Samuele F.S. Pardini interviews Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren about their new book “Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce this Time.”
Pardini: How did the book come along. What was the main motivation behind it?
Warren: Among the things we say in the introduction is that this book is really the latest manifestation of a long-term conversation that we have been having ever since we met in the 1980s. We have been concerned with the state of the Black Studies field, which has insisted on locating itself as a voice for a broad racial community, thereby kind of naturalizing a view of black Americans, black American politics, black cultural expressions, of black Americans as a kind of emanation of some sort of group identity thinking that has on the one hand misunderstood the nature of politics, the nature of inequality, the actual location of black Americans within the political world since the Jim Crow period going forward. And on the other hand, it proved, you could say, inadequate within the academic disciplines in terms of producing basic understanding about why people said the things that they did, and why people wrote the things that they did. What are the best ways to produce as accurate an account of what real people in the world were doing in writing books, making political decisions? This is an observation that we made when this conversation started. It emerged with an anthology of essays that we published in 2009. At that point, we had in mind the idea that we should do a book like this, with essays in which each of us sort of took the lead. We exchanged ideas and we finally got around to doing it over the past couple of years.
Reed Jr.: The only thing that I would add is that the project that was our conversation evolved, and evolved in relation to environmental circumstances, both in the academy and in the wider world. It was pretty clear from the moment that we met, maybe even before, that our political perspectives were quite sympatico, and so our intellectual orientations coming at the history of ideologies from our different disciplines but with somewhat overlapping field of specific archives, I suppose you could say. When this discussion started, I think it was most immediately prompted by a shared response to what we saw as really shocking, interpretivist turns within the study of Black American life. A key moment for me was two or three years before we met. I went to a job talk when I was still teaching at Yale, to replace the recently departed Henry Louis Gates Jr. At that point, I was director of undergraduate studies in African American Studies. I felt duty bound to attend the talks. I went to a talk by a guy I didn’t know, but that Ken knows him very well. A fellow named Michael Awkward, who gave a talk to the English department principally. It was on Black women’s fiction, and the topic of the title of his talk was something like “The Eye in Black Women’s Fiction.” It was at a moment, the late 1980s, prompted by the discovery/rediscovery of Zora Hurston along with Morrison. I sat there and as I listened to this talk, I couldn’t believe it. I was just shocked in my skin because the guy seemed to be making allegations based on what popped under his head at that moment, which sometimes can be motivated, as my grandmother would say, by that cucumber that you ate after 10 o’clock last night. He was drawing connections between Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and then something else with the perpendicular pronoun. I thought, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, this poor guy. I’m watching him bomb his job talk.” Then when Q&A came around, it turned out that he hadn’t bombed at all. Most of the questions that came to him accepted what seemed to me was this absurd made-up premise. But then finally, a colleague, a senior colleague in the English department who shall remain nameless, asked him a more tendentious question, which was, well, it sounds like, “from the thrust of what you’re saying, one has to be a black critic to be able to interpret black texts.” And I swear that he sort of drew a breath and said, “Well, yes, that is what I’m saying.” Well, you could feel the mood of the room change instantly, and one by one, the senior lights in the English Department kind of slunk away in the genteel fashion that they do. Not long after that, I happened to read Ken’s review essay in the first issue of American Literary History that discussed Awkward among others. I was very excited about this essay. I thought it was the smartest thing I’ve seen in the field. About a year or so later we met, and it took me a second to recall that this was the guy who had written that article. I didn’t know he was at Northwestern because when I read the essay, I hadn’t had any talks going with Northwestern yet. We certainly understood that we had basically the same take on the field, which was motivated by the same sort of respect for the integrity of intellectual investigation, and historicity. Of course, where there is serious commitment to historicity there’s a materialism that comes along with it. And to ramble a bit more, when my son went to graduate school, his first semester, he called me up when he learned that there were only three people in his year in his graduate department who were materialists, which he couldn’t believe it. He says, “Pop, how can you be a historian of the United States and not be a materialist?” And I said, “Well, buckle up, because it’s gonna be a lonely ride.” Ironically, just serendipitously, the other two had also had classes with me at Yale. That’s how it started. But over time, as the world kept going away the way it was going, and as the fields kept going as it was going, it became less and less meaningful for us to see this as mainly a rescue mission for something called African American studies. I don’t know if this is right Ken, you tell me otherwise, but somewhere around the emergence of the phenomenon called the Black Public intellectual, professors of Black Studies began to take on a political posture, much, much larger, much more extramural than just tweeting the cause of the “Negro” within the academy. And by the time you get to 2016, which was several years after the collection came out, it was clear that our academic colleagues were leading the charge as sort of chief ideologists for a particular black neoliberal ideology. From that perspective, the focus of the book became less intramural and more extramural.
