THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs David Austin

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#15, MARCH-MAY/2015

David Austin is the author of Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, and the editor of You Don't Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. Austin currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College.

Brotherwise Dispatch - FEAR OF A BLACK NATION obviously draws from a Hip Hop aesthetic in referencing PUBLIC ENEMY’s classic album Fear of a Black Planet. However, aside from your stated “appreciation of PUBLIC ENEMY”, in what sense does the title itself capture “the worldliness” of that which you conceptually introduce through your work as “biosexuality”?

David Austin - As you mention, Fear of a Black Planet is a classic album. The title track speaks specifically about “race” mixing and the fear that this engenders in America. The concept of biosexuality draws on this fear and frames it in relation to the history of Black-white encounters under the slave regime, including in Canada, and its attendant racial codes. I would have used ‘Planet’ instead of ‘Nation’ in the title, but copyright restrictions prevented that. When I eventually substituted ‘Nation’ for ‘Planet’, it actually made more sense in some ways, in so far as the word ‘Nation’ implies a state or at least a territory that has clear geographic boundaries, a people that may or may not be defined by ethnicity, and nationalism which has everything to do with identity both within and without geographic borders. Even the concept of diaspora as we understand it is defined in relation to nationhood or concepts of ‘Nation’.

I used the word ‘Nation’ in order to capture the fear that the growing and public presence of Blacks in Canada, and in Montreal in particular, during the 1960s engendered in the Canadian state, and particularly within Canadian state security – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The RCMP was literally concerned that the growing presence of Caribbean nationals in Montreal, mixing and mingling with whites would have biological repercussions in so far as Blacks would mix with whites, particularly Black men with white women, and sully the presumed purity, sanctity and innocence of the Canadian state. This fear, what I refer to as a biosexuality, speaks to the Black experience in the Americas (but not only in the Americas) and persists in the what Saidiyya Hartman has termed the ‘afterlife of slavery’ in so far as we live with slavery’s racial codes in the present, codes that either de facto or de jure, prohibited black-white sexual encounters, and continue to make them problematic in the present.

As I describe it in the book, biosexuality or biosexual politics “refers to a primeval fear of Blacks that is based in slavery and colonialism and the recurring need to discipline and control Black bodies – to force Blacks in particular to conform to the racial codes that govern their relations with other groups. It is a phenomenon intimately connected to both a fear of Black rebellion and self-activity, or self-organization, and an intense anxiety about the biological and political spread of blackness through Black-White solidarity and sexual encounters. It is about the perceived or potential threat that Blacks represent to the state.” (1) In many ways, the term represents a coda to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in so far as it accounts for the peculiar experiences of blacks in the Americas in terms of racial codes, laws, attitudes and practices that governed and govern black bodies. Blacks are virtually absent, or present in absentia, form Foucault’s analysis even though, as we now know from Brady Heiner’s work, the praxis of the Black Panther Party and the writing of Angela Davis and George Jackson were important contributing factors in Foucault’s analysis of prisons and biopolitics, even if their contribution is unacknowledged in his work.

State security fears did not occur in a vacuum. They came about as a result of the growing black presence in Canada, it is true, but this was the sixties and the RCMP was profoundly concerned with the growing public political presence of blacks as they exercised their right to exist and to be. In essence, they became a public enemy, as opposed to a private one that, historically speaking, did not occupy a great deal of public space and whose presence was largely restricted to behind closed doors or positions of servitude in terms of working as domestics in the homes of wealthy families, as porters on trains or hotels, or in the kitchens in restaurants and jazz clubs. Of course, Blacks in Montreal had always organized to humanize their existence – through church organizations, the UNIA the Colored Women’s Club, the Negro Community Center, etc., but in the sixties Black organizing took on a different tenor and tone, and the RCMP was fearful of this growing black nationalism in their midst, and even more concerned that it would spread like a contagion – both biologically and socially – and influence the wider society.

Of course the RCMP was also concerned with the global or at least transnational implications of Black self-activity during this period. Montreal sits in close proximity to the United States and its Caribbean community had close ties to the Caribbean. So state security was fearful that Canada was becoming not a, but the site of Black internationalism and that this would, in its own words, destroy the state:

We should be particularly interested in any future Black Liberation Action Committee functions and learning the identities of all members and individuals involved in this committee. Likewise, any additional advance intelligence relative to the Congress of Black Writers, mentioned in paragraph 5 of your report, and the identities of representatives to that Congress would be of interest. Should such a congress convene in Montreal efforts should be made to ensure that all proceedings are given as thorough a coverage as possible. In view of developments in the Canadian Negro community and the increasing liaison between Negroes in Canada and Negro Black Nationalists in the United States and abroad.... (2)

