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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Black Lives
- Sprache: Englisch
Cedric Robinson - political theorist, historian, and activist - was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century. In this powerful work, the first major book to tell his story, Joshua Myers shows how Robinson's work interrogated the foundations of western political thought, modern capitalism, and changing meanings of race. Tracing the course of Robinson's journey from his early days as an agitator in the 1960s to his publication of such seminal works as Black Marxism, Myers frames Robinson's mission as aiming to understand and practice opposition to "the terms of order." In so doing, Robinson excavated the Black Radical tradition as a form of resistance that imagined that life on wholly different terms was possible. In the era of Black Lives Matter, that resistance is as necessary as ever, and Robinson's contribution only gains in importance. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn more about it.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cedric’s Time
Notes
1 All Around Him
I can die, but I won’t work
Responsibilities of a community
Notes
2 The Town and Gown
It is something to be Black
He said such wise things
You both make a truth
Black dignity could be achieved
A tremendous effect to be in Africa
When you introduced me to the Crawfords
Notes
3 Authority and Order
I can fight with my own tools
Elizabeth
He made the correct choice
Realizing ourselves
Notes
4 Beyond Racial Capitalism
We must in fact be different
He never had to be
We are strangers
None was immune
Notes
5 The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Mosquitoes
Unhappy legacies
We will be Black
Truer genius
Choose wisely
Notes
6 Culture and War
They knew that he was authentic
Info-tech wars
Toward fascism?
A vision of the future
The closed text has been ruptured
Notes
Conclusion: I Am You
The appropriation of Cedric Robinson
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Cedric’s Time
Begin Reading
Conclusion: I Am You
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Cedric Robinson with Winston Whiteside
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Cedric Robinson in Southern Rhodesia, 1962
Figure 2.2
Cedric Robinson (center) dancing in a Kalanga village, 1962
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson at their wedding, 1967
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Cedric Robinson with his daughter, Najda
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Cedric Robinson in Nicaragua, 1988
Conclusion
Figure 7.1
Cedric Robinson at the Radical Thought Conference, 2004
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Black Lives series
Elvira Basevich, W. E. B. Du Bois
Utz McKnight, Frances E. W. Harper
Joshua Myers, Cedric Robinson
Cedric Robinson
The Time of the Black Radical Tradition
Joshua Myers
polity
Copyright © Joshua Myers 2021
The right of Joshua Myers to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3793-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Names: Myers, Joshua (Joshua C.), author.Title: Cedric Robinson : the time of the Black radical tradition / Joshua Myers.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: Black lives | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The first account of the radical thought and life of the great Marxist critic of racial capitalism”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2021002734 (print) | LCCN 2021002735 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509537914 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509537921 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509537938 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Robinson, Cedric J. | Communists--Biography. | African American communists--Biography.Classification: LCC HX84.R576 M94 2021 (print) | LCC HX84.R576 (ebook) | DDC 335.4092 [B]--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002734LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002735
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
The journey toward this book began with Robin D. G. Kelley, who has been instrumental both behind the scenes and in direct ways, in realizing its completion. Robin’s initial work on many of the biographical details of Cedric J. Robinson’s life was both inspiration and guide. His faith was also a steadying force. And his clearing of the way to Elizabeth Peters Robinson was indispensable. Without Elizabeth, this work would have never happened. She opened her home and heart to me in ways that I am still fully understanding. She provided not only access to an archive, she provided access to a way of feeling this life. I offer my unstinting gratitude to her and to the many people she placed before me as necessary witnesses to Cedric’s life: Gerard Pigeon, Joanne Madison, Marisela Marquez, Avery Gordon, Gerardo “Gary” Colmenar, and Matthew Harris, among others. Gerard, Joanne, Marisela, and Avery stopped what they were doing and agreed to talk about their experiences with him. Gerard was Cedric’s best friend and one of the most significant commenters on Cedric’s character. My conversations with Avery proved to be very necessary in shaping aspects of the book. Gary was a remarkable help in securing necessary archives from the University of California, Santa Barbara campus during the coronavirus pandemic. I am grateful to him and Matt Stahl of the library for making a very large cache of materials available to me. I am extremely indebted to Matthew’s work in organizing and processing the Robinson papers, which are still held in private. Without that work, my task of engaging that bounty would have been next to impossible.
Cedric J. Robinson’s students were a source of grace. I do not take their generosity for granted. I thank H. L. T. Quan for not only agreeing to an interview, but for graciously reading the manuscript and taking time to participate alongside Elizabeth, Robin, and me in a 2020 panel on Cedric that greatly impacted the book. My conversations with Tiffany Willoughby-Herard were deeply insightful. Not only did I find out that she was my South Carolina homegirl, but the care in which she outlined her memories of Cedric and what they mean for now, for the present, and the future of Black Studies will stay with me. Darryl C. Thomas gave me a clear picture of the earlier years and the important time the Robinsons spent in Michigan. I was also able to speak with Bruce Cosby, who took classes with Cedric at Binghamton. And Fred Moten who, though never a formal student of Cedric’s, considered himself in this number as a younger colleague. All of these students and/or mentees are now scholars in their own right, a testament to Cedric’s impact. There are many more whom I must thank, though we did not get a chance to speak about this project formally: Damien Sojoyner, Jordan Camp, Christina Heatherton, Greg Burris, Jonathan D. Gomez, Rovan Locke, Erica Edwards, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Tracking down Cedric’s comrades from his early years proved to be daunting. But I was thankful to find Ken Cloke, one of the organizers of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, who put me into contact with Mike Miller, an organizer of SLATE and eventually the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Miller remembered Cedric for, among other things, donating blood to him when he returned to the Bay Area after being injured in a car accident while organizing in Mississippi. He then connected me to Margot Dashiell, who was able to share with me her impressions of Cedric as a young activist who was connected to the UC chapter of the NAACP and to the emerging Afro-American Association. It was Dashiell who clarified so much about Berkeley history, Bay Area Black nationalism and radicalism, and other tidbits during those days, and I hope she is able to tell her story soon. She also graciously showed me letters that Cedric wrote her from Mexico, southern Africa, and Fort Sill, Oklahoma that she held onto for over fifty years. Others from that period in Cedric’s life that I interviewed included Nell Irvin Painter and J. Herman Blake, two scholars whom I consider to be giants in their own right. Their recollections helped me properly paint a picture of his life during those formative moments. The oldest friend that I was able to speak to was Douglas Wachter, whose testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee led to the events of May 1960. I am grateful to Douglas for his memories of Cedric’s junior high years.
