THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Matthew Quest (round I)

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#4, SEPT-NOV/2018

Matthew Quest is a brilliant radical historian and political theorist who teaches History and Africana Studies at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Known for his original research on C.L.R. James, Quest has also written on a variety of African-American thinkers from Ida B Wells, E. Franklin Frazier, Kimathi Mohamed, and Harold Cruse, to Caribbean thinkers such as Joseph Edwards and Eusi Kwayana. Recently, he has written articles on Antigua and Barbuda's struggles with enclosure and disaster capitalism.

Brotherwise Dispatch - Drawing from your essay “Reconsidering Anarchy and Civilization in Ida B. Wells Anti-Lynching campaign”, in what sense can “the striving for racial justice and the desire to vindicate African-American humanity and social-cultural achievement” potentially “lead into blind alleys”?

Matthew Quest – Let me address this first with a concise historical treatment of Ida B. Wells’s life and work, and then I will draw out more of the contemporary implications. In my research on the life and work of Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching campaigns, I found it valuable to demarcate her political legacies as before and after 1899. Before 1899, Wells’s anti-lynching work is articulated firmly within the realm of respectability politics, but not in its most conservative form for her time. For example, in her response to the attack on Thomas Moss and the People’s Grocery in Memphis, Wells defended Black humanity by expressing that those who were lynched embodied middle-class family values, were educated, good and enterprising citizens, even clean. The emphasis on cleanliness reminds us of the explicit legacy of Social Darwinism and “scientific” racism she faced that suggested Blacks were a bestial and lower life form.

Some continue to internalize such ideas today despite the fact that this kind of “science” has been thoroughly discredited by contemporary scholarship. Modern research even goes a step further and reaffirms the African origin of all humanity, not just of Black people. However, when corporate media representatives, church and educational authorities (both whites and people of color) indulge in discussions about “black on black crime” as a form of self-destruction, they are implicitly renewing and reinvigorating an effective legacy of Social Darwinism and “scientific” racism that clearly still permeates society. The fact is that when white people steal from, exploit, or injure white people (or behave like jungle-animals toward people of color) you will note the overall cultural character of whites never is called into question while the assassination of the Black male image in particular continues.

Wells, in her anti-lynching radical journalism before 1899, challenged the racial insecurities of white men who claimed to embody self-reliance, good citizenship, and reason, and white women who were said to embody virtue and placed on a social pedestal in a cult of true womanhood. Wells understood that these social archetypes worked hand and hand with images of women of color as beyond sexual morality (which made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation), and the Black man as a predator to be feared. Within this matrix of identities imposed on Black life, Black men frequently faced false accusations of raping white women, which would often lead to lynching and white race riots against Black community.

Lynching of course, is a ritualized public murder. But it is more than that. It is the mutilation of Black people carried out in the atmosphere of a picnic, where historically, whites took post-card photos smiling at such events and scrambled for the remains of the dead to display as souvenirs. The Black body was often burned, stripped naked, and had the genitals cut off for such memorabilia.

What white authorities really feared during the Jim Crow era at the height of lynching in the U.S. (the 1880s-1930s) was the independent organization of the Black community and of Black toilers in particular. Now by Black toilers, I mean those who whether as industrial workers, migrant farmers, sharecroppers, unemployed, domestic workers or as caring mothers, work extremely hard just to survive.

It is important to remember that while aspiring Black capitalists and Black professionals were attacked by working class white supremacists under Jim Crow, they were also often sponsored and patronized by white supremacist elites. To be a tremendous “success” when the multitudes of your people are dispossessed and terrorized is a peculiar accomplishment that the “New Jim Crow” paradigm does not substantially come to terms with in the past or even in the present. To not criticize or hold Black elites accountable suggests that a more comprehensive understanding with respect to overturning the politics of hierarchy and domination is imperative. Are hierarchy, domination, and institutional racism something maintained only by whites in a vacuum apart from the Black people they victimize?

Does not one become “a Black leader” by being acceptable to a substantial section of the mainstream white population? Many said the U.S. was not beyond racism when the Age of Obama commenced – this was substantially correct, but it could have a self-serving meaning. This is especially so when not coupled with underscoring that the majority of whites who voted for Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton collude with, and benefit from white supremacy. This begs the question why people of color get out the vote, feel euphoric or disappointed with a candidate that white populations who benefit from the effects of racism itself find acceptable? When a scholar like Michael Eric Dyson, as he is periodically want to do to, asks if most Republicans are racist, is he not serving a particular social function by mystifying how institutional racism actually works? In this respect, Dyson clearly offers much needed cover for the Democratic Party as establishment liberal elites who both manage capital and administrate Black life.

