation. But they also understand that, and they also, they understand that in terms of then how the state has to form in a certain kind of militant state that's going to repress black people. But they also understand that in a global context. And, you know, Magubane has an essay where he says, look, South Africa is basically the citadel of racial capitalism. And it's the citadel of racial capitalism, not only because of the kind of domestic formations of apartheid, but because of South Africa's relationship to both Southern Africa and the rest of the continent in terms of the expansion of militarism, the resource extraction and finance, and the extension of South Africa to international centers of finance, London and New York and elsewhere. Understanding then that when we talk about racial capitalism, obviously it's not like this kind of individualized experience of race and capitalism. It's this kind of multi-layered structure of exploitation that ties forms of domestic racial and class reproduction to regional and international imperial structures. And I think that what I see missing in much of the work of people who are espousing racial capitalism now is the kind of methodology and approach that can apprehend all of those layers interacting in a dialogical formation. And that pays the correct respect to the Pan-African socialists that I think birthed that kind of movement. Yeah. So that's really great. And I'm glad you ended there because we have in all sort of our undergraduate courses in which you do South African politics, there's always a theme on race and class, right? And we read sort of all the Negassics, Alexander, but also a lot of pamphlets, right, that are going through the unions, that are going through the labor movements, through the political parties, as are the sort of black consciousness versus the Pan-African versus the African nationalist, et cetera. But we don't think of it as in that concept of racial capitalism, right? And we don't read the sort of Robinson and stuff that is very specific in South African politics modules to the South African context. And actually in the book that we just have out in my chapter, I have a section on racial capitalism and I cited Robinson and Professor Peterson, my mentor, he read it and he was like, he just had a side note and he was like, you know, we're becoming more and more interested in the South African roots of racial capitalism. And seeing as the entire point of this chapter that you're writing is to sort of go into our own black intellectual tradition, you know, maybe we want to read Bjorn Robinson for a minute, which was great for me and sort of doing that work and then going back to the Muggle Bioneers, but also a lot of the ephemera. So I worked at the South African History Archive. And there's such a rich archive of the debates that were happening within unions, within political parties. I mean, we see these people now and we just like, what has become of you? Or that's what I think, because really the debates were so rich and beyond just the sort of two stage national democratic revolution, et cetera, but really thinking about sort of the primacy of, you know, race or class and the exploitation of black South Africans and the relationship between workers and sort of political parties and activists and what a state would look like, in which we had a particular type of emancipation that didn't reproduce. Right. But also when you were speaking, I just thought, and I was trying to look it up, that I do know that my other supervisor, Ahmed Veriava, just contributed to a special issue. So I see it's an Ethnic and Racial Studies that they did on the South African tradition of racial capitalism, which might be really interesting for you to read, seeing as you've read it. You're not, is it not doing what you want to be doing? No, no. I'm going to say something. I know that's based in the States, but I saw a lot of people who contributed. OK, so I'm going to say something and a lot of people are going to be pissed off with me about this. People weren't talking in the United States about the South African tradition of racial capitalism. I wrote a piece in, I think, 2014 that appeared in the Boston Review, which is called, I think, Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat. It was a, I was, the piece was solicited as a response to, I think, an essay by the historian Walter Johnson. And it was in this piece that I started to try to understand the difference between what Robinson was doing and what Neville Alexander was doing. And then it was after that piece came out, and I'm not saying that it was, it was part of a larger upsurge in an interest in racial capitalism that wasn't, that I wasn't responsible for, that people were doing. And then COVID happened and everyone was doing racial capitalism. But the contemporary genealogies of racial capitalism, like the social, ethnic, racial studies journal or whatever it is, are drawn from that. And I'm a little bit miffed sometimes because I don't feel like that piece really gets the credit it deserves. And I think I've, you know, one of the things in writing that piece and even after that piece is I've really felt that Robinson does nothing for us when it comes to understanding racial capitalism. I think if you read Black Marxism very closely, you'll realize it's a funny book because it's an anti-Marxist book. It's a book that doesn't deal with Africa, except in the last couple of pages, in the most cursory rhetorical fashion. It doesn't draw on the history of Pan-African thought in any kind of serious ways. The people who he casts as Marxists in that book, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and C.L.R. James all have their ambivalent relations to Marxists. And