THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Joseph G. Ramsey

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#5, DEC/2018-FEB/2019

Joseph G. Ramsey is a writer, educator and organizer based at UMass Boston in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He is the editor of four book-length volumes of radical social criticism, including the Works and Days/Cultural Logic collaboration, Scholactivism: Reflections on Transforming Praxis, In and Beyond the Classroom. Presently at work on a book unearthing the critical communism of Richard Wright, his work has also been published in Mediations, Cultural Logic, Labor Notes, Counterpunch, Dig Boston, Jacobin, Slate, Socialism and Democracy, Red Wedge, the American Writers series, Lineages of the Literary Left, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and elsewhere. A union activist representing tenure-barred faculty at Boston's only public university, Joe's reflections on alienation in the university can be found at Inside Higher Ed and in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

BROTHERWISE DISPATCH - Although in your essay “Revolutionary Relatability,” you characterize Assata: An Autobiography as being at times “strikingly didactic,” to what do you attribute its profound capacity to continually resonate with students?

Joseph G. Ramsey - Just the other day I had a former student, Vicki, stop by my office to take care of some old paperwork and, somehow, we got to talking about Assata—a book we’d read together in a course on “The Sixties” three or four years ago. Her eyes just lit up. Vicki is a working-class Latin@ from Puerto Rico, the first in her family to go to college—one of those students who came into my classroom saying that she “hated” history and “wasn’t really a reader.” She had come to college for job training: to become a nurse. But Assata grabbed her like no other book before had. Not only did she love it, but she passed it on to her younger brother, a kid who was really struggling with high school and with reading. But Assata he took to like a fish in water. Vicki told me that he read the whole book (all 274 pages) in like two or three days. She couldn’t stop singing Assata’s praises. (Vicki, by the way, is now working with struggling youngsters in the Boston Public School system, which was also great to hear.)

Now, why is it that a student like Vicki (or her brother) responds so strongly to Assata? I think it is partly due to the way that Assata Shakur weaves a vivid and immediate story of racist state violence and incarceration—the book’s narrative literally begins with police terror on page one—with a more gradually developing narrative of political education. There is a rawness to the former that makes the book hard to put down. And even in the education narrative, though it’s often nuanced, Shakur isn’t afraid to be blunt. Maybe the classic example of this comes when at one point she writes: “If you are deaf, dumb, and blind to what is happening in the world, you’re under no obligation to do anything. But if you know what’s happening and you don’t do anything but sit on your ass, then you’re nothing but a punk” (Assata, 207). It’s hard to imagine a more confrontational passage; she calls the reader out. I’m sure there are those who read this and feel put off—similarly her referring to police officers as “pigs” provokes some students, including those with family in law enforcement. But I think for many students Assata’s direct style, and the way she is explicit about the need to move from recognition of social problems to consciously willed revolutionary practice to change them, hits them like a blast of fresh air. Even students who don’t agree with her on this or that issue express gratitude at how clear and how committed she is to her radical vision. Better to be provoked than bored, right?

This is particularly true in academia where, at least in the liberal arts, much time is spent on teasing out the nuances of social injustices, but comparatively little on the pressing question of what is to be done about them. There is no shortage of academic analyses that imply that we need an overhaul of entire systems of oppression—related to capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and sexist or patriarchal relations—but it’s very rare that academics will take the next step, fully owning the political and ethical implications of the radical conclusions their own analyses point to. (At least not in the classroom, or on campus.) Assata models that next step, and in a cynical age like ours, it’s like a ray of hope, and possibility.

But of course, it’s not just a matter of the book’s style or tone. Crucial to students’ reception of Assata Shakur’s radical words and polemical provocations is the understanding that they are dealing here not only with someone who ‘talked the talk,’ but who also ‘walked the walk,’ and paid the price. And yet Assata also is someone who slipped the noose, escaping prison with the help of comrades, surviving to this day as an exile in Cuba, where she can continue to thumb her nose at Uncle Sam, even as the FBI has her on their “Top Ten Most Wanted Terrorist” list. (And here I must ironically “thank” the Feds: my students and I may never have read Assata in the first place if not for them elevating her like that. Funny how state repression can backfire, breathing more life into to the very thing it seeks to extinguish.)