Where racial disparities are underscored as the meaning of institutional racism this often obscures how people of color and even liberal whites support it. To emphasize racial disparities in professional and rational tones is to expose in fact that people don’t think racism is institutional. The proper individuals in hierarchical office and proper policies, it is believed, can change this. For example, Black people can be arrested, incarcerated, and beat in the head less than now and equal to the rates of white folks – what a joke, that will never happen without the designing of a new society. This exposes that many who condemn institutional racism in fact believe individual cops and administrators can transform these institutions through reform. The statistics of racial disparities are used not to abolish them but to elect and elevate such misleaders. The Movement for Black Lives platform felt some of the military budget could be re-routed for social programs. Apparently, a section of the imperialist army has a valid function.

To be clear liberals and Democratic Party voters, whether white or not, maintain institutionalized white supremacy by supporting the police as a legitimate institution and empire, the conquering of nations of color all over the world. These institutions cannot be reformed.

The police, even when presided over by Black police chiefs and Black women as mayors, must kill, conquer, and degrade Black toilers. Even when you have a Black president, the sovereignty of African and Third World regimes must be attacked and will be overthrown, as Obama and Hilary did to Libya. Recently, Obama gave speeches in Kenya and South Africa suggesting he respects the anticolonial tradition in Africa. Does he respect traditions of resisting empire when he presided over the overthrow of an African regime? Is he trying to test our attention span and literacy with his misrepresentations? Or does he understand the anticolonial tradition as the right of Black people to police and subordinate themselves?

Perhaps the next development in political thought that challenges hierarchy in Black communities will come from a reversal of the meaning of “Black on Black crime.” Who will have the audacity to say the Black professionals, administrators, mayors, politicians, and police are carrying out “Black on Black crime?”

The Black man as racial stranger, the predator to be feared, is the basis of contemporary racial profiling, the extreme abuse by police and prisons, different sentencing for the same crimes from drug dealing to the death penalty, and the historical tensions that many still feel about sex across the color line – it will not be abolished by cultural discussion and more diversity in hierarchies until a more useful idea is found to replace its role as justifier of oppression. Any new notion that serves the rulers will be a mutation of the old.

Obama himself was “the idea” that was elevated not because he had integrity or was exceptionally smart but in fact because he was not on drugs, not in jail, accepted the socialization from formal education uncritically by the measure of the post-civil rights generation, and seemed to care for his family. He rose to imperial prominence living off of anti-black stereotypes – because many saw him and concluded that, whatever Obama was, he was not that.

Ida B. Wells did not rise to prominence that way. She lived to slay false images and bring an end to lynching. Obama was sponsored by some racists only to be held in contempt by others. Perhaps Barack Obama is the new anti-black stereotype. But this does not take away responsibility for the old failed ways of thinking that paved the way for his arrival.

The foundations of radical journalism that expose contemporary police murder and past lynching should have some things in common. Telling the truth freely about how whites and black elites marginalize Black toilers, the unemployed and street force – to prevent them from gaining political authority to directly govern their own activities and be a part of directly governing society with other ordinary people.

Wells is a clear forerunner to Malcolm X in the sense that they both specialized in tearing down white racist standards as the unquestioned embodiment of reason and beauty which distort notions of citizenship that degrade and are dishonest about exploitation. And like Malcolm, Wells had to make adjustments when the masses, the Black toilers, unemployed, and street force began to move. Malcolm’s insight that white supremacy can make the criminal look like the victim, and the victim look like a criminal can be discursively traced right back to the work of Wells. Malcolm, more than Ida, however, began to question what was wrong with the Black professional classes, the formally educated, and the welfare state of mind.

The Black middle class is usually imagined as “not like the other Blacks” or an exception to the purported lower culture of their race. Racially profiling this class is always revealed as “a mistake.” The Black toilers are seen as embodying the white supremacist archetypes that assassinate the image of their humanity. There are no bourgeois conceptual tools to clarify this as a mistake when they are brutalized and killed. Institutionally it is not a mistake. Michael Eric Dyson cannot say that or he will not be employed making such money. Your doctorate does not save you when you tell the truth – even as a teacher, it catches up with you.