Richard Wright, in fact, was an anti-Marxist. His touchstones for the development of racial capitalism are not Africa and the slave trade, really, it's their Europe. And I think, you know, there's a kind of hagiography around Robinson that I've been trying to kind of fight against, not because I don't think he's an interesting scholar, but because I don't think he's a god. And so I've kind of lost a lot of academic friends for that pushback there. And I think that there's been an attempt, and this sounds almost paranoid, but to kind of erase me and some of the work that I've tried to do around racial capitalism and the South African context by the Robinson accolades. And I think the thing that I think is important for me is what I'm saying in that piece, and what I've been trying to say is, read the South Africans, you know? And what I'm seeing is people are now trying to colonize the South African stuff for their own career. No one has any interest in this stuff. And I can see they don't have any interest in this stuff because they have no interest in South Africa. And what I have, I've only been here for a few days. I'm not going to say in any way, know anything about the South African context, but there's some terrible things happening around race and capitalism that where there seems to be a specific continuity from apartheid. So we have a nice little black bourgeois class, you know, black political class that's in power. I don't see that the mining companies have relinquished any control. I don't think, see that white power has relinquished any control. I see that something like, you know, was it 33% unemployment currently in South Africa and the majority of them, it's like 66% in the black population. I see Indian shop owners shooting black youth in Soweto. I see this kind of crime that I think is a result of this unemployment and this unresolved question of apartheid. And I think that if you look at Magubane and you look at Neville Alexander and you understand that, you know, the claims that if the black working class wasn't emancipated, then it wouldn't make a difference if apartheid ended. And I think that's true. And it's disappointing to see a lot of North American scholars now seizing on this South African racial capitalism trope and making careers out of it without really wanting to replicate the emancipatory project that the critique of racial capitalism developed out of. So great. You have your journal, Social and Economic Studies. I hope you get tenure. I hope you are the racial capitalism expert. But, you know, black people are still fucked around the world. Yeah. And I think there's sort of three types of questions that that brings up for me. One is one of method. And I think it's important that we speak about that. And the second is probably how we demarcate sort of the black archive intellectually. But also just to come back to the last point that you were making, the example I was trying to give about how it's taught pedagogically here without that center of Robinson or sort of the states is because there's a lot of contestation around, you know, what I'm calling the sort of pioneering of particular terms and concepts, which I suppose has a space in the academy because people want to be, you know, the colonial scholar or the racial capitalism scholar. I mean, I think that's why I also tried to avoid to introduce you as, you know, a scholar of racial capitalism or whatever it is, because it is fundamentally about the questions that we're interested in and the work that we put in around them. But we know that this trend happens, right, and those people are going to be there. So I'm interested to know in this book that you're doing now, tracing the sort of Pan-African and South African roots of racial capitalism, how are you going to trace the archive of sort of material that you engage with? And how are you going to navigate? Because you'll have to sort of the framing of it in a way in which, you know, people are going to, I mean, sort of repetualize it. So that you're like, oh, and this one is, you know, like you said, we had after the student movement, sort of decolonization just exploded. And ever since then, up until now, we've had the steady flow of Latin American scholars, predominantly based in the States, who come here once a year and give these speeches and get large amounts of money. And it sort of made this their brand, right? And not noticing how they're reproducing the very types of sort of patterns of hegemonic placement of certain types of thinking that students were protesting again to begin with. And so I'm guessing that you cannot avoid it because of where you're placed and the sort of circulation that your work will have. But yeah, first, I'm interested in sort of how are you going to like draw the boundaries around the material that you're interested in? Because I think a lot of what's going to be helpful to you is not in any sort of library. And there's not a go-to person. You know, people love to be like, oh, Black aesthetics speak to me. You know what I mean? They like to sign point in those ways. But there's so much that happens, particularly on the continent, in cultural organizations that all these thinkers pass through that is not archived neatly somewhere in a text, per se. Yeah, that's a great question. That actually is something I will need to think about more. I think in the first instance that I'm interested in historiography, or I'm not interested in historiography, I should say. I'm interested in, you know, looking at the kind of texts that were associated with political debates within different moments of the 20th and early 20th century where there's that kind of friction or contest between sometimes Black Marxists and the Communist