Warren: A couple of quick notes in terms of the way in which the universe was, I think, supporting this meeting. After or during the time that I was writing the review essay for American Literary History, I had read, without having Adolph, his essay that was titled at the time, “Black Particularity Reconsidered,” which for me was one the most exciting things that I had read in the Black Studies field at the time. So, something was conspiring in the right way. Among the things we noticed as well along the way in response to the rise of the black public intellectual was a growing number of prospective PhD students who expressed as their career goal in terms of getting the PhD a desire ultimately to become something like a Black public intellectual.
Pardini: You edited books together, you know each other, but now you co-wrote a book. Had you written this book as a single author, it would obviously be different. You come from two different disciplines. One of you is a political scientist and the other a literary critic. What do you think that each of you brought to the book from your own perspective and, once things overlapped, made it the book that it is?
Warren: I’ll just say something relatively briefly, which actually ends up being a slight modification on the question of the intramural and the extramural aspects of our critique, because I do think that those reading the book will note the extent to which political history and political theory are guiding one part of our inquiry into accounting for black politics, black public life from the Jim Crow period forward. For me, the importance of working with Adolph is that you want to work with someone who is committed to, as we’ve been saying, the material history of what politics is. And I felt that likewise, the commitment from the standpoint of what is the right or the most plausible interpretation of a literary claim or a literary text, requires a kind of commitment too, something that ought to be sort of like the normal science of literary inquiry. I think that part of what might surprise some readers, but I would hope that they would be gratified by it, is the care that we take in relation to the question of evidence, proof, and the like, making claims that account for the material, the texts that we analyze, trying to make sense out of what’s happened, say, over the last century and a quarter or more, but most especially, what’s happened in the last 25 to 30 years.
Reed Jr.: I was going to say initially that how the book would differ if one of us, in this case, had I written it alone, would be on a specific disciplinary foci. But that’s not that much of a difference, right? I mean, that’s just a difference in the extent or in the archives that we brought to the book, and over the last 30 years, of course, there’s been more and more overlap in that archive. Certainly, you wouldn’t have gotten as deep or rich or informed a discussion of late 19th century literature from me, so the book would have been that much less powerful and rich. But I’ll say this, too. From the moment that I determined in graduate school that I wanted to work in history of ideologies, which came after thinking for a while that I would try to work on development politics in Latin America that I gave up after the coup against Allende in Chile at the beginning of my second year of coursework, in the back of my mind there was a concern with trying to figure out what an explicitly Marxist approach to the history of ideas and history of ideology looks like. Part of my project, since I was in graduate school, was to try to resolve that. That’s kind of what led me to Skinner and Pocock and those people, to contextualism and then C.B. Macpherson, and also kind of echoes a truism by a former colleague and a good friend of mine, Ian Shapiro, who argued that to be a credible historian of ideologies, you have to develop some minimal capacity in economic history, political history, history, philosophy, and anthropology, which, of course, very few people want to take the time to do. Where my own work had led me was to a pretty powerful interest in the late 19th century and early 20th century American ideology. Not necessarily about race but partly concerning questions bearing about race. When I encountered Ken’s work, not only that ALH essay, but particularly when I read Black and White Strangers, I immediately thought: This is how people ought to do this work. So, we’ve been kind of reading and commenting on and absorbing each other’s work since the early 1990s, or maybe the end of the ’80s. It would be hard for me to tell whose particular insights starts where and whose pick-ups at any given instance. But I think a definitive moment for our team, as it were, or for our approach, in general, even though it was clearly visible in both our work, especially Ken’s, prior to this, was the publication of What Was African American Literature? It dropped the gauntlet, set it in stone, and I think it has blazed a path on subsequent generations of students and scholars, even though it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long ago, since then. It’s a field altering intervention that helped chart our collective course, as well as the individual ones.