To be clear, I am not saying people of color cannot and do not achieve meaningful educational and cultural standards despite race, class, and gender obstacles. I am saying institutionalized oppression restricts who can achieve these standards through formal socialization processes, and a liberating movement should reject these normative distortions of human development and not seek to uncritically achieve them in the name of “equality.” For this is, in reality, the promotion of equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy; this subtly embraces the idea that some as a social class are permanently unfit for self-government. It is a denial that schooling produces justifications for keeping some people down and rewards others for managing their subservience.

It is understood today that conservative respectability politics is based on internalized white supremacy and patriarchy – but it can be a cheap understanding where we don’t advocate the abolition of the professional classes as the embodiment of culture and government. What was called “Black Lives Matter” failed to do that. For some “respect” the poor and working class but fear their independent action and don’t wish them to directly govern. Activist addictions to electoral and ethnic patronage politics exposes and makes this clear where in doubt.

After 1899, when Black sharecroppers and marginal toilers began to move, as depicted in Ida B Wells’s “Lynch Law in Georgia”, “Mob Rule in New Orleans”, “The East St. Louis Race Riot”, and “The Arkansas Race Riot”, to defend themselves against plantation owners and police, while they may have owned one good suit, most toiled with missing buttons on their shirt and dirt under their finger nails. Some may have been independent readers, and some may have had trouble reading. But under adversity they tried to organize labor unions, or Pan African associations, and when they had to, they brandished a gun (Robert Charles) or even an axe (Sam Hose). They cannot be made to embody any recognized notion of citizenship, by white or black elites because standing up to the police and the boss in the workplace cannot be justified under any circumstances yesterday or today. In the Age of Ida, some were accused of rape as individuals, and ultimately lynched, some were attacked in mass, and some conducted a more modern guerilla resistance in response to what today would be called racial profiling but also the repression of an attempt at the self-organization of Black labor.

But how does a defender of Black humanity respond when a Black toiler defends himself or herself with an axe against their employer and kills them or shoots back at the police in an environment of white supremacist terror? Wells had to recognize that discussions of who is a citizen, educated, who has a family, and who is clean can no longer matter as a vindication of Black humanity. Whatever racial disparities exist that appear on the surface to clarify institutional racism leave us with little credible to say in defending Black humanity short of a commitment to revolution. The desire to be left alone, or for the government to recognize the value of our lives is far from that. There is something naïve, illogical, or charlatan-like about denouncing institutional racism in society and then expecting those same government institutions to reform themselves without an insurgent rebellion or threat of social revolution.

Ida B Wells was never a hustler or opportunist but was among the few who saw the furthest of what needed to be done in her era. Still, we can learn from her strengths and build on her weaknesses. That is what pillars of radical traditions are for. They are not there for cheap socialization for success and self-esteem under dominant institutions. What is to be done when confronted with politicians, police, executives, and supervisors of color? As far as I know, no university based scholar is writing about this today. Despite the matter that where people of color are the demographic majority, if not the voting majority, that is who facilitates oppression. But to bring this up is to introduce what can only be termed “anarchy” – few communists today stand their ground against people of color in hierarchical positions. Angela Davis, that critic of the state and advocate of prison abolition (on Tuesdays) failed to do so advocating for the election of President Obama twice. It was not a dilemma of Davis but a pernicious pattern of many “progressive” people. That Davis felt comfortable waxing philosophic on Ferguson, Palestine, and the meaning of freedom as she stood with Obama meant she understood white supremacy a certain way that led her to discard opposition to capitalism, empire, and the state when half the ruling class’s preferred candidate held office.

The tropes of “anarchy” and “civilization” are just as important in grasping the challenges of Ida B. Wells’s life and work as explaining the contemporary “progressive” dilemma. Civilization is a cluster concept that implies standards of culture, development, and progress but has almost always been exclusionary. Those who are civilized, those worthy to be protected as citizens, by definition accept that there are certain humans who are bestial or of lower cultures unworthy of society’s protection and respect. This is the divide not just between black men and white men, but white men and white women, and can be the basis of gender and class divisions within the Black community itself. Respectability politics within Black communities means some Black people have agreed on terms on which they will not defend (or shield substantially) the lives of other people of color. The fateful embrace of the ethnically plural state (while saying they oppose the white racial state) means many Black activists who critique respectability politics also side with the police state though they may seek reformist legislation. This too, has something to do with how we understand civilization.