Party, but more often within Pan-African circles, right? And so I'm going to start with largely the kind of early debates in the Soviet Union on the Negro question, where different Black writers were brought in and trying to thresh those questions out. I think what's most, and I think the other thing I want to do is to think about, well, what does it mean to really think about a Pan-African historiography and a Pan-African methodology? Which is methodologies and historiographies that don't center white narratives of Marxism and really look at, you know, and I think in some cases it will be the kind of pamphlet literature, the kind of marginal material that was produced in kind of Black workers groups in Detroit or in student organizations in the Western Cape or whatever it is, you know? So there's that. I also think that one of the things I'm interested in is a particular conjuncture that I think shifts how the terms of racial capitalism and Black engagements with Marxism are occurring. What's striking to me is the year 1983. This is the year that Black Marxism is published. It's the year that Stuart Hall published his Marxism Without Guarantee essay, where he's basically arguing of the importance of understanding ideology. It's the year that in the Caribbean, the Grenada Revolution failed, and it's seen by many Caribbean scholars to be a kind of moment of the failure of the Caribbean left and the destruction of the Caribbean left with the assassination of Maurice Bishop and others and the death of the New Jewel movement and the US intervention. It's also a moment of where you have that moment of Reagan and Thatcher and the kind of birth of neoliberalism and the moment when Caribbean and African countries are suddenly faced with the debt crisis. In some ways, it's a moment that is a kind of crazy counterrevolution against the history of decolonization, against the history of the kind of Pan-African forces that were such an important part of decolonization. In South Africa, this is where Neville Alexander is really putting forth racial capitalism. But what's crazy is in the next seven years, racial capitalism almost disappears from a kind of South African vocabulary. It seems like it has this upswing, and then it's declined very quickly into the 1990s. You also see then many, many prominent black Marxists are seen breaking with the Soviet Union. Angela Davis, Charlene Mitchell, Manning Marable, Kendra Alexander, all of them kind of lead the Communist Party USA, decide that the Soviet Union, which then collapses, is no longer a vehicle for liberation of any kind. They kind of move towards a certain kind of liberalism. So they end up supporting Bill Clinton against more Bush. And I don't think we ever recover from that moment. What's important about that is I think that black Marxism, the text by Robinson, which comes out in 1983, people will say, well, nobody read it for the next 10 years or so, which is true. And I think in some ways it was a visionary book in the sense that it articulates a kind of anti-Marxist black politics that, and I haven't quite figured out how to articulate this, but then that works in a certain way with a kind of neoliberal critique where the horizon of revolution, as David Scott or other people might say, suddenly recedes. So we're now dealing with a black politics after decolonization where the grand narratives of Marxism no longer work, of state building no longer work. And so where are we? We're on a plane of race without mooring. Cedric Robinson claims that the forms of, I don't think he uses the word anti-blackness, but the forms of racism that we know in the modern world that construct the Negro, construct blackness, exist before the slave trade in the kind of inter-ethnic groupings in Europe. And so you're basically saying that there's this kind of almost metaphysical continuity of racism that exists before slavery up into the present. And so you're detaching it from any kind of, the kind of material formations that people like Eric Williams and Walter Rodney and others have claimed are the origins of racism. So race is floating through all of these kind of times. And so what does it mean then if as scholars, we're embracing that mode of racial formation, as it were, without political economy, without materiality, without, it's superstructure without base. Where are we then? I think there's something dangerous about that because then we're abandoning the black working class. We're abandoning the kind of social forces of capitalism that are producing race and making race into, you know, almost into the kind of Afro-pessimist. Well, I've been waiting here to ask you what you make of the sort of Afro-pessimist critique, perhaps of Marxism, of the sort of Wildersons, et cetera. I mean, first of all, there's a critique of Marxism, which is, well, why would I read Marx? He's a white man. You say, well, you're married to a white woman. So anyway, I mean, I just, I don't get it. And I think, you know, Walter Rodney once said, well, if you don't read Marx because he's white, why do you use electricity? It was harnessed by Edison. Why would you use an AK-47? It was created by a white man. So are you going to throw everything that was there? OK, but to be fair, to be fair, I have my own reservations of the critique, but I think it goes beyond that, right, beyond Marx being white. I think the sort of Afro-pessimist critique that Wilderson and Emkin Ford is that the type of NATO alienation, right, that sort of anti-Blackness holds can't be held with the sort of Marxist critique of capital. And I think that's totally fine because I don't think we need to have a pure understanding of racism through our reading of Marx. I think Marx and the kind of modality of the historical