So, it’s difficult, maybe impossible, to separate Assata’s appeal as a text from her own living example: her life proves that it is possible to challenge the most powerful repressive and reactionary forces on earth and live to tell the tale. Albeit not without major costs. (And we shouldn’t make light of those costs either.)

And yet, at the same time as Assata’s style and her living example position her as a serious and committed revolutionary, one who talks the talk and walks the walk, it’s important to add that the tone of this book is not one of holier-than-thou revolutionary arrogance. To the contrary, the book is exemplary for the way it models what I have called revolutionary humility. The text performs a delicate balance, at once modelling a bold radical confrontation with dominant power structures, while remaining respectful of the complex social and historical processes through which people’s political consciousness develops—starting with her own.

In this spirit, throughout her narrative Shakur foregrounds the occasions where she herself made mistakes, or where she had her ideological illusions and social contradictions exposed. She relates these formative experiences and self-reflections with a disarming openness, at times with irony and humor, at others with regret and sorrow for the harm her confusion caused.

One time has to do with her early internalizations of ideas associating dark skin with ugliness, another with her judgmental views towards her mother for not being able to duplicate the “perfect” American housewife image that appeared on television at the time. Another example of this that seems still edgy today comes when Assata describes a scene from her college years. While arguing about the Vietnam War with another student, she throws at him a whole bunch of anti-communist myths that she has absorbed uncritically during her youth. At this point, Assata (at this point her name is still Joanne Chesimard) is starting to become political, but there is still all this baggage of inherited ideology that she has only begun to work through. And what is so wonderful is how Shakur, as an author, is able to not only offer us this disarming story of her own youthful arrogance and delusion, but then to draw out of that a more general lesson. “I never forgot that day,” she tells us. “We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is…[A]lways decide who your enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your enemies for you” (Assata, 152).

Assata’s narrative of political education draws from this sort of critical reflection on past steps and mis-steps alike. It is by reflecting on past experience, with its positive and negative aspects, (critically revisiting myths she has previously been taught and so on), that Assata’s own revolutionary consciousness and commitment develops. This makes her text and her politics approachable. So, yeah, she challenges the reader, demanding that radical talk be extended into action, that social movement activists consider questions of state power etc., but at the same time she enacts a mode of reflection and self-transformation that suggests it is ok to make mistakes. She recognizes that oppressed people bear the traces and contradictions of the society that has birthed them. How could we not be mired in the muck of the past history we have inherited? (And indeed it is often by learning more about history, that Shakur comes to see the present in a new light.)

Assata demands that we take action to change this history, with an eye on truly radical social transformation—not just reformist band-aids, but genuine socialist revolution, an overthrow of the imperialist state, the abolition of mass incarceration, a cultural revolution against white supremacy and patriarchy in the movement and beyond it—but she also models an ethic of patience, encouraging us to work through the history as it is necessarily embodied and reflected in our own inherited ideas, personal relations, attitudes, and more. There is no going around what history has presented to us. We must go through it, together, alongside other people who have been shaped by this history too, just as we ourselves have been.

BD - In what sense did you mean that “contemporary radical educators and organizers have much to learn” from Assata: An Autobiography?

JGR - Well, if it’s not already implied: I think that contemporary educators and organizers alike could often benefit from a good dose of both sides of Assata’s revolutionary humility: both her unapologetic boldness about the urgency of the call for radical change, her insistence on moving from analysis to commitment and action, but also her patience and understanding approach to the contradictions and flaws that we find in ourselves and in other people. Too often in today’s US radical “left” we find one part of this combination but not the other. “Revolutionary” boldness and urgency without the love or humility hardens into sectarianism, dogmatism, an arrogant impatience with people as they actually exist in the present. On the other hand, humility and caring for the people without the revolutionary boldness risks bleeding into social work and passive acceptance of “reality” as it “is,” a condescending pessimism about people’s potential for conscious transformation of themselves and the world. We need both—both the bold revolutionary optimism, and the deep caring humility.