Though there were many collections held in private, I did have an opportunity to track Cedric and the larger movement to several formal holdings at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, The Oakland Public Library, The African American Library Museum at Oakland, the Bentley Historical Library, Binghamton University’s Special Collections, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I thank the many librarians and archivists who smoothed the way. I want to offer a brief note of thanks to Pendarvis Hardshaw, a true brother of the Town, who offered his help in connecting to Oakland sources. As far as libraries are concerned, I want to thank my cousin Dr Kayla Lee, who used her library access to help me secure some of Cedric’s earliest articles when I first began to work on this text. Thankfully, some of those articles are now more widely available. Richard E. Lee, Resat Kasaba, and Beverly Silver directed me to several places to help me unpack Cedric’s relationship to Terence Hopkins. Yousouf Al-Bulushi graciously sent over audio files digitized from Cedric’s collection that proved necessary.
There are a number of scholars, activists, and organizers whom I spoke to about this project. Many of them read drafts, offered encouragements, and gave me directions that are reflected in the final project. These include Ava Wilson, Shauna Morgan, Ashon Crawley, Bedour Alagraa, Imani Perry, Alan Minor, Mario Beatty, Valethia Watkins, Greg Carr, Donna Murch, Chris Roberts, Stefan Bradley, Jesse Benjamin, Minkah Makalani, Baba Lumumba, Anyabwile Love, and Ashanté Reese. Shauna and Ashon read early drafts of the first words of this text and kept me encouraged. Bedour sent me periodic texts that betrayed an authentic and welcome excitement that I was writing this book. I began one of the chapters while sitting next to Ashanté, on a day where I felt stuck and did not feel like writing. By the end of that session, the rest of the book came rather easily. Finally, Greg Carr introduced me to Cedric J. Robinson in 2006. Though it would take several more years for me to actually read this work closely, it was his engagement with that work and its relationship to Africana Studies that started all of this so many years ago.
I have been privileged to bring Cedric’s ideas into public spaces on several occasions. Conversations in new media helped propel my thinking a great deal before and while I was developing this text. I am grateful to Jared Ball, Jared Ware, and Joshua Briond for providing space to think in public with Cedric’s work. Special thanks to Sankofa Video and Books’ Haile Gerima and Addisalem Gebrekidan and the rest of the team who put together the “Critical Reading: How to Read Cedric Robinson” series. Sitting with Acklyn Lynch and his tattered copy of Black Marxism months later was a revelation. Finally, thanks to Darrell Johnson, Chad Kehinde Graham, Aliah Hill, Ayanna Jackson, and Danita Florence Warmack who took my seminar on Cedric J. Robinson at Howard University. You, and all my other students, gave me the opportunity to really know and appreciate his work.
Thanks to Polity Press’s George Owers and Julia Davies, who patiently shepherded this project through a very difficult time in human history. Thanks for believing in this project and for developing the Black Lives series.
A few final words for my friends: B. Nicole Triplett, who was with me when this work was at proposal stage and always provided space on my New York research trips. And to Chigozie Onyema whom I did not talk with a great deal about this project but who, when it comes to radicalism, was one of my first real interlocutors. Alexsandra Mitchell is always there, and when I first took this project on she said she cried. I feel her.
