University Place

Hello, everyone. I've been asked to introduce Cedric. The hardest thing about putting together an introduction to Cedric Robinson is keeping it brief. The man is a towering figure in the intellectual history and political science. His seminal book, Black Marxism, laid the foundations for the study of black radicalism decades before the publication of works on the black Atlantic and other diasporas appeared. The book is a blockbuster, that quelled the sterile debate about whether or not race or class is most important and challenged western historians who consign slavery to the margins of modernity. Black Marxism surgically dissected 500 years of a history of racism and enlarged our understanding of racial capitalism. Now, while Black Marxism is Robinson's best known work after its publication he continued as a leading voice in radical black scholarship. His 2007 book,

Forgeries of Memory and Meaning

Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II, won the Errol Hill Award of American Society for Theater Research and demonstrates Cedric's expansive interests and acute insights on social movements in popular culture. Several collections of his works are now in the pipeline to be republished, including an early and almost forgotten gem,

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Political Science and the Myth of Leadership. Robinson is a public intellectual in the finest sense. Not one to court the limelight in the mainstream media, but one who is actively engaged and uncompromising in his progressive stance. With the assistance of Elizabeth Robinson and others, he helped develop the community radio program Third World News Review, an alternative public affairs program heard on both KCSB and public access stations. That's been going strong now for 35 years. Provides an alternative to the fake news that still dominates today's airwaves. As director of the Center for Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, Cedric has been available as a teacher and mentor to decades of students like me, who had the opportunity to have a dissertation fellowship at the center there in the early years of my career. As director of the center, he deflected various bureaucratic attempts to make black studies a poster child for budgetary retrenchment. He protected it from political attacks while cultivating several cohorts of dissertation fellows. Those who have held dissertation fellowships from the center include Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, the policy analyst who blew the whistle on corruption at the Environmental Protection Agency, and Beverly Tatum, formerly president of historically black Spelman College in Atlanta. The Center for Black Studies posed a vision of czradical scholarship with communitarian objectives. It sought to make knowledge available to publics outside the academy. Cedric understood the need for accessibility and helped close the distance between the university and the surrounding community by organizing a regular forum that attracted local citizens. Cedric Robinson is here today to discuss the topic Why Black Radicalism? Why, indeed. We are facing a challenge today where we must free ourselves from the chaos and criminal anarchy of a failing political system. In a moment when society is breaking down under the weight of catastrophic public policies, we must be the survivors. We are fortunate to have guides along the path to understanding and rebuilding. And I'd like to present one of them to you, Professor Cedric J Robinson. (applauding) Thank you very much, Professor Plummer, and thank all of you for being part of the reason I could come here. When I talked to Karma last, was it yesterday or the day before, she asked me, "What title are you going to use?" And I said to her, after a few minutes of thought, Why is there black radicalism? Which reminded me of a talk that I gave 40-50 years ago. I was still an undergraduate, had a local reputation in the Bay area, and was asked by the Richmond Police Department to come speak to its officers because there was some concern that the black Richmond Police Department officers refused to leave the cells where there were black prisoners because they had been beaten overnight, and they were being taunted, these black police officers, with the question, "Which side are you on?" So I began my talk with, what do black people eat? And it went over pretty much the way it did tonight. (laughing) So I said food. (laughing) Because we are human beings. But, in any case, I got a call about an hour after the lecture was over from a sergeant in the police department, a female, who said, "I just wanted to tell you be careful when "you're' driving through Richmond because we all "have your car's license plate." So I never went to Richmond again. (laughing) In any case, in response to the query that I've made, let me take you back to about 1898-1899 in the Philippines. There was a young corporal named... I had his name on my mind the last three weeks, and there it goes. (laughing) David.. It's gone. (laughing) Anyway, David was a young black man who was serving in the American military in the Philippines. He became very concerned with how the Filipinos were being treated by their saviors, the American military. So in 1900, David defected to the Filipino insurrectionary troops, and for the next two years, he fought with the Filipinos, commanded Filipinos in the field, etc. And, eventually, because there was a great deal of consternation about his narrative, which they had hoped to suppress but made it into the United States through black newspapers because black troops were writing letters to the black newspapers detailing all their experience in the Philippines. A reward went out from the War Department to bring David's head to military headquarters. And in 1901, reportedly a young thief brought David's belongings and his head, decomposed head, to American headquarters in the Philippines. The issue I wanted to raise with this example is the notion of the black radicalism does not have borders, boundaries, racial qualifications, etc. Here is a man who understood, and he was not the only, there were nine black defectors in the American military in the Philippines between 1899 and 1901. I want to remind you of another young person. I may not get her name right, Rachel Dolezal. -