And let me underscore just one more point before we move on, to counter a certain understandable but nonetheless dangerous tendency to romanticize Assata Shakur herself, or the Black Liberation Army or Black Panther Party, she was involved in. We need to bear in mind how Assata extends this self-critical attitude towards her own revolutionary praxis in the BPP and the BLA as well. It’s not just her “pre-revolutionary” self that she criticizes. As she puts it near the end of the book referring to the BLA: “On the whole we were weak, inexperienced, disorganized, and seriously lacking in training. But the biggest problem was one of political development. They were sisters and brothers who had been so victimized by Amerika that they were willing to fight to the death against their oppressors. But we were to find out quickly that courage and dedication were not enough. To win any struggle for liberation, you have to have the way as well as the will, and overall ideology and strategy that stem from a scientific analysis of history and present conditions” (Assata, 242, emphasis added). Assata pushes back here against a fetishization of militancy or commitment, emphasizing the danger of becoming isolated from the masses of people, and of substituting voluntarism for strategy. Assata does not give us some anti-intellectual celebration of “action” for action’s sake. She insists on action, yes, but action that is guided by (self) critical reflection.

It is in this context that we need to hear the intellectual challenge in Assata’s now-famous mantra, which became a staple at protests and meetings (and on the back of “Assata Taught Me” hoodie sweatshirts) in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter uprisings. As that beautiful chant goes: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” But what’s crucial to grasp is that this mantra is not only a call to revolutionary militancy, tempered with mutual aid and kindness; it is also a call to do the hard work of theory and practice, of thought, application and critical reflection, necessary to develop a collective strategy that can actually win. No easy task.

BD - Would you mind giving our readers a breakdown of just what exactly took place at that 2013 MLA convention with regards to your reading of Assata Shakur and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow?

JGR - Well, it’s difficult for me to recall exactly what went down back in 2013—so much has happened over five years! But, yeah, I have had a chance to give a few public talks on the relationship between the work of these two key figures. Happy to share some of the take-aways.

The first point to make is that I think it’s really important that people read both Michelle Alexander and Assata Shakur. Read, discuss, and build upon their work—critically. It’s invaluable stuff, both for drawing new folks into these conversations, as well as for deepening our understanding of the system we’re up against, its history, and how it might be dismantled and transcended. I teach both books whenever I get the chance to.

It would be easy to give a long list of the virtues of a book like The New Jim Crow (as we’ve just done for Assata). Alexander does a terrific job de-familiarizing what has come to appear as our “new normal,” laying bare the legal architecture and governmental policies that have built the current system of American mass incarceration. In doing so she drives home how things did not have to go this way; how there was plenty of research evidence and alternative policy proposals even in the 1970s that could have led the country away from prisons and jails rather than deeper and deeper into the gulag archipelago. As she makes clear, it was not “inevitability” but rather a deliberate political strategy—an elite choice—to turn towards greater repression and punishment, and towards new forms of coded racism, all as a way of driving a “wedge” to divide and rule the American masses in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement.

To her credit, Alexander traces how this cruel and racist offensive, from Nixon on, used appeals to “law and order” and the demonization of inner-city Blacks to decimate the growing progressive movement of the late 1960s, a movement exemplified by efforts such as Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign. Drawing analogies to the invention of racial slavery in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion (in the 17th century) and of Jim Crow in the response to the multi-racial class-based insurgency of the Populist movement (in the 19th century), Alexander makes it clear that the contemporary system of mass incarceration was part of a reactionary political project of ruling-class control, a response to movements from below that could have taken this society in a different direction.