Another agent’s statement is far more explicit, not so much in terms of its fear of internationalism, but it terms of the impact blacks might have on the nation itself:

Although these are fairly recent organizations on the subversive scene in this area, the militant Black Power advocates and the Internationalists are indeed the most active. Their effect is being felt throughout the Canadian Universities and unfortunately their popularity is growing steadily at an amazing rate. It is my firm belief that the internationalists and their corporate, the Black Power organs as previously noted constitute an extreme threat to the national security and their influence in our educational institutions is presently being felt with strong consequences. If able to break down the educational area of our society within the following generation the Nation’s Government could be destroyed…. It is anticipated that in 1969, the organizations noted in this report will gain movement and power, increasing their areas of concentration. The present situation at Sir George Williams University as reported on file...is a valid indication of progress within the Black Power movement. Similar radical incidents are expected in the future. (3)

This is obviously a different kind of statement than what we would expect from the U.S. It is the same fear of blackness, but in this case, the fear is directed at Blacks as intruders, a foreign element to the nation that is violating it from the outside. The RCMP statements may sound alarmist, but they have a historical context. Canada became a sovereign nation in 1867. Sir John A. MacDonald was the country’s first prime minister. Here’s what the founding father had to say about blacks in Canada one year after the country attained dominion status:

We have retained the punishment of death for rape…. We have thought it well…to continue it on account of the frequency of rape committed by negroes, of whom we have too many in Upper Canada. They are very prone to felonious assaults on white women; if the sentence and imprisonment were not very severe, there would be the great dread of people taking the law into their own hands.

As MacDonald’s statement makes obvious, biosexuality was in many ways a founding tenet of the coming into being of Canada as a nation. There are other examples, but this one speaks volumes because of the stature of MacDonald and the timing (1868) of his statement. MacDonald’s conception of race and sex essentially inaugurates the nation.

BD - The Negres Blanc, Negres Noir chapter in your book is fascinating, especially for those of us who suffer from an unfamiliarity with such a formative moment in Canadian history. What is it about the ontological tension inherent in Black Liberation praxis against western imperialist power, which lends such socio-historical impetus to a wide variety of diverse movements who seek to “radically transform global structures of inequality”?

DA - Part of what I try to get at in the book is that our experiences as Black or people of Africa descent as makers of history, and as the embodiment of political experiences that are deeply rooted in the experience of slavery, and slave rebellion – including our cultural and artistic production such as the blues, jazz, rock and roll and R&B, ska and reggae – our politics, and intellectual production have not only been an expression of our particular social and historical experiences, but, in the process, have been profoundly important for other oppressed and marginalized groups, and for society at large.

This is the universal and particular dynamic that goes unrecognized despite its importance to the notion of Western civilization. In other words, our particular experiences have been universalized in many ways, on the one hand, then contained in their particularity on the other, or ignored altogether, which is precisely what Heiner suggests in his essay on Foucault, but generally speaking, the impact of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements in North America are limited to blacks as if they did not infect the entire society, when we know that they were profoundly, even primordially important. In Canada, this phenomenon is embodied in events such as the Sir George Williams rebellion that I discuss in the book, and how these events not only emanated from and helped to change the conditions under which Blacks existed in Canada, but touched the entire society in ways that struck dread and fear within Canadian state security, but when the histories of that period are written, Black politics and experiences are reduced to a footnote, or altogether silenced.

In terms of why the Black diasporic experience has been so profoundly important for other groups, I think this has everything to do with the fact that, in the racial hierarchy, Blackness is inescapably, and some might argue irrevocably at the bottom and, perhaps this is what Afro-pessimism seeks to probe. We will always be Black in ways that prevent us from being “integrated” into society at large. Blackness remains an enigma with a stigma attached to it, associated with slavery, baseness, and vileness. Blackness is registered as both ethos and pathos, a qualified humanness that, quite logically, becomes a stand-in or vicarious expression for other groups that are oppressed. We remained reduced largely to physical attributes, and even in those areas where we have gained access – sports, the arts, and especially in the music industry, the mental labor invested in these forms are ignored and reduced to a physicality. We remain esconsed in Blackness, part of a permanent underclass, but it is that very experience that makes us, that has fed and continues to feed Black creativity.