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Dolezal. Dolezal. Her story was only told in bits and pieces. She was accused by many of the professional blacks on commercial television of having stolen the pain of black women, appropriated the pain of black women, imitated the pain of black women. That was an obscenity, those charges. It turns out that she was responding to a number of wounds inflected upon her and her foster siblings by her parents, and they came out after her, by challenging her identity. She never pretended to be... African American. She constantly told the interviewers, where they could hear it or not, that she was Black. Black, not Afro-American, not African American, not Negro, Black. And she paid for that privilege. Now, black radicalism is spontaneous. It's something that you've enjoyed here in Madison, Dane County for a little while. It comes out of anguish and pain, but it is not spontaneous. People learn about it. People learn how to be black radicals. Some of you have read what is called The Confessions of Nat Turner. They're not confessions any more than... Socrates wrote the confessions of Plato. Turner was explaining to the young attorney who came to interview him in the jail how he came to be. And how he came to be was, in fact, incremental, gradual, and organic. His mother, his grandmother told him that he was going to be special. They knew that because they read the scars on his body. That he would witness extraordinary events. So from childhood to his adulthood, he learned the black radical tradition. And, of course, he enacted one of the most extraordinary incidents in slave insurrectionary history. There are 1,000s of such examples. I was reminded of them a couple weeks ago when my wife and I were attending a postdoctoral manuscript presentation by-- -

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Justin Leroy. Justin Leroy on black radicalism in the aftermath of slavery. Justin began his manuscript with the contest between Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker. Now, Phillis Wheatley is best known as a poetess. Consequently, I paid very little attention to her until a couple weeks ago. She was remarkable in a sense that she took on Jefferson right where he could be most effectively injured. Leroy is trying to say "You understand "why Jefferson could not consciously "and publicly acknowledge that "either Benjamin Banneker or Phillis Wheatley "were ordinary or even extraordinary human "intelligence because he could not envision an American empire "with blacks living in it." And so he had to disqualify the possibility of blacks living in the American empire by maintaining that even the best of them, the most extraordinary of them, were not quite human. So it was not personal peak. It was a political program that inspired Jefferson to go after what obviously now, from our vantage point, very talented people. They went after him with equal energy and intelligence. So, one of the things that I wanted to raise when I was thinking about Black Marxism, when I was thinking about Forgeries of Memory and Meaning... Is how pathetic our racial constructions are. They're not only pathetic but they're enormously vigorous. It seems, as you now know from our political culture, it seems the more stupid you are, the more influence you might have. (laughing) So, in any case. I thought I could unravel some of that by making certain kinds of historical inquiries, certain kinds of historical inquiries. In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, I began with the anomaly that William Shakespeare had published Othello in 1604. And that 90 years later, practically exactly 90 years later, a British tragedian had disqualified Othello from being a tragedy because, as he said, "It was based on an absurdity "that any white women would marry a black man." But why did Shakespeare write Othello? It's not as if Othello was his first adventure into race. He had, 10 years earlier, written, what was that? -

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Merchant? No, he did Merchant in '92, I think. But in '91, he had written-- -

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Tempest? -

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Yeah, Tempest. -

Cedric

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No, he had written Tempest as well. (laughing) Titus! -