The “New Jim Crow” then is not merely a continuation of a monolithic and ceaseless white supremacy, but a particular political response to the threat posed by an emergent multiracial class-based movement. This is important to mark, as too often, popularizations of Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” idea—found even in a powerful film like Ava DuVernay’s Thirteenth—paint the picture of contemporary racist practices as if there has been no exception to this pattern of anti-Black demonization and oppression. Certainly, there are powerful similarities and continuities in the history of racism in the USA—who can doubt it? But there have also been ruptures in this history, and it is important to keep from falling into an ahistorical overemphasis of Amerika as nothing but one long white supremacist monologue. (Here I think of the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, powerful as it often is, as perhaps the most influential expression of this tendency.)

So, in understanding the New Jim Crow, I would emphasize that we need to bear in mind two things: 1) the ways that contemporary forms of racist oppression have been developed in response to rebellions (including multiracial ones) from below, and 2) that there are important new elements in the “New Jim Crow,” that requires us to look at changes in the overall political economy of global capitalism if we are to make sense of them. What we have been seeing over the past few decades is not merely another reiteration of the “same old” American racism. It has historically specific determinants that the work of folks like Alexander helps us to grasp—though I would also want to mention the work of radical sociologist Loic Wacquant at this point, (as well as the recent book Incarcerating the Crisis by Jordan Camp). Wacquant’s work has been crucially important for drawing out the way that class inequalities within both the white and black population are more marked than ever in the USA, and for showing how this system of “hyper-incarceration,” is not just a targeting African American people in general, but is very specifically aimed at brutally controlling and isolating the historically rebellious urban poor of the former ghettos. (See the Special Issue of Socialism & Democracy on “The Roots of Mass Incarceration: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor,” edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández. Also see the important critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates by my comrades Gregory Meyerson and Stephen Ferguson, which delves into many of these issues.

Much of what Alexander writes can be seen as an important supplement to Assata. But it’s maybe important also to reflect on where TNJC and Assata differ, or even conflict, in terms of the subjective political standpoint they encourage us to take up. These books focus on many common issues (racism, mass incarceration, tyrannical police powers, etc.) but they address their readers in different ways.

So, when we look at how Michelle Alexander frames the audience she is writing for, in her opening Preface to TNJC, she speaks of three different groups: first, those who already care about racial justice, but who “do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration.” Second, those who understand the severity of mass incarceration, but are “struggling to persuade their friends, neighbors, relatives, teachers, co-workers, or political representatives” to see the racist nature of what is going on. Third, Alexander writes that she is “writing this book for all those trapped within America’s latest caste system.” “You may be locked up or locked out of mainstream society,” she adds, “but you are not forgotten.” In short: Alexander aims to persuade the caring but uninformed, and to arm the convinced so they can persuade others. She offers the book as a practical tool for these two groups. But she does not conceive the third group in the same way. This third group, the incarcerated themselves, are not framed as subjects to be activated or armed, but more as objects of sympathy, to be remembered. Imprisoned humanity is framed here as a motivation for others outside the prison to become active in righting wrong—not as itself a potential force of social change. (I know I am reading a lot into a one-paragraph preface. But I think these few sentences are indicative.)

Thus, one of the important criticisms of TNJC –namely that the book tends to ignore the body of theory and practice of the Black Liberation Movement itself, including the work of revolutionary prisoners—follows ‘logically’ from this initial framing. The long tradition of prison resistance, writing, organizing, and revolutionary praxis is here rendered mostly mute. We find no mention in TNJC of the Attica uprising, or of the work of George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal or Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson today. (There is exactly one reference to the work of Angela Davis, and no mention of Assata Shakur.) Prisoners are presented as victims of a system of oppression, and as objects of sympathy and compassion, but not as political or social agents in their own right.