French Quebeckers were the downtrodden and disposed majority of Quebec who, despite representing the majority, were treated like refuse, the déclassé in relation to Anglophones at a time when Montreal was the industrial and cultural capital of Canada. They were Quebec’s Irish, were told to “Speak white” which is to say English in a way that racialized their experience as “Blacks” or nègres. But this occurs at a time when the dominant notion of race was essentially what we might describe loosely as ethnicity and the English and the French were considered two separate races, the two founding nations of Canada. But they are the founding nations only in so far as the presence on Indigenous peoples is conveniently ignored, and they were nègres only as long as the actual nègres, Black folks living largely in Montreal, are/were made invisible, or ‘unvisible’ – seen but unacknowledged. So, when French Quebecers read Césaire or Fanon they could not help but moved by the penetrating imagery, language and politics of his poetry. But the irony is that as a writer and thinker, he could be simultaneously acknowledged and ignored, engaged and disavowed because the enigma and stigma of Blackness is thick, representing a limited and restricted humanity, an almost subterranean presence. So, today, here in Quebec, the influence of Césaire and Fanon is almost the stuff of distant folklore as it is not part of the narrative of Quebec’s coming of age in the 1960s.

BD - What contemporary implications might one draw from the way participants at the 1968 Congress of Black Writers at McGill University grappled with recognizing the historical importance of the “universal and particular dynamic” of Black liberation praxis while simultaneously realizing the socio-ontological significance of resisting the pull to succumb to a “western socialist humanism”?

DA - That question connects to the previous one. On a social level, I would say that the organizers of the Congress of Black Writers understood themselves as being at the center, we might say the vanguard, of change in a way that was characteristic of the Black Power movement. They were drawing on a tradition – the tradition of the previous Congresses of Negro Writers and Artists and the work of predecessors such James, Césaire, and Fanon, among others – in a way that situated Black humanity, ipso facto, as part of the global struggle for social transformation and anti-colonialism and anti-racism. This is not to say that everyone involved consciously understood that this was what they were doing, the thrust of the event was organized in this spirit with certain individuals consciously thinking about the Congress in these terms.

Of course, in many ways, and in different ways, James and Carmichael’s presence at the Congress typified this spirit in which the universal was embodied in the particular work and experiences of Black folks. But beyond their presence and their overall work, your question again speaks to the larger issue of how Blacks struggles are often reduced to a “minor terms” or seen as secondary to “the struggle” when in actual fact the experiences and struggles of black folks have often been defining elements of social struggle in general. And this is the point that is often missed when the historical moment of the 1960s is written about in ways that writes out of existence or minimizes the importance of Black struggles. It is also a phenomenon that is characteristic of theory as both Heiner’s analysis of the impact of the praxis of the Black Panther Party, Angela Davis and George Jackson on Foucault in the 1970s and in Susan Buck-Morss’s analysis of the impact of the Haitian Revolution on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.

This phenomenon is also instructive in terms of thinking about how the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) in Detroit was in many ways at the forefront of the labor movement in terms of the demands that it sought to impose on capital. They went above and beyond the work of the UAW, and rather than conceding to the LRBW and the demands of Black labor, the auto industry fled leading to the transition of Motown from an industrial capital to a ghost town. Of course, this particular-universal dynamic is a very masculine one in which the particular experiences of black men becomes a stand-in for black humanity in the same way that white men stand in for white women and men. I tried to tease out this contradiction in Fear of a Black Nation by drawing on the narratives of women who had been actively involved in Black politics in Montreal and several theorists, including Carol Boyce Davies, Belinda Edmonson, Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, Kathleen Cleaver, Natasha Barnes, Katherine McKittrick, and Saba Mahmood, among others. It’s a bit of a hazard to list so many names without speaking directly to the specifics of their work, but in various ways, each of them helped me to think about not only the dynamic of gender and race, but also gender and agency under circumstances of subordination. This is important because, while many women played active roles in the politics of the 1960s and 1970s, their roles are usually subordinated to those of men in ways that make their actions invisible because they are not seen as being central.

BD- For those of our readers who have yet to read your work, describe the controversy surrounding the involvement of ‘Whites’ in the Congress, in particular how it was simultaneously mediated by such diverse Black intellectual orientations as cultural nationalism and socialism?

DA - Well the debate was clearly a component part of the moment in which it occurred. This was the sixties, the height of the Black Power period and Black nationalism, and there were some who participated in the Congress who felt that it should be a Blacks only space. Of course, the event was held at McGill University, which made this prospect improbable, but the demand for a Black only space on the part of some, and the opposition to this idea by other Blacks, reflected, as your question suggests, the different tendencies among blacks during this period. During this period, Black politics ranged from Islamic groups, socialists, Maoist, Pan-Africanists, Caribbean leftists and nationalists, and liberals and conservatives. Race was the unifying feature, but often was not enough to sustain a sense of unity. There were some, including Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best who was adamantly opposed to the idea of excluding whites, and said so publicly and explicitly. According to Best’s comment in an interview I conducted with him over thirty years later, C.L.R. James quietly told him that this was not a position he should have publicly stated.