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Titus Andronicus. -

Cedric

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Titus Andronicus. And Iago and Othello was Aaron in Titus Andronicus. Aaron was a moor, a black man, who was evil as sin... and was a lover of the Gothic queen. Tamora, I think was her name. And at one point they have a child, and Titus, and Aaron... Picks up his child and says to him, "If only you were the hue of your mother, "you could be an emperor, "but you're my color. "Consequently, you will never amount to anything." So, Shakespeare had had plenty of opportunity to explore one kind of racialization after another, some of you mentioned Merchant in which he is very often accused of being antisemitic because of his portrayal of the Jew in-- That play. But here, Shakespeare, in 1604, wrote a play which is based upon European, English, and Mediterranean history. Othello is chosen to command the Venetian military around the defense of Cyprus. And why is he brought in to that? For two reasons. One because the Venetians have set up a constitution so that no Venetian could ever command the Venetian military, That way that could lead to coups and so on and so forth. The other reason Othello is chosen because as one of the aristocrats in the play says, "We have no one of his family. "We have no one who knows "military art as well as he does." And why, in this early 17th century, Shakespeare would invent a black man who is a military commander was hidden from us for 300 or 400 years. As some of you know, Shakespeare was adapting an Italian play for Othello, the moor. The play was called Desdemona by Cinthio. And the moor in Desdemona was never named. That was something that Shakespeare contributed to. But the Italian play was done in the 1560s or something like that. 40 or 50 years before Othello. And the Italian play was based upon Alessandro de' Medici, who was the son of one of the popes, and his mother was an African maid, domestic. And Clement, his father, created a duke-al authority for Alessandro in Florence. All of that was pretty much wiped away in the process of privileging Shakespeare's Othello, that there was a historical basis for all this material. What I was doing in Forgeries and had done earlier in Black Marxism, was to mark everything that I could find that had been suppressed from our consciousness because that suppression provided the mystery of why there is black radicalism. There is black radicalism because there is, in fact, social injustice. There is black radicalism because that social injustice has in the modern times, been very often... Has very often targeted African and African American people. But we have to understand that that's not the way to understand where the social injustice comes from. In Black Marxism, in the first chapter, I spent a lot of time talking about the Irish. I do that again in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning. I do that for several reasons. One because in 1980 the American census for the first time in its history had asked about ancestry, and it came as a surprise to me that the second greatest ancestry among whites is Irish. That many of the students I was trying to relate racial matters to had Irish ancestry and perhaps could make the leap into the imaginary of black people by remembering their own histories. Remembering that in the 1640s, the lord justices declared that Irish women should be killed in Ireland because they were the basis of the rebellion. That Edmund Spenser, 50 years earlier, had put out a plan for the conquest of Ireland by saying, "You start in the "north, you march to the south, "and you kill everything you come across." That the Irish understood, or should understand, something about oppression and something about racialism. Now, you and I know that you can tell very little from English complexion and Irish complexion. Yet they created a racial division between those two peoples. Very clearly similar to what's happening in Korea, which, according to Orlando Patterson, is the longest, surviving system of slavery in human history, over a 1,000 years. And I said to some of my Korean students, ""How could you tell the difference "between a slave and a free person in Korea?" And they looked at me like I was an idiot. You tell by which hand they wrap their clothing with. Right hand wrap, left hand wrap. They could not tell, phenotypically, a slave from a free person, except for the way they dress and other similarly subtle indicators. So... One of the things I wanted to say about particularly those two books, Black Marxism and Forgeries, that we had to deconstruct radicalism from its racialist and racist moorings. Marx didn't understand that much, and, as a consequence, he left gaping holes in history of capitalism.history of capitalism. I wanted to make the argument that capitalism doesn't product racialism, but racialism produces the kind of capitalism that we have all experienced. That capitalism emerged three or four times in world history, that we see markings of it in Aristotle's discussion of profit. We see markings of it... Everywhere But when it comes to fruition in the 13th and 14th century, maybe slightly earlier, was coming to fruition in a thoroughly racialized culture, and that thoroughly racialized culture pinned to capitalism ceratin kinds of racial imperatives, certain kinds of racial markers, certain kinds of racial instructions. And those instructions sort of got obscure by the powerful imaging of African and non-African people that began to emerge in the 17th century. So here's a moment when Shakespeare is writing Othello, which stretches from the European and Mediterranean past, a moment when the moors and the Muslims were powerful people, sufficiently powerful to control southern Europe, the Mediterranean, etc. As I mentioned in Black Marxism, the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, characterized the Mediterranean as a "Muslim lake". So Shakespeare is dredging forth with this character. Othello is not simply an Italian figment of imagination. Othello is not an English figment of imagination. Othello is grounded in historical materials. Historical materials which would be evacuated by time and even more thoroughly and rigorously evacuated by the appearance of the Negro. So, that's something that I tried to accomplish with Black Marxism. And secondly, with Black Marxism, I was concerned with the remark made by a radical, that a Negro is a Negro. This was contrasting black people with the proletariat, which had a historical role. We, however, were Negroes and had no historical role. As Trevor-Roper, the English historian, said once, I think he in fact wrote it, "There is no African history. "Only the history of Europeans in Africa. "Savages do not leave history "because the succession of one savage "after another is not a historical event." So we had many disadvantages, particularly those of us who went through universities 30-40 years ago, had many disadvantages from the get go. There were no ethnic studies. There were no gender studies. We had to invent those. We invented them because it was a way of surviving in an academic and intellectual world in which we'd been negated on a continuing basis. Black Marxism was an attempt to reiterate because numerous scholars had done part of this work before I came along, to reiterate that we are of historical importance, and what you're doing here in Madison is another kind of investment in that page of history. So, I have to congratulate you for the remarkable work that you're doing. To establish the fact that there are boundaries to injustice. Now, one of the complaints made recently by several police authorities is they can't do their jobs because there are cameras. They cannot do their jobs because they're afraid of being recorded, documented, etc. What kind of job is that? What we have told them again and again, if your job is in fact worthy, you should do it in front of a camera. You should document the value of what you are doing. The rest of us do it over and over again. Why can't you do it? So, why is there black radicalism? There's black radicalism because of all the other radicalisms in the world. Black radicalism is not the master narrative of radicalism. It's the master narrative of a radicalism that comes out of a particular culture that emerges in that particular culture that confronts particular injuries, particular inadequacies. When I was a young man, I became very proud of being black. I'm prouder and prouder since then. But my pride has to be tempered by the fact that other people have reasons to be proud as well but no one has reason to be proud of being unjust. So we have to draw the line somewhere. I think that's about all I have to say. Thank you very much. (applauding)