Obviously, it’s too easy—and sometimes not very helpful—to criticize a book by listing the things that it doesn’t discuss. And Alexander herself has obviously written and said and done a lot since this book came out in 2010. But I do think that there is a danger in making the case against mass incarceration mainly in terms of moral appeals to those not directly impacted by the system themselves. Powerful and necessary as moral appeals are, centering the movement outside those most affected risks further marginalizing the voices of the radical black and prisoner tradition—including the “Assatas” of today—voices which still have the power to inspire and inform a new generation, inside and outside the prison walls.

Assata of course, supplements and challenges TNJC, as it is, among other things, the story of how incarcerated people themselves are capable of becoming some of our most insightful, courageous, and inspiring revolutionary subjects.

This difference all comes back at the end of TNJC where Alexander makes her case for a prison abolition movement that is based fundamentally in a call for compassion, a rejection of highly racialized ways of excluding individuals or groups from society on the basis of their being “undeserving.” (“Felons,” for instance, who remain locked out of social institutions even after serving their time.) This is actually a rather profound intervention in a culture increasingly bent on labelling certain groups (often but not always racialized ones) as ‘undeserving’ of sympathy, or human rights, or even basic due process. However, the danger is that, in making the case for a more compassionate “America,” the fundamental class contradiction that churns at the heart of contemporary political economy gets elided—and that, as a result, opportunities to politicize and radicalize broader masses of people by connecting the barbarism of mass incarceration to a broader exploitative system—which touches us all—get missed.

I think we need a discourse of class interests as well as moral discourse to counter criminalization and racist dehumanization. Compassion can and should be extended to all people as human beings, yes, but ruling class interests cannot simply be ‘included’ in an expanded notion of our human community; they need to be exposed and abolished, right alongside with the incarceration system that these interests depend on for social control, even where they do not profit from it directly. There is a class antagonism under capitalism that cannot be embraced away.

It now seems clear that the capitalist system’s profit and social control imperatives are leading the ruling class to increasingly see the people of certain working-class communities—disproportionately urban, Black and Brown—as human “surplus” to be contained and controlled—if not disposed of altogether—through new forms of direct violence, since the system no longer sees a way to profitably exploit them as wage labor. At the same time, the existence of a proliferating police state, prison system, and surveillance “security” apparatus, however disproportionately aimed at a Black and Brown “surplus population,” serves the ruling class as a control mechanism more broadly, threatening other potentially rebellious sectors in the society. Concurrently, and ironically, this punitive and racist system then offers the ideological appearance of “privilege” for those working-class communities who have been “lucky” or “deserving”—and often “white”—enough to not yet be subject to such levels of state repression. On top of this, the mass incarceration and policing system does offer real material incentives to some, in the form of the jobs offered to people in places where other forms of gainful employment have largely dried up.

In this sense, grasping what is new in the “New Jim Crow” requires understanding how this system relates to such underlying dynamics of class, empire, and capital. So long as our society is ruled by those who view people and the planet chiefly as a means of extracting surplus profit, we are going to keep hitting up against new and better ruling class strategies for controlling, cordoning off, or killing off our “redundant” brothers and sisters. Abolishing prisons and racist criminalization requires abolishing capitalism and empire as well.

Don’t get me wrong, we need books like The New Jim Crow. The task of reaching broad audiences with an exposure of repressive state polices and the legal architecture that sustains them is crucial. This is especially true considering the preponderance of deadly state force that prisoners inside must face. Folks inside do need outside help if they are to break the bonds of this new kind of slavery. But as recent prison strikes across the country have shown us, prisoners themselves are far from passive in all of this. History shows prisoners are capable of great feats of collective action, and those actions are capable of inspiring and even leading movements that extend well beyond the prison walls. See for instance the astonishing work of Kevin “Rashid” Johnson of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, whose writings, drawings, and theoretical interventions deserve much wider engagement, even as his immediate situation—locked in solitary confinement as I write this—demands our solidarity. Thus, the system’s repressive development is also creating new opportunities for drawing people into opposition against it. As Rashid puts it eloquently, the strategy should be to “Transform the Razor Wire Plantations into Schools of Liberation and the Oppressed Communities into Base Areas of Cultural, Social and Political Revolution!”