Pardini: As Ken knows I am particularly fond of that book also because the title is a riff over my caro maestro Leslie Fiedler’s book What Was Literature? Speaking of titles, the subtitle of the book is The Farce This Time. I must say that had I been the editor of your book, I would have recommended to title it The Farce This Time and subtitle it Black Studies, Cultural Politics, And The Evasion Of Inequality. Obviously, it is a riff off Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Marx’s The 18th Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte.Why the farce this time? It’s a specific announcement that you make in the title: This time there’s a farce going on.
Reed Jr.: Well, I’d say one thing. When I think about the racial vindication as an intellectual project, one of the crystallizing images that always comes to my mind is J. A. Rogers, an autodidact historian in the ’20s and ’30s, and I guess into the ’40s, who spent all of his time in archives trying to vindicate the claim to equal humanity. I’ve always considered Rogers’s project and others around him for this project, and that’s one of the reasons why in my teaching I’ve been beating students over the head with people like Lawrence Reddick and the philosopher William Fontaine. I have always seen that as a sort of tragic undertaking, tragic in the sense that that’s what the moment seemed to call for, that element of a black intellectual community. From that perspective, keeping on with The 18th Brumaire, if that’s the tragedy, then this moment of a racial vindication is that’s a handmaiden into neoliberal inequality, is by definition the farce.
Warren: Indeed, we had reversed the title. When we first went to Routledge with it, they insisted, based on what they felt was their understanding of marketing, that having the more descriptive title before the colon would better appeal to our readers. We didn’t agree with that assessment, but we did decide to defer to what we thought was the wisdom of the press, if indeed, that was going to get more readers to pick up the book.
Pardini: The last thing about the exterior of the book. This wonderful cover that you have, where people are in line waiting to attend “the black and white minstrel show.” But you don’t deal with the minstrel show, and you barely deal with white people or white intellectuals in the book. Why did you pick this cover, given the content of the book?
Warren: I think we do deal with the minstrel show, what is called Afropessimism. Part of what I think we do across the book is to try to lay out why approaches like Afropessimism’s limitations should be so apparent from the standpoint of trying to produce a politics of solidarity. Because the goal is to unite the many and to defeat the few who hold power. How has it come to pass that politics that has nothing to offer for that broader project remained a dominant strain of thinking within the Black Studies field? We did go through a number of possibilities in thinking about the cover. I do think it actually conveys in some real way what the book is about.
Pardini: Let’s dig into the specific chapters. The first two chapters are more political-historical, while the third and fourth are more literary-political, with a focus on Faulkner and Toni Morrison in the former and on Frederick Douglass and Colson Whitehead in the latter. What unites them is the attention to the South, geographically speaking. Do you think that this is in a way a limitation? I understand historically the importance of the South for the country and the project of Black literary studies. But do you think that this focus on the South may obstruct a larger view of the question that you’re dealing with? Additionally, do you think black writers who use the South limit themselves and their own creativity in focusing on a region that forces them to deal with slavery and segregation? If you’re a black writer, say, in Maine, I am being hyperbolic here, does that give you more opportunities to open yourself to different kind of questions or to use your own questions in a different way? I hope the question makes sense.