Introduction: Cedric’s Time
The Bakongo peoples of West-Central Africa saw Life as a cycle. This was not merely the invocation of the idea that all time is the same, that all experience is constant. Rather, what is meant is that we experience time in ways that allow us to see how all other time was experienced, that our experiences of time are not without deep connections to the cosmological. Human life is mapped, spatially oriented in the Kongo cosmogram (tendwa nza Kongo) as a mode of realizing how “the four moments of the sun” mirror not only individual lives, but also communal existence. We live our lives as we experience being within the larger universe. Human existence is akin to bodies arranged about the sun: constant motion and movement, darkness and light. But the creation of society, of human relationships within and amid existence, is not mechanical. The cycles that the Bakongo observed did not produce natural laws that govern our interaction in space. To be human, for the Bakongo, is to seek to understand, grow, and mature in rhythm with ancestors and the natural world, and to align them with a vision of and for community. Yet there is no guarantee that simply being alive will produce such connections. The Bakongo believed that tuzingu, or “rolls of life,” give us a record of what happened in the experiences of our ancestors, as we ourselves experience the cycles that mark our journeys around the sun. These records are required to pass down “lived accumulated experienceknowledge” to create social togetherness. They are there for us to see how it looked for others, so we can sense how it will be for us. Our lives are inherently linked, but they are our lives.1 As Jacob Carruthers writes, time and eternity coexist and are in communion.2
Perhaps this is also a conceptual foundation for one definition of the Black Radical tradition found in the work of Cedric James Robinson. In the 2000 preface to his bestknown text, Black Marxism, he describes that tradition as “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle.”3 Enslavement, inasmuch as it provided the occasion for struggle over and within a particular kind of existence, was ultimately a challenge that required Africans to remain connected, to create the records – the collective intelligence – of those struggles and prior knowledges in order to continuously apply them to the realization of an otherwise to that existence and a more familiar mode of being à la Bakongo. Cedric’s conception of the Black Radical tradition as that accretion, then, is consistent with the worldviews of our enslaved African ancestors. And we might easily find direct familial and ancestral ties between Cedric, an African with roots in Alabama, and the peoples of the region who conceived of the tendwa nza Kongo, who later found themselves in the western hemisphere in large numbers, helping to produce the artistic and spiritual cultures that have been collected under the designation, “black Atlantic.”4
But, while interesting, an immediate genealogical relation is not required to reveal the greater insight: that these ways of seeing and imagining connections to each other across time and space were shared across Africana cultures. And so much so that what became the “deep thought” of the Bakongo might also be perceived as part of the tuzingu of countless other African intellectual traditions.5 That it appeared among Africans in a space called “the Americas” at a particular point in time is, however, also deeply significant and consequential in its own right. For it was in this context, this moment of the sun, that the foundation for that accretion of intelligence – of which the genius of significant Black thinkers was derivative, of which the thought of Cedric Robinson was derivative – was necessarily realized.6 This is to say, Cedric’s time occasioned a unique vantage point for comprehending reality and questions of existence that were both exceptional and constitutive of the very traditions he named and narrated.
The construct of time is useful – as any among a range of possibilities, such as space, geography, race, class, sociality, or systems – for thinking the life of Cedric Robinson. If the method of his work is, as Erica R. Edwards describes it, “to carefully excavate the mechanisms of power and to just as meticulously, and with a singular determination that I think can only be called faith, detail the radical epistemologies and ontologies that those mechanisms have been erected to restrain,” then we might use constructions of time as a route to understanding the ordering logic of those forces of restraint.7 This is indeed the aim of Damien M. Sojoyner, who writes in Futures of Black Radicalism that time, as a mechanism of restraint, structures and utilizes difference while imposing ideological adherence to the regimes that require that structuration by instituting the “disciplinary mechanisms aimed at ideological positions that counter western notions of law and order.” Resistance, then, if it is to be truly effective, requires us to initiate a “Black Radical time” – a time against the practices of difference making and othering.8 And within such alternatives to time as imposition, we would also develop alternative modes of relating to each other and to the past. Cedric himself perhaps sums up the importance of this framing most effectively in Black Marxism, where at a pivotal point in the text he states:
The point is that the construction of periods of time is only a sort of catchment for events. Their limited utility, though, is often abused when we turn from the ordering of things, that is chronological sequencings, to the order of things, that is the arrangement of their significances, meanings, and relations. Increments of time contoured to abstract measure rarely match the rhythms of human action.9
“Significances, meanings, and relations” are deeper than the order of time and are the points of departure that this text will take in thinking with the life of Cedric Robinson. As an intellectual biography, it speaks to and with the larger themes and considerations of his work, while thinking through the contexts that made the work, the moments that made the worker. It is chronological but also thematic. The first few chapters look at the foundation of Cedric’s relations. They are followed by chapters that consider the meanings of his work. And a final chapter considers the significance of it all. This book is imagined as a contribution to the larger constellation of that work, an offering to future workers, an entry into Cedric’s roll of life.
Western time was constructed to do more than serve as a “catchment” for events – it was an attempt to impose order on the rhythms of human action, rather than simply understand them. And, as such, intellectuals operating under these assumptions have maintained the useful fiction that Black Radicalism is at best derivative of western thought or western temporal systems. This is, as Cedric has maintained, an ordering conceit that made liberation from the terms of order unimaginable. But it had been imagined. As a tradition of seeking otherwise than what is assumed to be attainable or even desired – indeed as a tradition that calls into question normative assumptions around what liberation even entails – the Black Radical tradition emanates from thought that is “unthinkable.”10