If we don’t keep in mind this broader political-economic context, we run the danger of failing to grasp what is new in the New Jim Crow, and of basing our political analysis and strategies on old forms of oppression that have substantially changed. We risk becoming anachronistic in our approach. Yes, it’s crucial that we appreciate the continuities in the regimes of racial oppression and state violence, but also that we grasp what is new in our situation. Here I would single out Alexander’s critical clarity—and courage—at the moment near the end of TNJC where she calls out the anachronism of mass anti-racist rallying around the “Jena Six” back in 2006, brutal as the treatment of those Black youth was. Alexander points out that as horrific as this episode was, focusing on it—and self-congratulating ourselves for doing so—risks drawing us away from the more subtle, and more normalized, forms of racist oppression in society that are steadily advancing right under our nose.

Here we could draw analogies to recent political developments in the wake of Trump, and to the way that certain neo-fascist elements now increasingly visible in the USA today may be getting more attention from us than they in fact deserve. (Consider the left’s leaping to mobilize against the most visibly extreme forces of the “Unite the Right” type, from Charlottesville on. Or look at the recent film of Spike Lee, BlackKKlansman versus what I would describe as the more contemporary-grounded films like Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You and that other Oakland film about interracial working-class life, Blindspotting.) There is a danger that we allow the last gasps of these dying dinosaur open white supremacists to take our eyes off the ball in terms of the dominant shifts in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and the racist social control strategies actually gaining purchase today in the USA.

In short: We need a revolutionary movement that can address the creeping catastrophe of the structural, not only the screaming spectacle of the sensational.

Similarly, in light of the sharpening class inequalities across this society, I think we need to push back on the idea that “white people” as a whole “benefit” from this New Jim Crow system. Instead, moving beyond Alexander, I would argue that we should follow the great radical historian Ted Allen in understanding the extension of “white privilege,” at least as far as European American working-class people are concerned, as a “poisoned bait,” a ruling-class tool to put “chalk in the eyes” of people, and to get them to confuse their friends with their enemies, and vice versa. So for instance, the racial disparities in terms of imprisonment and police brutality in the US are stark and widely noted. However, compared to most European countries, where the poisoned bait of “whiteness” has not been so available, American working-class white men are much more likely to be targeted by police violence and imprisonment. The “privilege” here is only relative, only appears as “privilege” in relation to super-oppressed Black proletarians (mainly folks from the de-industrialized inner cities). And so here need to point out, against the tide of predominant left-liberal notions of “white privilege” theory, that one of the key functions of racism and the loading of an extra layer of oppression on Black proletarian people is to render the base-line of police harassment, social control, state violence and incarceration experienced by the majority of white working-class folks invisible. To construe a “normal” amount of oppression as a “privilege.”

Frederick Douglass saw this way back in the days of slavery, when he wrote in his second autobiography that there were two classes of people destroyed by slavery: the slaves themselves who were directly oppressed by their masters, but also the many non-slave-owning poor whites who were forced to compete with a ruling class with access to enslaved Black labor. The tragedy of the situation, Douglass noted, was that most poor whites have come to blame the Black slaves for this situation, rather than the system of slavery itself.

In this context, we need to reclaim the history of multi-national and interracial organizing and solidarity, including (but not limited to) the legacies of European-American radicalism, but without romanticizing or ‘white-washing’ the real contradictions and limits and problems. There is a radical history of so-called ‘interracial’ organizing in the USA, and it should be reclaimed—critically.

BD - What is the significance, as you point out in your essay “The Makings of a Heroic Mistake,” that readers are “hard-pressed to find a hero who embodies a positive mode of intellectual, moral, or political engagement” in the work of Richard Wright? And how would you define such “positive” modes of “intellectual, moral, or political engagement” in our contemporary world?