Warren: I do take the force of the question, but I don’t really see it as a limitation at all, really, but as a kind of necessity in terms of trying to write a project that seeks truly to understand the context of a black political project. Taking down monuments to the Confederacy had traction and resilience nationally in the early part of the 21st century when indeed most of those monuments, when we think where they are located, are in the South. How does that become a kind of point of urgency in the early 21st century? Even if you’re in Maine, the visual becomes significant part of your day-to-day life. And really to understand that, you do need to understand what the first couple of essays really address, which is the politics coming out of the rise and demise of Jim Crow in terms of its capacity to structure day to day black life that was most prominent in the South, but obviously was crucially important in understanding the shape and the dynamics of national politics. Any successful and responsible inquiry into the issues of the lives of black Americans nationally understands what is and what isn’t or what was and what wasn’t specific to and a feature of Southern life and the way that that shaped and inflected national politics. Our argument is why is it that everybody can feel the immediacy to take on the vestiges of slavery and the vestiges of Jim Crow, but not the immediacy to understand how that operated, how that came out of the South, how it operated within, and what it did and what it didn’t do. Since What Was African American Literature? has been mentioned, I wouldn’t have been able to write without a couple of decades of conversation with Adolph. That book was really a moment of distillation. But part of the force of that point was in terms of thinking about the historical emergence of and the coherence of the thing that was African American literature. This would be something that goes, you could say, beyond the South, but you don’t understand what African American literature is without understanding the emergence of Jim Crow in the South and the way in which the defeat of the populist insurgency, which removed most black Americans out of Southern politics, created the conditions for a politics of appeal, and that consistent with that appeal was producing the idea of a literature that could speak on behalf of a race. That is what African American literature conceptually is. You don’t understand that until you take aboard the force of the historical emergence of the field in terms of the problematic that naturalized the idea that there could be a voice or a set of cultural habits and attitudes that were essential to black politics and black political life.
Pardini: In the first chapter you write that race is “a technology of hierarchy.” Let me play devil’s advocate. What would you say to people that point out that the question of taking down the Confederacy monuments came as a response to the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota or that the killer of black people in a Buffalo supermarket intentionally targeted only black people? How would you respond to people who object that you downplay how color is part of this oppression rather than class. After all, nobody goes to Charleston, SC and shoots people in a white church.
Reed: Right, right. That’s an interesting question. I’ll say a couple things. One is that the question suggests another reason, that it’s so important to locate these incidents within historical perspective. I remember when I lived in Connecticut, in the early ’80s, there was a Klan march in Meriden, which is in a central part of the state. Colleagues and neighbors were going crazy about this. And I kept saying to them, “This is not the Klan. This is a handful of disconnected losers who have gravitated toward scapegoating ideology for reasons that Gordon Allport would understand more than anybody else, but they really don’t have anything to do with social structures except with respect to the way that the mechanism of scapegoating is rooted in the society at this moment. Like that stupid kid from wherever is from in Upstate New York who drove five hours to Buffalo. Like Dylan Roof in South Carolina that had black friends whom he was trying to convince of the legitimacy of white supremacy as an ideology. These are obviously, and here I might sound like a Trumper, damaged people who have personal problems in the world that they display on race. And that’s what prejudice is. And prejudices are going to be around against different groups in the society. I remember I saw a movie once, set in New Orleans, with a character who was deeply committed to anti-Albanian bigotry that made no sense whatsoever. But the senselessness of it was the function. The fact that there were no roots in history or social structure in the US for deep bigotry against Albanians. And a point that we make about the ultimate roots of southern racism as a political force and as a motive force, and one that’s institutionally embedded is that those ideologies, such scapegoating-based ideologies, stick and gain institutional force when and only when they comport advantageously with the interests of rich and powerful elements in a society. So, both of them are true at the same time, right? And if it’s not Blacks, it is immigrants. God, as late as 1967, when the first black mayor was elected in New Orleans, it was a significant pushing of the upscale white population that voted for the Black creole candidate, over the low browed Sicilian candidate for racial reasoning. I guess that’s not a concise answer, but it’s kind of a response, I think.