What is “thinkable” is that which is reasonable. The meaning of time as “measurable movement” in western civilization is a product of the conceptual architecture of Enlightenment, premised as it was on knowledge as the preserve of Man.11 Though borrowing from such “classical” sources as Aristotle and St Augustine, much of what enters the western intellectual tradition owes its birth to the need to develop a form of measuring time that is ultimately about how patterns of human relationships with the natural environment can be understood. After all, if knowing through reason is a specifically human practice, then any attempt to naturalize humanity would have to also naturalize the environment in which such reasoning occurs. It is through a conception of human nature as naturally occurring that time as mathematical precision is assumed. But none of this is actually natural; it, too, is a conceit. Time’s meaning is not given in nature, it is given in the human understanding of nature. It is a social affair. The attempt to naturalize time is the practice of “temporalizing,” which requires also that human relationships to the past be imagined and narrated. And thus came the emergence of history as a conception for measuring and living with change.12
In order to understand what made human experiences significant, conceptions of change that had existed prior to the elevation of reason as the foundation of knowing had to be extinguished. Cedric’s work shows how incomplete this transition was, while also revealing that western thought attempted to achieve such a hegemonic disruption by imposing a logic of time, a historiographical tradition that imposed order on imagination, on the fantastic. The result was not only a theory of history but a theory of politics – a theory of reality that rendered the temporal scope of western civilization as the very meaning of what it is to be on and in time. From such distillations, notions of progress, momentum, and potential emanated to mark the physics and state of being. And it was this very arrangement of consciousness that could not incorporate “others” and their various accounts of what it means to live.13
This conception of time was also spatialized. Beyond the shifting time zones that mark different geographical locations, there also exist presumptions that “time is slower there,” or “time is frozen there,” which describe encounters with those who exist outside of “normal” time. These are, of course, premised upon colonial confrontations that gave birth to time-bound accounts of non-western life that sought to make their notions of life legible by presenting their ways of relating to each other as exotic or primitive. Much of this knowledge enters our consciousness through the domain of the social sciences, fabricated in often naive ways upon the philosophical assumptions of the natural sciences. Western time reads differences and imposes certain arrangements of other times and spaces, not necessarily to produce an account of universality or sameness, but to erect a knowledge useful for containing a threatening otherness. Time constructs a cartography of control.14
Part of what makes Cedric’s work significant is that it is premised on not only understanding these arrangements but excavating the existence of these other arrangements – or even ways of being against arrangement – that characterize the lived histories of western thought’s assumed others. It is work that covered an array of disciplines and deployed “what Michel Foucault called the ‘counter-sciences,’” but it was not interdisciplinary as much as it was an attempt to think beyond discipline, toward the ways in which the disciplines of knowledge were in fact responsible for establishing order, establishing time.15 Two of Cedric’s collaborators in England, A. Sivanandan and Hazel Waters, capture the relationship precisely when they write that it was Cedric who asked a “question that scarcely even occurs within the academy.” He questioned how our understandings of social “transformation” and “social justice” change when we acknowledge that the assumed foundations of knowledge of the world found in western thought – history, philosophy, and rhetoric – are themselves “stunted at birth, diminished in their capacities, crammed into spaces too small to contain them?”16 Perhaps an answer lies in Black Study, a practice within Black Studies, a tradition Cedric would acknowledge as a “critique of western civilization.”17 But it was not an internal critique, one that sought to rescue that tradition. For it was not about its improvement as much as it was about “subverting” its particular ways “of realizing ourselves” – those ways practiced not only in the domains of the academy, but tantamount to the nature of western thought itself.18 Such is one conception of Black Study, the practice of denaturalizing western disciplinary knowledges so that knowledges – ways of thinking and being – necessarily obscured by those projects can operate in spaces cleared of this debris. Though it was the original intent in many ways of the Black Studies movement, the existence of this approach to knowledge was never guaranteed, even in those spaces. In that sense, Cedric’s work speaks to the ongoing crisis of Black Studies.19
In Cedric’s practice of Black Study, we are offered the gift of seeing how those peoples who were excluded from history, and thus excluded from time, found ways to realize themselves. All time is not closure or management, reducible to spatial logics of colonialism and exploitation – all time is not order. As Sojoyner writes, time can be full of life, a shared construct of communal possibility; it is the collapse of the relationship to measurement as heard in the sounds of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler or Tyshawn Sorey and Esperanza Spalding, in the dance and play of Black girls around the diaspora, in the spaces created in the aisles of sanctuaries and the middle of the cipher – in the movements of cycles of life where we relate to each other, in, out, and around each other.20 This is the Black Radical tradition, living beyond the order of time, finding ways to live again.
Cedric arrived onto the scene at perhaps one of the most critical junctures of western time: the mid-twentieth century. It was a moment where the hegemonic grip of western world order – the order that he would come to understand as constructed on a myth – was loosening thanks to the combined pressures of anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements across the globe. It was a freedom dream arrayed differently than the liberal model of political representation and economic ascendancy. And against an unsustainable market system underpinned by the violence of war and capitalist accumulation. In other words, it was a moment that saw revolution as a distinct possibility, even imperative to disrupting the time of western civilization permanently. In the wake of this moment in Black Marxism, Cedric wrote: “Everywhere one turns or cares to look, the signs of a collapsing world are evident; at the center, at its extremities, the systems of western power are fragmenting … the characteristic tendency of capitalist societies to amass violence for domination and exploitation [created] a diminishing return, a dialectic, in its use. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’”21
Cedric’s sojourn through the conceptual worlds of Black Study began in earnest in the early 1960s in the Bay Area, continued through the Midwestern and Northeastern United States, and into the United Kingdom, before finding settlement in Santa Barbara, California, where he served as the director of the Center of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was here where he and his partner Elizabeth, and daughter Najda, made their home, where all five of his books were released, and where the communities of struggle that would significantly mark their lives – both on and off campus – were based.