materialism that he offered us was meant to understand a particular formation or part of a particular formation in the economy. And I don't have a problem with that being limited and saying that, you know, OK, Marx doesn't offer us a way to understand white supremacy. He gestures towards the importance of white supremacy and of race. He says things like the, you know, the labor in the white skin will never be emancipated until labor in the black skin is emancipated. In his chapter on primitive accumulation, he has these really stunning passages where he basically says the birth of the modern world is tied to the extirpation of indigenous populations in the America, the torturing of the Asian populations in Indonesia and elsewhere, and the branding of black labor through the slave trade. So he's aware of these kind of things. He, you know, he studies the Civil War and he thinks about the relationship between black workers and white workers. That said, yeah, does he give us a kind of coherent analysis of race in the modern world? Absolutely not. But he gives us a way of understanding the early formation of capital, its reproduction, and its mode of labor exploitation. So I'm willing to take that from him and then try to find other ways of stretching or appending or adding on to Marx through other writers to understand the racial piece. So on the question of blackness and social death? I don't actually have an opinion on that. I mean, you know, people, somebody was saying to me the other day that that comes out of Orlando Patterson's work, but people haven't really read. Well, I was going to say, so the sort of Wilderson social death as opposed to the sort of Patterson social death, which is not as sort of fatalistic and totalizing, I think. Yeah, so part of the thing for me is I'm actually not that interested in blackness as being or identity, you know, I think I was at a time that the earlier time that we talked about in Vancouver was all about white blackness. Did you ever have dreadlocks? No, no, my hair was too silky to do that. But yeah, I didn't. I didn't go. There's certain places that I didn't go. Bob Marley shirts, dreadlocks, into the reggae. Yeah, like reggae, Bob, I can I can listen to some Bob. No, I mean, so I think, I don't know, I don't find I don't find the debates over identity to be kind of methodologically useful in terms of thinking of the history of capitalism and black people, in terms of thinking of contemporary exploitation of black people. And I feel like I'm, you know, be who you are. That's that's cool. I'm not I'm not here to judge how you define your blackness or whatever. And I, you know, if people want to judge me on that, that's that's on them. But it's not that's not the question that I'm at this point trying to to interrogate. That's really interesting. And I when you were speaking earlier about sort of the some of the interactions that you've been having over this week, I mean, Afro pessimism is something that's really taken hold amongst students here. And I think Wilberson's relationship, not only to South Africa, but particularly this university has sort of increased that sort of in that. Oh, this is the center of Afro pessimism? Well, not not really. But I mean, he was here and he writes two of the books. Yeah. And I mean, some people think that, you know, he he took some of the ideas from here without fighting the people from which he took them. But we won't we won't go into that. But I mean, I just think that Afro pessimism has been a very big way in which people have rooted themselves around these questions around racial capitalism, et cetera. But the other has also been abolitionism. So I'm interested also to know what you think of sort of like the Ruthie Gilmore and the abolitionists. You're really trying to drive me into some things. No, I just. Let me say a couple of things. First of all, I've never met Frank Wilberson, the third. And the one thing I would like to say about him is I've seen letters of recommendation he's written for students, and they have been fantastic. And so I don't know what, you know, I don't know if I glean anything from those letters. It's like he's obviously working well with students in a particular way. And I've seen very prominent scholars write terrible letters of recommendation for people. So I can think of this one letter that was just really quite beautiful and engaged with the students. So that said, I've read the Afro pessimism book. And the thing, and I'll say this, is I didn't find it compelling as a piece of writing, as an exploration of identity. I didn't find it deep. I found that he refuses to, you know, he's very quick to reduce every experience into one thing without suggesting that there might be contradictions or layers of unknowing that he might not have as an individual writer. And I wasn't kind of compelled by it in terms of wanting it to make a certain kind of theoretical move. And I think, you know, you can look at a there's a book by a brilliant literary historian who's at the University of Virginia, Deborah McDowell, who wrote a book called Leaving Pipe Shock, which is a kind of memoir of growing up under Jim Crow, which I don't think people read. And I don't think people necessarily will read alongside Wilderson's memoir. But they should look at this because it's a very different account of coming to consciousness, a very different account of one's relationship to blackness, black community. For her, trying to understand the kind of transition from consciousness for her as a young woman going to college, growing up in the South, in Jim Crow, moving to these different kind of places. Her father's relationship to the Bessemer Steel Plant as a working class individual. Like there's so much in that