Warren: I do think that that gets to it. Obviously, we can’t and don’t purport to get inside the heads of any particular individual who induces racist motives for committing acts of violence. But I think, broadly speaking, that, and this goes to your question about, say, the southerness of the examples that we use, that when you understand, say, Morrison and Faulkner – and Morrison is a northern writer, out of Ohio, right?, this is not someone who comes from the south – the response to the material forces that are further incorporating the south as a region into what you could call consumer society or capitalism more broadly, gets figured for Faulkner and for Morrison as an assault on something like cultural and group integrity. Susan Willis has a great book on Morrison that kind of gets this right, that for Morrison the problem to be solved and one of the reasons she focuses on the North to the extent that she does, I mean the North in terms of her focus, in The Bluest Eye and other of her novels, the problem is what happens to black Americans in the cities in the North. Do they lose their connection with their past? Do they lose the basis of their cultural integrity? One reason to put her alongside Faulkner is to demonstrate the extent to which one part of what has become a kind of default as a way of understanding the dislocations and the displacements that capitalism and neoliberalism produce is to understand that as an assault on cultural integrity, and to see, then, those who don’t share or represent other kinds of cultural forces as the enemy and as the problem. What gets exacerbated is the likelihood of understanding whatever has not gone right in your life, not as the result of capitalism when you have eliminated working class opposition, but rather, as the result of the incoming forces of alien identities, alien beliefs, and alien cultures. Therefore, you do create the ground for, again, not knowing exactly how to account for any of these individuals, response like that that can seem logical and necessary as a way of protecting the things that you feel are under assault and valuable.
Pardini: Both the chapters on Faulkner and Morrison and Whitehead and Douglass have a target in a sense, which is the black identity scholars. You say that the problem is that they read Black life based on the experience of slavery. Whereas you say that the primary relation Black Americans have to their past at this point is with emancipation. What, then, would you say is the relationship of black life to slavery as an historical experience? What is the role of that experience within the larger framework of emancipation. Obviously, you’re not denying the experience of slavery.
Warren: One of the ways that I would respond to that is, first of all, sort of just push back on the phrase “the experience of slavery” or the experience of emancipation in some sense. Because none of us living contemporarily can claim to have an experience of slavery. And I know that’s not what you mean, but I think that phrase is a telling one in terms of understanding the ways in which something like Afropessimism – and I do think the first two chapters really lay out this critique of Afropessimism that sort of underwrites where the latter two chapters go – in which there is a kind of assertion of something like a contemporary experiential relation to the past or the horrors of slavery that inform how contemporary black Americans live, to the extent that this argument is making a claim about what people ought to do. But it’s actually making a claim about what people experience in the present, whether it’s through a certain kind of structure of trauma or something like that. Among the things we do is push back on these broader experiential claims about what it is to be black or, you know, someone who can be ascribed as black in the contemporary moment to show the extent to which those claims are ideological and to show the work that they have done in terms of going back to the moment of the consolidation of Jim Crow, a way of presuming a kind of uniformity of experience from which certain scholars or political individuals can claim to speak with authority for all of those represented under that umbrella.