It would be impossible, however, to understand this intellectual journey by solely focusing upon the academic contexts of the work. This is a journey that must also take into account what it meant to be raised by Black folks from Alabama. It has to think through the meaning of the organizing tradition of 1960s Oakland and the larger momentum of Black revolutionary work that spawned networks of activists, thinkers, and artists in places like Detroit and New York. It has to search for meaning in the African-diasporic connections that were forged in travels to Mexico, southern Africa, and the United Kingdom. Black Study occurred here as well. And Cedric saw in real, Black space and in communal time the ways in which structures of thought that sought to understand and make realizable certain outcomes for Black peoples were deeply, even fatally, flawed. It was a form of study that was with rather than simply of Black peoples, a way of realizing that managed to offer more than the scientific veneer of objectivity in favor of a sort of rigor and deep thinking that was grounded in solidarity.22 That mode of being with and for was necessarily a mode of being against the very structure of domination in even its most welcoming forms, and it inculcated a deep suspicion that Black people might be better off living, dying, and obtaining “freedom on their terms.”23
This may indeed be a model for us in these ever dark times – this normal time of darkness. Thinking with Cedric and the contexts of his life then would reveal the particular sites of his epistemic rupture with western time and the premise of his quite prescient view that, at its heart, the Black Radical tradition was ultimately grounded in preserving the ontological totality of peoples whose lives were interdicted by the political and material requirements of the modern world and whose understanding of how to be free must now be our point of departure for thinking freedom. This is a text that exists to call attention to a life, and not merely narrate its details, in order that we do more than find in Cedric’s work a subject to study. For, in calling attention to a life, we call attention to ourselves.24
Some believe now that western time is late, that capitalism is late. This idea of late capitalism is an attempt to name a moment where time had reached a moment of completion, a natural evolution toward an end – a teleological “end of history.” Yet what actually attended late capitalism was a further deepening, an entrenchment of a violent logic of othering and weaponized difference-making that has produced an assault on the commons, a sensibility that renders everyone and everything in and as a market relation, as the new common sense of how to be in the world.25 Cedric’s intellectual work appeared at perhaps a critical inflection point in the making of this neoliberal set of arrangements, as the 1980s saw the coming together of both the discursive and political logic that attempted to stabilize order through the twinned tactics described by Edwards as “incorporate and incarcerate; co-opt and incapacitate; represent and destroy.”26
Those signs of the collapsing world that occasioned the words and vantage point in 1983 have been exacerbated, as the “racial regimes” that Cedric wrote of in 2007 are constantly updating themselves, as they must if they are to continue.27 Globally, the racist foundations of capitalism are evident; these “native racisms,” responsible for death on a massive scale, have produced a moment where simply saying “Black lives matter” becomes an attempt to stave off the disavowal of Black humanity. And even such declarations are met with further utterances of contempt. Underneath those utterances are affirmations of the modes of living and the temporal and spatial constructs that have generated a newly energized racial capitalism that is supported and reified by a white nationalist consciousness where everyone is vulnerable, every day. One could easily identify the election of the forty-fifth US president and the subsequent right-wing and fascist efflorescence, the turmoil in Europe, Africa, South and Central America around migration, permanent war, the global pandemic, and the increasing fears around human planetary existence as realities that make the current moment a prime one for an initial engagement or reassessment of Cedric’s work. And they would be correct. But western time has always produced the urgency we feel. It has never not been this late, this dark.
Black people, as Christina Sharpe has written, live in the wake of immanent and imminent death, which in the conception of western time is the erasure of life. We need Cedric Robinson’s work, then, for it reminds us that there are ways of inhabiting these conditions and finding ways not to be reduced to them; or, in Sharpe’s words, we need to find solace in “tracking the ways we resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence.”28 We need Cedric Robinson’s work because what we need in this moment are better ways of seeing and marking the limits of a conceptual project that renders so many of those who have been marked for death as having no rhythms of human action to speak of, who have been prevented from offering what they know about (an)other time.
It was Cedric, again in 2013, who reminded us that Black modes of living in the forms of spirituals were often dismissed as “noise,” and that what was assumed as “noise” had evoked and invoked life. He told us to find that noise, to see the ways that this noise has been, at root, what we are.29 For beyond these ideas of death is the mode for the very reproduction of Life, which is, after all, a cycle.
Notes
1.
This conversation about the Bakongo is based on the work of Tata Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, the Congolese intellectual who has contributed vastly to our understanding of Bakongo worldviews and their application to contemporary problems. See his
African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo: Tying the Spiritual Knot: Principles of Life and Living
(Athelia Henrietta Press, 2001), 35–8, for a discussion of the
tuzingu
and many of these other principles. For an anthropological perspective, see Wyatt MacGaffey,
Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire
(University of Chicago Press, 1986).
2.
Jacob Carruthers,
Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the Time of the Pharaohs to the Present
(Karnak House, 1995), 50–2.
3.
Cedric Robinson,
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxx.
4.
John K. Thornton,
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World
(Cambridge University Press, 1992); Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton,
Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundations of the Americas, 1585–1660
(Cambridge University Press, 2007); Michael Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks:
The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
(University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Robert Farris Thompson,
Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy
(Vintage, 1983), 103–58. Cedric found the Bakongo conception useful for understanding questions of the state. See Cedric Robinson,
The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership
(University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 225n40.
5.
Carruthers,
Mdw Ntr
, 65–87.
6.
On the Black radicals discussed in
Black Marxism
, Robinson would write, “But always we must keep in mind that their brilliance was also derivative. The truer genius was in the midst of the people of whom they wrote.”
Black Marxism
, 184.
7.
Erica Edwards, “Foreword,” in Robinson,
The Terms of Order
, ix.
8.
Damien M. Sojoyner, “Dissonance in Time: (Un)masking and (Re)Mapping of Blackness,” in Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (eds),
Futures of Black Radicalism
(Verso Books, 2017), 60.
9.
Robinson,
Black Marxism
, 177.
10.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Beacon Press, 1995), 82.
11.
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,”
CR: The New Centennial Review
3 (2003): 257–337; and Sylvia Wynter, “A Black Studies Manifesto,”
Forum N. H. I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century
1(1) (1994): 3–11.
12.
Hans Ruin, “Time as Ek-stasis and Trace of the Other,” in Hans Ruin and Andrus Ers (eds),
Rethinking Time: Essays on History, Memory and Representation
(Soderton, 2011), 54–5. See also Reinhart Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
(MIT Press, 1985).
13.
Johannes Fabian,
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object
(Columbia University Press, 1983), 2–6.