book and it's so beautifully written that I really wish, I mean, I think it's one of my favorite books. So Leaving Pipe Shock, everyone should read it. On the other hand, what's missing to me in Wilderson's account of his own life is a sense of his own past position. And the truth is he's Frank Wilderson III. He's the child of a university provost or dean. He supposedly worked on Wall Street and he has nothing to say about how that class position and the kind of adjacencies that he might have through that class position might actually influence who he's, how he developed a kind of nihilistic theory of blackness. Why are so many of the Afro-Pessimists either light-skinned, married to white women, or from the black bourgeoisie? I think that's a question to ask. Yes. So I want to center those sentiments in ways that won't get both of us canceled around. Embracing ambivalence, which I think is a really big part, sort of just as we think methodologically about what we need to do in the type of work that we're interested in. And so I want us to speak about one last thing I know we've been going on for a while. And that's the article you write on Douglas, right? Because if there's an ambivalent character to speak about, I'm afraid that Douglas would be one of them. And I just want to know what drew you to Douglas. And what can we learn from sort of the ambivalent trajectory of his life in terms of how we orient our own type of writing? You know, because I always think that people speak of the young Marx, the older Marx, and there's this sort of grace that's extended about, you know, people are living in a particular time. So Fernand when he's in Algeria, Fernand when he's in France, but how do we sort of give ourselves that grace, you know, as well? So maybe through Douglas, you can sort of orient methodologically what we can do to hold ambivalence rather than, I think, people trying to purify it in a way in which you have these a true black radical sense of like a true Afro-pessimist. Yeah, no, I think the first thing I would say, not related to Douglas, but in terms of that ambivalence in general, a contradiction in general, I try to tell my students that when you're writing, things don't have to resolve themselves, especially if you're looking at things historically, that you can allow the conflict to just sit on the page and that you don't have to always take the good side. And I think when I was writing Bankers and Empire, it took me a while to realize that I'm writing about all of these white bankers. They're the primary subject of the book. And I had to kind of say, you know what? I know they're all racist, but they operated in different ways at different moments. And sometimes their racism was paternalistic. Sometimes they were actually generous with, say, Cuban or Dominican locals or whatever. And I had to then get away from just wanting to rhetorically cast them as these avatars of the most rapacious forms of racial capitalism into people who were, in some ways, complicated individuals working within the kind of racist structures that they didn't even really know that they existed, but they were born into. And in part, the Douglass piece, which appeared in Boston Review, emerged partly out of Bankers and Empire because there's a chapter on Haiti that's central to the book. And the kind of U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 is the kind of fulcrum of the book, largely because it's the city bank is behind it. And I became interested in that in Citibank and learned of Citibank through a piece that James Weldon Johnson wrote in The Nation in 1920, a kind of three-part piece on the U.S. occupation. And that kind of led me to that. And so I started trying to read everything around Haiti and U.S. relations to Haiti during that time and then realized, yeah, Douglass had, Cedric Douglass had, at the end of the 19th century, near the end of their life, one of his last kind of political assignments as this figure who's really one of the most prominent African-Americans in the United States was hoping to get, you know, the kind of usual political appointment by Washington that figures like that should get. You probably know that at that time, the tradition on the part of the State Department was to appoint Black ambassadors to Black countries, to Liberia, to Haiti, because they thought that, they imagined that they could better use their Blackness in those kinds of situations. So Douglass went kind of very naively into this post in Haiti and not realizing that in the first instance, the local American merchants really imagined that Douglass was there to do their bidding. So if there was any dispute he was supposed to rule in favor of U.S. business to grant concessions to U.S. business. And so he was like, no, I'm not, I'm not going to do this. And they treated him with the utmost disrespect. I mean, even on his way down to Haiti, he couldn't sit in the captain's quarters because he was Black on the ships down to Haiti. And then when he arrives in Port-au-Prince, the elite just kind of walk in, the white Americans walk in demanding things at any time. He also then realized that his primary purpose in Haiti, according to the State Department, was to gain a concession for this bay called Mont Saint-Nicolas, which is an area that faces, I think, the Windward Passage. So it's between Cuba and Haiti. And so it's a strategic, commercial and military location. And it's a deep water harbor where you could have troops. So he didn't realize that he was there on the part of the U.S. to negotiate for U.S. imperialism. Was that naive on Douglas' part? I think it was absolutely naive. I think he would say it was naive. I think he really, really didn't. I think he was almost shocked by his own