Reed: The only thing I would add is, from the heuristic point of view, how can people believe this? It’s so obviously false. And that’s when the ideology detector goes off, because it’s clear that no one answering in their right mind could believe that, unless there’s some material reason for them to do so. Ken heard me say this a million times, but my father often described ideology as the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe you hold with what advances your material interest. Belief in this legacy of slavery, for instance, could not be a clearer illustration of my dad’s understanding of the work of ideology. Just take one counter example. Disfranchisement at the end of the 19th century meant that the Southern planter merchant capitalist class had more thorough control over local politics and state politics than any state had in the North. So, when people ask, “Why is the South so anti-union?” And they turned into stuff like culture and heritage and Protestantism, backwardness, or in breeding, whatever. The reality is much simpler. There was no space for a state sympathetic to unions or at least felt some need for what we call a pluralist balance. No governor or state legislator or mayor sided with unions. There are very rare exceptions that stand up against the anti-unions’ forces. One exception was Mayor Fitzpatrick in New Orleans, in the 1892 General Strike, who sided with the workers, and the strike was successful, despite massive involvement of the governor and employers to foment race-based hostility to break the strike, but that was almost a unique moment in Southern history, which helps to explain the failure of Operation Dixie and the reason all backward assholes are in power until today. And it had nothing to do with slavery. And just to be a little bit provocative, I’d be more willing to talk about the long-term legacy of slavery as an institution now that I’m spending a lot of my time up in Western Massachusetts, if we also talked about the long term implications of the mill work, because they’re pretty fucked up too, right?
Pardini: Let me look at this from an academic standpoint, in terms of methodology and institutional structure. Do you think that this (un)critical approach can be changed by an idea and practice of the university that remains organized around a departmental structure? Or do you think that to advance the intellectual discourse towards the goals that both of you have and that personally I share, the university would need a different structure. We’re living in the time of the neoliberal university. I don’t think these things are disjointed.
Reed: Well, that’s a very interesting question. The efficacy and the impact of a technical reform is going to depend on the balance of political forces within the institution. For instance, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, multidisciplinary projects and programs seemed likely not to be on the side of people who wanted to pursue unconventional research areas. More recently, I think they have worked for the other side. In fact, I just saw last night that my own alma matter [UNC Chapel Hill] is killing something like 70 interdisciplinary programs, and it’s part of the extended neoliberalization of the university turning into trade schools and responding to the blandishments and monetary enticements of right wing billionaires who want to remake the university as a place where none of us who are part of this conversation would be seen by and large, or would have any impact. So, it’s an interesting question, but I think it’s a question that itself is more interesting in particular when we’re in an environment of higher education that seems more neutral than the current environment does, if that makes sense.
Warren: I totally agree. But what I wanted to add to that is that there is no reason, inherently, that a Black Studies field could not do the kind of thing that you suggest. I think about the work that Adolph has done, the work that I have done, going back to Adolph’s work on W.E. B. DuBois and American political thought, and Black and White Strangers in the ’90s. Those works came out of questions that one might see as rooted in the idea of Black Studies. Where did some of the key formulations that we associate to voice come from? And what has contributed to their persistence? Part of the point of that book is that in order to answer the question in terms of where these conceptualizations come from, you need to locate the voices in his intellectual milieu at the turn of the century as a Victorian intellectual with the sharing assumptions of those around him. As long as we don’t presume that the answer to that question has to stop at the precincts of what you take to be black things, then the point where you start can actually be the way in which you open up to the question of how do you really do an effective intellectual history of Du Bois’ thought, as well as, how do you account for the sort of the misconceptions that have attended to the more popular understandings of who or what Du Bois was that ensued, or the several decades after that turn of the century period. My decision in Black and White Strangers to spend a lot of time writing about Henry James was a course that was dictated by a question that I could see coming from the Black Studies field in some sense, which is to say how to understand the rise of Jim Crow over and against or at the moment when a turn to literary realism was arguing for broader democratization of American cultural life and civic life generally. The argument in that book in some sense was that in order to see that you had to go somewhere where turn of this century Black Studies, conventionally conceived, might say you wouldn’t go to Henry James (in this instance), and there are reasons for that. There is a way in which one can take certain kinds of questions that we might associate or identify as Black Studies questions, but with the understanding that you don’t predetermine the domain in which you have to pursue those answers. Most specifically, you don’t presume that the answer’s got to be race at every juncture, every turn.
