This Week

• Nope: Black Resistance in Theory and Practice

• A bit on Klein and Coates

• On discipline

• Stuff I’m doing this week

Nope: Black Resistance in Theory and Practice

I realize I haven’t talked about what I’m teaching this semester. We moved to a 2-1 course structure a couple of years ago, which means that one semester I teach one course, and then the other semester I teach two. I chose the one course option this semester because I knew it’d be a bit of a struggle given the political context.

The class? Maybe the best title I’d ever come up with: Nope: The Theory of Black Resistance.

A bit of backstory.

As soon as Trump was inaugurated I switched gears as far as social media usage. I didn’t turn it off, but I became much more strategic, using my posts (most anyway) to inform and to get folks to at least think about organizing. My information posts were designed to do a couple of things—get people to understand what was going on, and to get people to respond. 

Part of the “get people to understand” dynamic involved responding to dis and mis-information.  Two pieces of mis-disinformation are doing an especially problematic job on black populations and then within black populations, black women. 

The first is the idea that “rest is resistance.”

The second is the idea that white people got us in this mess, and they’re going to have to get us out. 

Both are understandable, particularly given the political work black women perform (see Sally Nuamah’s work here), but both are empirically and politically wrong. 

Rest, for instance, can serve as a form of direct resistance when the form of domination is economic and based on labor extraction. At the micro level there are all sorts of ways individuals can and do resist forms of labor extraction deemed to be unfair—they can call in sick when they aren’t, they can take more time to do job-related tasks than required, etc. And at the macro level there are labor strikes.  But if the mode of domination is political, rest actually aids the opposition rather than resists it (with the exception of regime bureaucrats and police agents). Rest is valuable. Rest is important. But rest is rest. 

And turning to the second idea, one way to define politics is to define it as the attempt to make collective interest-based decisions. The idea that whites are disproportionately responsible for our current position itself relies on two ideas. First, that racial populations exist. Second, that these populations have different interests. If you believe that whites are disproportionately to blame, you must not only believe that whites exist, you must also believe that whites have different interests than non-whites. 

If you believe all of this, how under God’s green earth would you then believe that the same whites that are disproportionately to blame in part because they have different interests would then turn around and engage in behavior which reflects your interests? 

As the kids say “where they do that at?”  

Now I don’t think that the majority of black women believe either of these propositions, but I do think that a constellation of forces make it appear as if they do. After a particularly intense argument that ended an approximately 30 year friendship, I realized that I have two tools at my disposal. 

The pen, and the chalkboard. 

With that in mind, I decided to create the class entitled “Nope: The Theory of Black Resistance.” “Nope” gets at the visceral component of resistance—that thing that happens when you know something’s not right and you know you’re going to respond to it somehow. We’re headed towards week 6. 

I’ll write more about this, but over the past two weeks we’ve examined Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this right after reading Frederick Douglass’s biography. 

What strikes me about both texts is not just Douglass and Jacobs’ persistent attempts to resist domination, but the fact that they define their resistance as the very definition of black politics. 

The mode of domination we’re currently facing is not slavery. Isn’t anything like it. But I think this moment requires us creating a definition of black politics appropriate for the moment. Turning back to how people like Douglass, Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, (to name a few) can aid us here.

Klein and Coates

I’ll extend by using the recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates to say what I mean:

There’s a lot going on here, so I’m just going to point to one aspect. Over and over Klein asks Coates what we should do given how bad we appear to be losing. I’ll take for granted that the “we” Klein refers to include us. What should we do with the fact that 40% of folk voted for Trump? What should we do with the fact that Kirk died having a large and seemingly growing followership. 

Over and over Coates responds by turning to ancestry, basically saying “welcome to black history.”

So here’s Harriet Jacobs, writing of the moment find she’s been technically freed via sale:

In class my students asked me who Jacobs wrote her work for. While it’s clear she wrote it to grow the abolitionist movement and in that way she’s writing to people of her time. However with this passage we see she’s got a far broader time horizon in mind. In this way, she’s arguably writing to us. It’s this time horizon we see Coates turn to, not just in the conversation with Klein, but in his work in general. But where Coates errs a bit, is in thinking that this legacy of struggle is genetic. The legacy of struggle is not genetic…it is political. It is “mine” not just because I’m black, but because I politically claim it as mine. Klein can’t quite wrap his head around it not just because he’s not black (in fact some of the folk who came for Coates for not being hopey changey enough were black) but because he doesn’t see black history as his. 

There’s a reason why Trump and his ilk don’t want black history taught. Not because it makes whites feel bad…but because it makes them more likely to see America as the site of a particular type of freedom struggle. And they’re more likely to choose the right side in that struggle.      

On Discipline

In response to Trump’s attempt to send the national guard to Chicago, a few folks posted a table of the top ten most violent cities, noting that Chicago wasn’t on this list. While they’re likely doing so to point out the fact that Trump’s decision was politically motivated rather than driven by data. Repeating this particular piece of information implicitly expresses support for two ideas:

1. That placing the national guard in cities based on crime rates is a good idea.

2. That Trump should send the guard to one of those other cities instead of Chicago.

Both of these ideas aid and abet Trump’s work, whether intended or not. Knowing that these newsletters reach folk but only about 500 or so, and that a video post would probably work better, I created one, arguing that what we needed was better message discipline. In this instance we need as many people as possible to refrain from making any critique of Trump’s decision that somehow pits one city against another one. 

But there are two other forms of discipline that we need to inculcate—one form in which people need to take guidance from people who may have more….I’ll use “expertise” as shorthand…in political struggle. Another form in which people become members of organizations they don’t necessarily agree with but need to support. The three modes of discipline all place the ends of solidarity over personal desires. Message discipline asks that we think not primarily about ourselves or our communities in defending ourselves against Trump. The second mode of discipline asks that we place the ends of our politics over our own desires. The third mode of discipline asks us to begin to use what resources we have for larger political projects than those of our own personal political ideologies and interests. These three modes constitute core components of party discipline…and although we’re not in a party, we increasingly need to behave as if we are. 

Party discipline in this way serves as a complement to a politics that seems to be more horizontal than vertical, that seems to focus on decentralized rather than centralized activity and leadership, and one that emphasizes real world activity and consequences over virtual ones (which I think tend to reproduce sentimental and affective orientations towards politics). 

I may make videos about these other forms as well, but I wanted to write them down here in case I don’t but also because the video as a medium doesn’t allow for the same thought that writing does.

This week

I’m way past the 1000 word mark and there’ve been a few things that I’ve wanted to inform you all of. This week I’ll be in Michigan for homecoming (October 2-5, again, probably by the time you read this) and am planning a couple of parties in Detroit for folks who don’t usually come to Ann Arbor….so if you’re around and interested we’ll be at BLVD on Thursday night and then at The Shadow Gallery in Eastern Market on Saturday night. I’ll also be around the following weekend to celebrate my dad’s 80^th birthday.

Next month I’ll be delivering a lecture at the Damon Keith Center on new institutionalism and change in Detroit. There will likely be more associated with this, but the date is Nov. 12. And then closer to home I’m working with folk in the Center of Africana Studies to produce a series of programs on campus and in Baltimore about the current conjuncture, and am continuing the Baltimore County Public Library backsliding series.