14.
Fabian,
Time and the Other
, 6–21.
15.
Robinson,
The Terms of Order
, 6.
16.
A. Sivanandan and Hazel Waters, “Introduction,” Special Issue, “Cedric Robinson and the Philosophy of Black Resistance,”
Race and Class
47 (October 2005): iii.
17.
Chuck Morse, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson,”
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory
(Spring 1999): 8.
18.
Robinson,
The Terms of Order
, 215. On notions of “improvement,” see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Improvement and Preservation; Or, Usufruct and Use,” in Johnson and Lubin (eds),
Futures of Black Radicalism
, 83–91.
19.
On Black Study, see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten,
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
(Minor Compositions, 2013) and Ashon Crawley,
Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility
(Fordham University Press, 2016), 237. The methodological implications for that mode of critique and the possibilities inherent in that intellectual work are connected to the work of Cedric Robinson as well. See Joshua Myers, “The Scholarship of Cedric J. Robinson: Methodological Implications for Africana Studies,”
Journal of Pan African Studies
5 (June 2012): 46–82; Greg Carr, “What Black Studies is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work,”
Socialism and Democracy
25 (March 2011): 178–91; Fred Moten,
Black and Blur
(Duke University Press, 2017), 1–27; and my
Of Black Study
(Pluto, forthcoming).
20.
Sojoyner, “Dissonance in Time,” 65–7.
21.
Robinson,
Black Marxism
, 71.
22.
My thinking here aligns with Imani Perry, “Black Studies in the Tradition, for the Future,” 67th Charles Eaton Burch Lecture, Howard University, March 19, 2019.
23.
Robinson,
Black Marxism
, 170.
24.
Ibid., 168–71.
25.
Wendy Brown,
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(Zone Books, 2015).
26.
Edwards, “Foreword,” xv.
27.
Cedric Robinson,
Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regime of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II
(University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xiii–xiv.
28.
Christina Sharpe,
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
(Duke University Press, 2016), 13.
29.
Cedric J. Robinson, “What Is to Be Done? The Future of Critical Ethnic Studies,” plenary session, Critical Ethnic Studies Conference, Chicago, September 21, 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKnf100jCFI
.
1All Around Him
When he was asked, Cedric cited his maternal grandfather, Winston “Cap” Whiteside, who for much of his life worked as a janitor, as a primary intellectual influence.1 Intellectual genealogies, like familial genealogies, evoke relationships across time, premised on cultural or philosophical ideals that determine the nature of those relations. In most academic treatments, conceptions of intellectual genealogies privilege intellectuals in the “formal” sense, even when those presences are not acknowledged or are obscured in the citation practices that accompany a text. But Black thought has always taken seriously the intellectual influences that exist beyond the patina of scholarly legitimacy and in locations that are unbound by relationships to conventional western educational environments. Blackness, insofar as it is a repository of African cultural meanings, produces another way to think genealogy, intellectual or otherwise.2 In Cedric’s case, there are many instances that point to the imprint that Cap – who never wrote an academic text – had upon his conception of Black being, his orientation toward the meaning of Black radicalism. And in one important case, a direct citation – a natural inclusion of Cap as part of that tradition – was present all along.
In Black Movements in America, a text that deftly traces the continuity of mass Black political action throughout the history of the American project, Cedric contextualizes the “push” factors of early twentieth-century Black migration in the United States with a story about his own grandfather. One day, sometime in 1927, the manager of the Battle House Hotel – a white elite enclave of Mobile, Alabama – attempted to “exercise his sexual privileges,” with a maid named Cecilia, Cap’s wife. According to Cedric’s account, “When Cap was told, he returned to the Battle House that evening, beat the manager up, and hung him in the hotel’s cold storage.” A white hotel manager, heir to the long tradition of white sexual violence against Black women, was “chastened” by a Black man, heir to a tradition of resistance to that imposition. That tradition thrived among a significant segment of Black Alabama, as well as the Black South writ large, and through both word and deed asserted that white supremacist violence against Black women were terms of order that would not be accepted.3 Resistance, however, also meant that Cap Whiteside could no longer stay in Mobile. Concluding the story, Robinson added: “In a few days, Whiteside headed for Oakland, California. When he earned their fare, he sent for his family: Cecilia and his daughters, Clara, Lillian, and Wilma.”4 It was in Oakland that one of those daughters, Clara, gave birth to Cedric a little over a decade later.