Reed: Let me just add another comment about Black and White Strangers. The general observation is that going back to the dawn of Black Studies, or the early justifications for Black Studies as having institutional standing in the American academe, in addition to what Kenn has pointed out, the dominant justification was the community service function. Or, as another former colleague once put it, take the Cornell University Administration Building Occupation as an instructive moment. The President comes to work one day, sees this crowd in his office, and says, “Will you all go home if I make him and her associate professions for life? And they all leave.” But insofar as an intellectual justification, it was in fact in addition to an administrative one that also made sense. It was the only way that black faculty was going to be hired. Because the individual departments were either hidebound or locked into their routines. Faculty searches would never be defined in a way they would produce a black candidate, or a candidate of any sort who wanted to pursue questions that we would associate broadly with the purview of race or Black Studies or questions of equality. I’m talking about going back to the ’70s and ’80s. But another intellectual justification was that Black Studies, like other multidisciplinary programs, just because of the intellectual work that people associated with those new fields embraced, would open up spaces for people who were even Henry James scholars, but who were interested specifically in James in relation to the emergence of the idea of gentility and the ways that it was raised right at the end of the 19th century. That’s another scholarly discourse community that Black and White Strangers presumes. In the process, it answers other questions that seemed much more like the purview of race scholarship, but questions like, “How exactly did they successfully sell the claim that their program to disfranchise weren’t in violations of the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution? What made the wink and nod effective?” It is a question that I had in my head but that wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. But once I saw a response to it or saw the tools for answering it, then it did jump to the front of my mind. And I saw those tools in Black and White Strangers. Well, was that gentility? Because gentility did the same work for class-based social regulation outside the South that race did within the South. Same efforts, same commitments, same ideological understanding of the essentially racial nature of the difference that Anglo-Saxon elites felt the need to control and subdue. That vision of Black Studies can apply the same logic to Women’s Studies and other fields. That was a logic by which you can see these interdisciplinary fields and programs as opening opportunities to a broader intellectual discourse. For a variety of reasons, I’m not blaming the programs exclusively, and I’m not blaming the academic departments exclusively unless you’re talking about economics, which I blame pretty much exclusively for most horrible things that have happened in this country since World War I. But there is an institutional logic and dynamics of jockeying for position in relation to university budget allocations that led things to turn out the way they turned out, and for Black Studies and these other cognate fields to become increasingly the sort of narrow turf protected BaileyWorks that they became.
Pardini: Don’t you think that Black Studies in the US would benefit from going outside the U.S. and look at how race plays out in other places?
Reed: I think it could be. I say that kind of tongue and cheek, because Ken and I are both track and field fans. So, we’ve been following this. I mainly watch European track and field now because it’s a lot more interesting, partly for that reason. I can tell when there’s something significant going on. For instance, when a British announcer during a 400-meter relay commented that Rashidat Akeleke, as she was easing up the track, said, “Look at those long Irish legs run.” The fact that she becomes Irish is telling and suggested also how racial categories and configurations are always contextually specific and in time they get revised, and that’s the interesting thing to watch, intellectually and for civic reasons. But the problem is that as we all know, travel broadens those who are open to being broadened. And what and how American race thinking travels abroad now is with bags of money from foundations and promise of research grants and openness to American institutions to impose the American way of thinking about race elsewhere in the world. It’s a constant struggle in Cuba to keep that stuff at bay, and it is in Brazil also, and it’s tougher in Brazil, ironically, for market reasons that we all understand. But as you know, there’s been the growth in Europe, even in Ireland, of an American way of thinking about race being transported to a generic Europe, which frankly has only been Europe for the last two, three hundred years anyway, so what the hell? Or hundred plus, if you look at Germany and Italy, or France. Well, does that make sense?
Pardini: Yes, unfortunately.