For his part, Walter Rodney seemed to be clearly suggesting that the very debate was an indication that the level of political discussion on race in Canada had not sufficiently evolved, and that he did not feel the need to convince whites of his humanity. Harry Edwards made it clear that the incessant focus on individual whites as opposed to the system that produced and perpetuated racism was shortsighted, and while, as far as I can recall, neither Stokely Carmichael and James Forman spoke to this issue during the conference– their presentations, both of which focused in their own ways on colonialism, exploitation, and race – there is nothing in their presentations that would suggest that they supported the idea of whites being excluded.

It is hard to gage the overall sentiment as we only know the thoughts of those who spoke up during the Congress, and the after-thoughts of some who were in attendance, but clearly the very thought of excluding whites suggests that there had been a shift towards a Black nationalism that made even the expression of the idea of excluding whites possible. This perhaps would have been improbable the year before.

BD - Late in your book, during your criticism of contemporary postracial ideology, as specifically ushered in historically with the 2008 election of Obama to the U.S. Presidency, you mention that popular and extremely pervasive justification for maintaining established relations of power because “Blacks, after all, can now be found in all sectors of society: as CEO’s or on the boards of large companies, as professionals of all kinds, as mayors, as elected politicians, and even a head of state. Is this not precisely what civil rights and Black Power groups fought for in the 1960s and 1970s?” How do your respond to such claims drawing from your own theoretical perspective of ‘biosexuality’?

DA - Clearly the recent police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, as well as the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, highlight the fact that the idea of a post-racial society is a profoundly problematic falsehood. Black bodies continue to be the target of racial attacks, and if we look into the area of mental health, Blacks continue to suffer the psychological effects of slavery and colonialism’s afterlife, rooted among other things in a fear that I tie to the notion of biosexuality. And yet, the notion of a post-racial society is so strong, especially given that the president of the United States is a Black man, and despite the fact that there appears to have been no marked change in the circumstances of what is essentially a permanent Black underclass in the U.S., at least not for the better, and including in the Southside of Chicago, in the very city where the president has roots, this is telling.

Here in Canada, the Black incarceration rate has increased by 50% over the past 10 years. That is remarkable by any standards, although statistics on race and incarceration are relatively new in Canada. Along with Indigenous peoples, Blacks are criminalized more than any other group in this country, and this is not a new phenomenon. The number of police shootings of young Blacks over the years here in Montreal alone is alarming, and the same can be said of Toronto. But there are also the more mundane and less spectacular forms of racial exclusion and violence that occurs in the education system and the workplace, all of which serve to limit the life prospects of Black women and men in this society. Clearly the more spectacular manifestations of racism are part of an ongoing, perpetual problem, and this sometimes get lost or overshadowed by the justified outrage evoked by brazen killings. And, of course, so-called “Black-on-Black” violence is equally troubling and political. In fact, the term is not simply inadequate, but profoundly misleading. How can we disassociate intra-Black violence or fratricide from – as Fanon as demonstrated in his often misunderstood chapter on violence in The Wretched of the Earth – the social and political circumstances and the sense of powerlessness, hopelessness, and violence that the colonized and marginalized and dispossessed feel and experience?

I begin the concluding chapter of the book with a discussion I had with a young black man who was a youth in a center where I used to work years ago. He was the first person I heard articulate what might be described as a post-racial discourse in relation to Obama, in 2008, when Obama had won the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party. This thick notion was already in the air, and coming from seemingly unlikely sources. It is hard to confront such narratives without thinking about the relationship between narratives and power, so-called knowledge production and power, all of which cannot be understood if we simply speak about race as if race is solely about representation and not about power relations that are tied to class, gender and sexuality, and attitudes that are deeply embedded in the psyche and which cannot simply wished away, even with good intentions. Fanon tried to tell us this, has been telling us this, but we don’t seem to be listening to him. In this sense, Fanon is like a ‘duppy’, the Jamaican word for ghost that haunts the present, an unsettled spirit because, in this case, his ideas have not been properly embraced. He cannot be properly laid to rest until the circumstances that he described in relation to colonialism, coloniality, and race and power no longer have the relevance that he accorded them. Needless to say, we are a long way from granting Fanon the burial ceremony he rightly deserves.

BD - This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of David Austin and The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of David Austin for The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from July 25th of 2014 – February 9th of 2015)

(1)Fear of a Black Nation, p.11

(2)RCMP, “General Conditions And Subversive Activities Amongst Negroes – Province of Quebec,” Congress of Black Writers Conference, 11, 12, 13 October 1968, Montreal, Quebec, 15 August 1968, vol. 1, 000069.

(3)RCMP, “General Conditions And Subversive Activities Amongst Negroes – Province of Quebec,” Congress of Black Writers Conference, 11, 12, 13 October 1968, Montreal, Quebec, 29 January 1969, vol. 5, 487. (emphasis added)

John A. Macdonald, cited in Barrington Walker, Race on Trial, 116.