In retelling this story days after Robinson’s transition, Robin D. G. Kelley reminded us that Cap’s influence registered in Cedric’s commitment to understanding not only the historical and political realities of the Black experience but also its spiritual meaning – for this is how he also understood those conditions of Black existence. Kelley writes that it was Cap who represented the “personal dignity, discipline, quiet intelligence, spiritual grounding, courage, and commitment to family and community” that served as the foundation for that alternative tradition, what Cedric would characterize in his conception as “the Black Radical tradition.”5 What he would write of the radical intelligentsia was also true of his own life. This was a tradition that was “all around” him, present in the midst of his people – in their search for a level of autonomy in Mobile, in their migration to Oakland, in the community they forged in their churches and neighborhoods, in their common pursuit of knowing, and in the love they produced out of what may have seemed a kind of nothingness.6 In times of trouble and in moments of joy, this was their ontological totality. The horizons of the possibility of a Black Radical tradition constituted a theme that Cedric would pursue throughout his intellectual work, but perhaps nowhere more beautifully than in the conclusion to Black Movements in America, where in a note of resolution he honors “the continuity of Afro-Christian belief and vision … with them it is always possible that the next Black social movement will obtain that distant land, perhaps even transporting America with it.”7
Figure 1.1 Cedric Robinson with Winston Whiteside
Image courtesy of Elizabeth Robinson
All around him were these people, his people. They know that life, Black being, had required struggle. Their faith was the warrant for extending that tradition. One did not have to see what the end would be. One only had to believe in this collective intelligence that had been gathered from struggle.8
I can die, but I won’t work
Before landing in Oakland, the Whitesides had already embarked upon a remarkable journey in the post-emancipation South. Cap’s father, Benjamin Whiteside, was born enslaved in 1847 and had migrated to Mobile from Cooper’s Gap, North Carolina after the Civil War.9 Cap’s mother, Clara Mercer, who had been enslaved in Virginia, had also managed to find a new beginning in Mobile, settling in a house with her widowed mother. We do not know the details of the circumstances that led either of them away from the only places they knew to a place that was the dreaded “deeper” South, the destination of many in the domestic slave trade. But Black migrations south after the war were not unheard of as many sought family members from whom they had been separated, while others merely wanted to test the meaning of freedom away from the familiar plantations that had been the source of their exploitation and their pain.10 Mobile became such a space – with its Black population increasing by 65 percent in the years after the war – for many to practice these experiments in freedom. But such experiments were often fraught. In Mobile, as well as other recovering Southern cities, one would not have been able to escape the possibilities of violence and of a kind of class warfare that sought to control and manage the kind of militancy that might presage true societal transformation.11
In 1870, at the age of nineteen, Clara Mercer married Benjamin Whiteside. Twenty-three years later, Cap was born, becoming the youngest of seven children, amid the erosion of Reconstruction and at the height of Redemption – the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that solidified Jim Crow was handed down a month before his third birthday. Finding work as a drayman in industrial Mobile, Benjamin would soon put enough money aside to secure a family home and open a delivery business. Soon thereafter Clara became a restaurateur, serving home-cooked meals out of an adjacent property on N. Jackson Street. As Mobile’s harbor activities recovered from the war, this growing Black population became a source of the necessary labor force required to make the port city attractive to international capital.
Throughout the 1870s, the Black population would struggle to consolidate the political power that manifested as a possibility during Reconstruction. In Mobile, this meant an intra-racial battle between an elite, moderate wing, often aligned with the “radical Republicans” and a mass-based militant assertion of self-determination that struggled to find a political footing within the Republican Party (which often meant alliances with the Democrats). This latter element included working-class freedmen, such as draymen like Benjamin Whiteside, who went on strike in 1867 to demand fairer treatment.12 In cases where that militant segment did find its political voice in the Republican Party, with prominent personas like Lawrence Berry and Alexander Allen, their political maneuvering often went awry, with many living out their last years in public disgrace. Berry turned to alcohol, and committed suicide, with the encouragement of the white press, while Allen ended up in jail on murder charges after a mob descended upon a bar he owned. He would perish while incarcerated. Years of harassment and ridicule were the costs for advocating for the Black poor in Mobile.13 Their deaths were part of a campaign of racial terror. It was defined by cases like that of elderly Black leader and minister Sam Gaillard who, after being sent to a chain gang for refusing to be degraded and referred to as “boy,” subsequently refused to work and was shot down after uttering the last words, “I can die, but I won’t work.”14 In response, other leaders counseled moderation, a tactic to defuse the situation. A Republican paternalism directed the city’s part in Reconstruction. But it was, perhaps predictably, a moderation that was still too much for the white supremacist assumptions that informed Democratic power.
With Reconstruction and Black political leadership undermined through white violence and greed by the mid-1880s, a Black business class emerged situating itself along Davis Avenue in the Seventh Ward. A détente with Jim Crow, however, led some of them to adopt the self-help, apolitical posture of Booker T. Washington. But arguably this class – only representative of about 1 percent of the population – was not the true foundation of Black life in Mobile. The richer valences of Blackness resonated in the cultural and social lives of the masses who lived a rougher material existence that was nevertheless replenished by a deep spiritual well. On the occasion of a funeral, the community of Samaritans, a social order, would appear for the public ceremony in all-white, with “white broad-brimmed hats with long white veils,” a rite reminiscent of African pasts not long past.15 Death, even under the hard circumstances of life in the early days of Jim Crow, was a time to fortify bonds and togetherness. Like the churches and other social organizations, the creation of community-based and service-oriented businesses was also grounded in this pursuit of a measure of autonomy, care, and protection. It was necessary in conditions where the exploitative realm, the requirements of capital’s expansion, was both grossly unfair and often deadly. While such a business class, even those who were political, could not fully negate the political and economic conditions that placed the vast majority at the behest of capital, they were part of a community ethic that was critical to the Black community’s sense of order.16
Though not as financially successful as Washington acolyte, pastor, and insurance man Christopher First Johnson nor as well known as labor leader and store owner Ralph Clemmons, the Whitesides were a part of this economy which served Black Mobile, achieving, in fact, a semblance of economic independence. But, soon after, their failing health forced a primary school-educated Cap to emerge as the family’s economic glue, a situation that was made more urgent after his older sister and mother passed in the first half of the 1910s. Facing the possibility of financial disaster, he sought and attained full-time employment at a cigar factory and would soon begin a family of his own, but not without further turmoil. Cap married Cedric’s bloodline maternal grandmother, Corine Cunningham, in 1916. Their family apparently included some Native American and French ancestry. She had lived in Mobile with her mother and grandmother before moving into the Whiteside family house and caring for her father-in-law, Benjamin. After giving birth to Cap’s three daughters in quick succession, the marriage abruptly ended and Cap later married Cecilia, whose assault would serve as the impetus for abandoning their lives in Mobile.