Warren: I do think that the tendency, or you could say seeing the benefit of casting social conflict, problems of inequality, as sort of the resurgence of something like primordial racialism emerging here, is one of the dangers that one encounters in terms of thinking about . . . Well, how do you internationalize this? Or how do you look at it broadly? Because one of the ways in which you internationalize it is to presume that there is something to this race thing because here it is, it crops up here, it crops up there, it’s the same kind of thing. There’s no need to sort of engage or produce a sort of material account of exactly what’s going on there, because you’ve already presumed what the answer is, which is race.
Reed Jr.: I precisely think of this scholarship that began in the ’90s, that begins from questions like: Why is there no race counter political movement in Brazil? Which has a silent phrase, like the one that exists in the U.S., because there are political movements and tendencies among Brazilians that have disproportionately drawn support from people who might phenotypically or categorically be classified as black or non-white, but they are not necessarily racial movements and they don’t draw black people or people who might be identified as black, because they’re identified as black, but they’re left movements, and they draw disproportionally from people who are poor. For historical reasons and otherwise, people in places like Brazil who are poor tend disproportionately to be people who might be classified as black, although now, apparently everybody in Brazil is black.
Warren: To highlight that point, in the early ’90s, I went to Brazil as part of an NEH seminar that brought together U.S. black Americans scholars primarily, but scholars working in Black Studies from the U.S. together with scholars in Brazil working on this question. And that became really the point of contention with so many of the U.S. scholars identifying the problem with Brazilian scholarship at that moment, as a problem of denial, that these people were obviously denying the extent to which their situation derived from race as the primary vector of understanding the world. That’s what they needed to learn from American scholars.
Reed: I knew a black American in exile from Cuba, and this was probably a decade or so after your experience, excited to see that young people in Cuba were beginning to understand that they’re black. And I said to him, “So what, don’t they have mirrors in their houses?” And he looked quizzically and said, “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.”
Pardini: Leslie Fiedler told me that once he had a student from Madagascar, a black student who stormed into his office one time and said, “Is there any black person here? I have enough of all these black Americans going around saying they’re black. There’s not a black person in here.”
Reed: There you go.
Pardini: 70% of the American people want Medicare for all, which has everything to do with healthcare. Most people in America are in favor of unions, which are number one enemy of neoliberalism. I could go on with other examples. Do you think that the general population including, obviously, black Americans, is more advanced than intellectuals at this moment, at least the ones who get to speak publicly and ascribe themselves the role of spokespersons for their community?
Warren: I’ll just say this. I would suspect that most of the black intellectuals would, if you ask them about these issues, where they are, they come down pro universal healthcare and the like on these policies. I think the key though is that the interpretive presumption of trying to understand why in the face of polling data showing that progressive policies that would benefit a whole lot of Americans are favored by a majority of the population, why don’t we get there, the presumption that the field produces is racism. With that interpretive conclusion already in place, what you do is highlight the idea of racism as the problem that is standing in the way of more progressive solutions.
Pardini: And that’s not the case, because as you write, “inclusion doesn’t replace redistribution. It’s a poor substitute for it.” And they are not mutually exclusive as far as I’m concerned.
Reed Jr.: I’ll just say that it’s been like that since September 18, 1895.
Warren: There you go.
Pardini: Do you think that there’s maybe a younger generation of black scholars and students who may be more open to going in the direction that you point toward?
Reed Jr.: Well, look, I just came out of retirement. I’m teaching at Mount Holyoke. I just finished the first class, it’s a small sample, we have nine students in our class, but I’ve been impressed at how at least half of them are excited about having an alternative way to see the world and are getting into it. The last undergraduate Black Politics course I taught was the best version of that course I taught in 40 years. Because there was practically no pushback to the proposition that we should try to understand Black American politics historically and with historicity, and I could see the class dynamics that are obscured in the race versus politics. From that perspective, I kind of suspect that we were going to have better luck in connecting with people who don’t necessarily see themselves by having gotten a fat letter, that puts them on the path to the upper middle class. Because it’s harder with those people. I have been trying to do this since I was 19, so I must be optimistic.