naivety. I think he went to Haiti believing of the greatness of the Haitian people, believing that they were at the same level of civilization as the rest of the world. He was encountering Haitian diplomats who were well-read and were writers and statesmen of the greatest order. And he then acted according to all diplomatic protocols, saying who could approach a ship at a certain time or who, if you land in Port-au-Prince, the kind of chain of greetings and commands that you would have to go through to kind of maintain protocols. He tried to kind of astutely observe that in a way that previous U.S. officials hadn't. And he basically was removed from the post because he refused to do the bidding of U.S. imperialism. Ethically, he couldn't do it. And he found that he was kind of torn between his nation and his race. And he ended up choosing his race and it cost him his nation and his career at that point. And he was kind of vilified in the U.S. press for his actions. But he didn't shy away from trusting his ethics and diplomatic protocol and respecting the sovereignty and the rights of Haiti. And so on one level, there's an ambivalence there because he had to work through his ambivalence as a Black agent of U.S. imperialism. He described himself as an unprofitable servant to American empire. But I think the lesson from Douglass is that we don't have those unprofitable citizens anymore. That we've lost a kind of tradition of dissent, of Black dissent to U.S. imperialism or to other kind of expansionist states as well. We're too willing to be the Black face of the State Department, the Black face of the corporation, the Black face of the university. You know, Jesse Jackson's whole moral capitalism, we just need more Black capitalists. Right, yeah, that's it, that's it. And so, I mean, I think the lesson there is to say that you, you know, well, the truth is, at this point in the game, a figure like Douglass wouldn't be appointed. They would know who he is and have done all the kind of proper vetting and they would have someone who was very happy to- Omarosa. Right, well, I mean, we could- Condoleezza. Well, we could, Barack Obama. Right, right. I mean, look at this. I mean, we could name a number of South African politicians there. Now we have- All of them. Kamala Harris. The dude who's in charge of- Yeah, I mean, there's so many of them right now. It's terrible. And I think it's terrible also because the white power understands very much how these people are being used and how Black people will fall in line behind them, you know. Yeah. Okay, so maybe a last question to end on a slightly more positive note. Just sort of three suggestions that you would give students or young academics or just people who are interested in making a difference through their intellectual work on how to stay grounded and to sort of avoid those pitfalls. I mean, some of the most, I won't name them, radical thinkers we had in the 80s and 90s sort of embody that type of liberal individualization now and their sort of themes and head dissenters, etc. And it's almost impossible to relate their work to their person. And I think that's a big thing that the student movement showed, that the position that people took showed that there was a sort of a distinct detachment between the things they write intellectually and how they live their lives, right? And we would hope that that's not inevitable, that there is a way to sort of hold our sociopolitical investments and investments in our communities and our love and care for those communities, but also to have security within these institutions where we find ourselves. So maybe as someone who is not old, but is walking that journey themselves right now and some things that you found to be helpful. So the self-publishing is great. And I think that's a thing that definitely we need to talk more about and how we capacitate each other to do that, how we build networks across the continent, which is really how a lot of things circulated back then. And maybe with like-minded people even beyond the continent. But beyond that, what are some of the things? How do we hold on to ourselves in these institutions? Yeah, I mean, I think in, first of all, friends and family. I think you reproduce the world you want to live in in your kind of domestic environments. And so if you're not, if you don't have a certain kind of political commitment to how you are as a partner, as a parent and as a friend, then what does anything else matter after that? In the second instance, I would say that as much as I'm committed to the university as a professional, I don't think it's my intellectual home. I don't think it's my spiritual home. I don't think I belong there. And I think I'm sometimes surprised I'm there. And so I feel like I, on one level, I think I've done pretty well in terms of my career, and I've been able to get jobs, and I've been published and all this kind of stuff. But it's not like this, this is not... My intellectual home, you know, going back to earlier comments, is with the traditions of writing and activism that came before me. It's not through the kind of disciplinary formations and the kind of publishing worlds that exist right now. And so I don't, I think, you know, you should never assume the university is a safe space. Right. You should never assume that the university you should never assume that it's your home, that you're, you know, we're outsiders there, unless you're making that other kind of spiritual commitment that I'm not a part of. And then I think, you know, I think there's, I think there's something important to me about being grounded in writing and a practice of writing, and again, a practice of writing that has its commitments outside of the university. And I often