In contrast, anarchy is seen as chaos, where not recognized as a socialist form of working class self-government that rejects state power and hierarchy. Whoever is labeled as a purveyor of chaos is not deemed worthy of respect. We need to reconsider if institutional racism responds to Black self-emancipation as “anarchy,” and if the state normatively places the Black body under surveillance, then anarchism might inform a deeper sense of Black liberation. But this will not work if Black rebellious identities, not consistent practice, are seen as a form of authentic rebellion, both because the FBI says so and it sells t-shirts. The FBI of course can conduct campaigns of disinformation that obscure and contain the deeper sources of Black insurgency.

Recently the FBI conflated the founders of Black Lives Matter with those who shot back at the police in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Nothing could be further from the truth. The founders of Black Lives Matter were to the right of Bernie Sanders, a socialist for American empire, and supporters of Hilary Clinton and Mayor Rawlings-Blake, a black woman who presided over police murder and the repression of the Baltimore rebellion. The incessant chatter over “the meaning of Ferguson” was a conscious effort to mystify the role of “black power” in police murder and as the enemy of the Baltimore rebellion.

It is difficult to grapple with this because of two other truths. Black people live in the shadow of state power and the racial gaze. Still, that doesn’t mean Black minds are committed to deep rebellion or social revolution. We have to be careful as we approach this on a few counts.

First, we cannot labor under the mistaken assumption that anarchism is synonymous with certain white people alone. Second, except perhaps those whom recognize that labor creates all things of value, most anarchists have a severe condemnation of civilization as synonymous with the empire of capital itself. But world civilization, to my mind, as a concept, must be democratized as the repository of what labor has produced but also what freedom movements including those of the colonized have advanced.

We need to build a consensus among radical thinkers that “civilization” or “world culture” is something that has been contributed to by the humanity of all peoples – not primarily those who plunder toilers’ lives. We don’t want a false dialogue of civilizations facilitated by empire and its increasingly culturally plural academy. We also don’t want to have such a severe class line that we can’t recognize that some middle class people or even those of aristocratic origins, in their scholarship have taught us, on occasion, some important things that are crucial.

During Wells’s lifetime, especially with the emergence of the Marcus Garvey movement, and even among those who dabble in African American popular history today, there has been an effort to vindicate Black contributions to world civilization and establish that Africans had their own civilizations in precolonial times before Atlantic World enslavement.

White supremacy during Jim Crow labeled the insurgent Black body as expressing “anarchy” disrupting purported white civilization. At first Wells argued the Black middle class were more civilized and more legitimate citizens than whites, though their citizenship rights as embodied by the vote were denied. However, Wells’s second half of her public career corresponded with the Age of the Haymarket Martyrs and Wobblies, and other anarchists and syndicalists. Syndicalists are radicals who believe in workers’ self-management and “the general strike” to take over and govern cities.

We need to be clear, the Age of Ida B. Wells is the same as the Age of Booker T. Washington, that period labeled the “great nadir” where supposedly there was little Black resistance. Lynching and race riots were a response to that resistance by those whose names are obscure to history.

Further, the Age of Ida B. Wells was also the Age of Lucy Parsons, that outstanding anarchist woman of color. A major way Ida B. Wells’s life and work is distorted in African American history is by grouping her too uncritically with Mary McCloud Bethune, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Mary Church Terrell. Wells transcended these Black middle-class club women and literary figures.

Wells’s generational peers in radicalism were the anarchists Emma Goldman and Lucy Parson, the latter a woman of color who also moved from the Jim Crow South to Chicago. Wells, Goldman, and Parsons were all public agitators, women who advocated armed self-defense and what today is called “stand your ground.” Their voices were deemed equal to the power of a mass riot.

Ida B. Wells, it is true, because of patriarchy, did not quickly find her place in Africana Studies canon formation. But just as Harriet Tubman will eventually find her face on the other side of money from Andrew Jackson, that slave holder and killer of Native Americans, we should not want Wells in any canon of great women and men who are elevated in a manner that makes them respectable but not repositories of disobedience.

When we learn of Wells as an abstract Africana woman writer in search of her own identity and defender of Black humanity, this is good for professional development and accumulating social capital for future executives and administrators of our lives – one recent advertised job I saw in the spirit of the heritage of Wells was a salaried “anti-oppression consultant.” Minimizing armed self-defense, disobedience, insurgency, and defending Black toilers who are normatively “undefendable” in an environment of lynching, as the context for Wells radical journalism, ensures that Wells’s work is not recognized as an archive of conversations about what to do and how to do it in a moment of danger.

This is the first of a three part interview through email correspondence from April 28th, 2018 – August 12th, 2018 between Matthew Quest and The Brotherwise Dispatch.

The rest of the interview will be published in upcoming issues . . .