The rich textures of institutional and associational life in Black Mobile extended the militancy of the Reconstruction era to the period of the Nadir – often beyond and against the middle-class pretensions of Washington’s followers. This political tradition was at once representative of Black resistance writ large and deeply connected to the contexts of Nadir-era Alabama. And Cap was its product. His generation, those who lived at a time in Alabama where the 1901 state constitution openly mandated segregation and disfranchisement, responded most famously with a streetcar boycott, which was followed by a contentious strike of Mobile’s back longshoremen, who were affiliated with the International Longshoremen’s Association.17 This threat of Black organizing and self-assertion led directly to a spike in racist violence, including a number of lynchings within the Mobile city limits. The Whitesides would have remembered the scene of Richard Robertson’s 1909 extrajudicial murder by hanging, a violent spectacle that took place across the street from the historic Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Mobile. The Nadir was real in Mobile, even as the city fathers often brandished the city as a paragon of progress and a “new South.”18 But those labels, products of boosterish corporate imaginations, could not assuage the discontent that led to Black out-migration during the late 1910s and 1920s – a retreat northward and westward that the Whitesides would soon join.
Responsibilities of a community
The Oakland to which Cap arrived was not yet the space it would become after the wartime industrial transformation that preceded an influx of Black migrants from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and other southern states. But it was not a culturally barren place either. By the late 1920s, many of the social and political institutions that would become the foundation for the new entrants were in place. They would soon remake Oakland.
But before that occurred, earlier migrants from the South, who had increased the Black population sixfold to over six thousand people from 1900 to 1920, were drawn to service jobs and opportunities associated with the three transcontinental rail lines for which the city served as a terminus, as well as eventually those within the shipbuilding industries. Almost immediately, they asserted what Dolores Nason McBroome described as an “economic militancy” that was largely framed within its religiosity and communal determination. Utilizing self-help organizations and a growing labor consciousness, these militant postures were desires to realize and live against the racial proscriptions that continued to set the political terms for their realities. At the apex of an organizing tradition that sought otherwise terms were organizations like the National Association of Colored Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Activists like C. L. Dellums, Tarea Hall Pittman, and Frances Albrier fought for employment opportunities and legal and civil rights on behalf of Black Oakland alongside religious leaders like John Snape and H. T. S. Johnson who joined their efforts by anchoring the community in the spiritual traditions they brought with them.19
As more jobs became available, the perennial challenge of housing shortages amid residential segregation reared its ugly head. Since the late nineteenth century, the neighborhoods of West Oakland had been a viable, but at times suboptimal, location for the Black community, given its close proximity to the rail lines and the requirements by some employers that workers be on call. In short order, a vibrant community of day laborers, factory workers, mechanics, and engineers had appeared. This community also included, perhaps most significantly, a large presence of Pullman porters, which by the mid-1920s under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph and Dellums was organized through the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Chambermaids, becoming a critical force in Black working-class politics throughout the country.20 It was also the community that Winston Whiteside would call home, living first at 1448 Jackson Street before renting a home at 34th and West Streets, and finally securing their permanent home at 3020 Adeline Street, just north of the McClymonds neighborhood.21
For those unable to hop aboard the Pullman cars, opportunities were relatively sparse. Laborers were subject to the whims of uncertain market conditions. But Cap was industrious and strong-willed. He would not be denied. After finding work in downtown Oakland, he found community and meaning in the spiritual traditions that had been deposited in West Oakland. Though the African Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches were dominant, Cap converted to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, where he would have found a resonant, deep religious experience that bound him to a vision of a new land and world beyond, but also to a strict sense of moral uprightness in the here and now.22 And he was a strict adherent to these views, eventually hosting Bible studies at his home. In their religious instruction, the Whitesides understood authority beyond earthly power, beyond our lesser human experiences. Though Cap was gentle, remembered for the power of his dignity and deep respect for others, this was a theology that could be wielded with a heavy hand. His ability to convey the necessity of moral control may have defined him more than any other set of attributes.23 In 1933, after witnessing a store being held up at gunpoint (a toy gun, it was later discovered), Cap, who was all of 5 ft. 4 in., sprinted down the street to prevent the assailant from fleeing in a taxicab. Such an act garnered him a mention in the local papers.24 He simply could not overlook a wrong. This would have meaning for Cedric’s birth and childhood.
After a year of consistent work as a janitor downtown made it possible, Cap sent for Cecilia and the girls. It was the year before the stock market crash, and Black Oakland was growing and jobs were available, even as housing accommodations remained stagnant. And then the expansion suddenly ended. As elsewhere, in Oakland, the Great Depression meant a deepening of inequality in the Black community. With unemployment crippling the community, a mix of self-help voluntarism, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns, and labor agitation provided vehicles for activists to buoy West Oakland through the crisis.25 And also, as elsewhere, the presence of radical forces provided an alternative analysis of “the problem” – one that saw it as a problem of racial capitalism.26 But at the core of West Oakland during the Depression was a community, an attempt to forge togetherness in the face of hardship.
The community, the tradition that we are describing here, was not one without contradiction. Love transmitted through a “disciplinarian” ethic could at times be difficult for some to bear. Cap ran a tight ship. According to family lore, boys were not allowed near Cap’s daughters – and the unlucky few who were caught were severely and violently punished for such an indiscretion. Whether it was a Christian morality or a fear of the possibility of what happened with Cecilia also happening with his daughters, we can only speculate.27