contribute to Black Agenda Report and a little subsection called Black Agenda Review, where my partner and I, you know, write an essay every week. You know, we've been doing this for three years and we try to republish kind of different works from the history of Black radicalism, you know, going back as far as possible. And so that kind of writing and thinking about an audience outside of the Duke University press report or whatever is important. And I think, I think there's also a way you have to imagine that the intellectual in the university is a worker like other workers. And so your work as a professor, you know, even though you may get more accolades or you may get paid more, does it matter more than the administrative assistant or the janitor or the elementary school teacher? Like, you know, and I see this on Twitter and other places or in department meetings where, you know, there's a star system. And I'm like, you're a fucking intellectual. Like, and you think you're a star? Like, what is that? You know, maybe if you're in the New Yorker and you get profiled there, that's kind of cool. But I don't want to be in that world. And I don't want my validation to come from that world. So I would say those are the things that immediately come to mind. Those are great. Those are all really great. I mean, extremely difficult, but, but great. And I think that last point about validation is extremely important because I think you can tell a difference between people who know that I'm doing these certain things procedurally because I have to do and for sort of, you know, KPIs as a researcher. And then there's those people who they sort of embody them and it becomes who they are. So that now when there's contestation about who the true racial capitalism with decolonial scholar is, it's something that affects your spirit because you've attached your validation to these institutions, which is a bit awkward. But yeah, thank you so much. I just want to say one last thing, especially about being in the university. I mean, as a job, it means you have to actually do your job. And so, you know, your work is in the classroom, your work is in the department. And so all of the kind of drudgery of being in the university, writing reviews, going to meetings, you have to do it. And it's not radical work by any means, but it also means that especially as someone with tenure or someone who's kind of almost a senior scholar, you have to do it to support the younger scholars coming through to reproduce a generation of scholars, to support other people who are first generation or outsiders who are struggling to be in those kind of places. And so you can't shirk from doing certain kinds of administrative work. And I heard someone say recently that they don't do administrative work because it keeps them free politically. I'm like, well, that's BS. I mean, you know, if you work in any other job, you have to do all the pieces of the job. You know, one of the things you do in the university is called service. And I'm like, well, no, it's not service. It's your job. You have to support your colleagues in these administrative functions. And then maybe if you do become a dean, you say no to the kind of violences that the university is trying to enact. And you have more power to say no than you do by staying outside. And so I think, you know, there's a scholar. I know he makes close to $500,000 a year, plus speaking engagements and everything. And he's big on Palestine. And but he rejects the university. I'm like, well, you don't reject the university if your paycheck is coming through every day, you know. And so it's like, yeah, there's contradictions in it. But don't be dishonest about those commitments, because that hurts a whole that hurts younger scholars and scholars who don't make $500,000 a year. And I think it also hurts primarily students. Absolutely. I think back to my undergrad degree and I think of my teaching as well. I think that the things I do that have the most impact are in my engagement. And I think, you know, that's so important because the truth is the classroom is one of the last few, almost unadulterated peer places we have. Of course, students come in being interpolated by neoliberalism and all of these kind of things. And there's pressures of funding and money and all this other stuff. But when you're in the classroom and there's a text between you and the students, there's something where you can blot out the rest of the world and engage in a certain kind of political practice of transformative learning that you can't do anywhere else in the world. And I think it also is it's also about time. And I think it's so important. I find that that's sacred time to me and my students. Absolutely. Sure, all those other things, commodification of education. But in that 50 minutes that we have together, they get to imagine outside of the reality of their material lives. I get to introduce them. You know what I mean? Like that is such an important space of world making, I think. Absolutely. And I think for a lot of people that's where a lot of their consciousness was ignited. Was this not some big piece of this, a teacher who really was invested in honoring the sacredness of that space and making the most of it. Yeah, we both were. We're on the same page with that. Now, thank you so much for doing this. It's been an absolute pleasure. And I think it's the beginning of a conversation that we'll continue to have. I absolutely hope it is. And thank you so much for inviting me and taking the time out to do this. And I'm going to bother you for all the sort of references we spoke about just so that we can give those to people as well and spread the knowledge further. Wonderful. OK, thank you so much. Thank you.