JRG - I think it’s very understandable, in a desperate moment like the present, that people who are longing for some kind of radical social change, should turn to literature or to history (or even to contemporary culture) in search of heroes. Whether for inspiration, or for instruction, or even just for distraction from a social situation that, from a left perspective, can often seem bereft of hope. This understandable desire too, needs to be understood dialectically, and engaged critically. Richard Wright offers us important resources for how we might do that.

I’ve emphasized above the importance of not ignoring the history of interracial and multi-national class-based organizing, solidarity, and resistance in the USA, and beyond. Part of the reason I emphasize this is precisely to counter a certain cynicism that seems so prevalent today, in American culture and even on the Left itself—a kind of depressing consensus that people—regardless of their ideas or subjective efforts—are fundamentally incapable of transforming themselves, or of transcending their narrowly construed “identity” or background, in terms of sex, gender, race, nationality, etc. This cynicism takes a variety of forms—from the more identitarian, to the more crassly individualist—but it’s all over the place, and it does real harm, to our imaginations and our relations. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it is incompatible with egalitarian social revolution—which doesn’t mean we give up on those who have succumbed to it (they have their reasons!). But it does mean that we need to struggle with these folks, finding ways to demonstrate that there is more to reality, and more to human potentiality, than such identitiarian cynicism allows to appear.

In this context, grasping the ways that past movements—and the historically engaged groups and individuals who constituted those movements—were able to build connections and organizations across inherited social lines, transforming themselves while transforming the world, is crucial for rekindling in ourselves and others the sense of such possibilities today. Learning about this history—which is seldom taught in schools—alters how we see the present, and thus the potential for the future we might build.

At the same time, of course, we need to attend to the dead-ends, defeats, blunders, and blind-spots of these prior efforts. We got to learn from the negative as well as the positive. Cynicism is a danger, but so is romanticization.

And so when we think about movements that made important inroads in building international and multi-racial solidarity and comradeship, even here in the “belly of the beast,” one that demands our attention is the Communist movement of the mid-20th century, with all its promise and its problems. Here the work of Richard Wright, who was an active and publicly known member of that organization for over a decade stemming from the 1930s to the 40s, remains a crucial figure. Wright was one of the most important and influential writers to emerge from this milieu, and also one of those thinkers who grappled in powerful and enduring ways with both the strengths and the weaknesses of the radical movement he was involved with.

The evidence of Wright’s sustained and penetrating reflections of all of this can be found in his works of fiction, such as Uncle Tom’s Children, Lawd Today, and Native Son, as well as his works of non-fiction such as 12 Million Black Voices, and above all, in his autobiography Black Boy, the second half of which was posthumously published as American Hunger. (The book was originally written as one united work of autobiographical reflection under the title “Black Confession”).

Wright is very relevant to our discussion here, precisely because his work movingly confronts us, again and again, with portraits of people who are consumed by struggles against the oppressive social conditions that limit their lives. In a sense, he shows us everyday people, and Black working-class folks in particular, being thrust by events into situations where they must do something ‘heroic’ just to survive. And yet—and here is where we get to your question—Wright’s work repeatedly shows us that it’s not this simple, because the very ‘heroic’ forms of resistance and struggle—in thought and in action—that his characters cling to, are often weighed down and deformed by the very forms of oppression and brutalization that have ruled over their lives. So, in Wright’s work, we have the paradox of character after character (from Silas in “Long Black Song” or Sue in “Bright and Morning Star” to Bigger Thomas in Native Son) who is shown to be a victim of this or that form of race, class, and/or gender oppression, and who resists that oppression “heroically,” but who also nonetheless in a sense participates in reproducing that oppression (or that of others), tragically undercutting even their own best attempts at resistance. And this goes both for Wright’s portraits of the oppressed black people, the working-classes, and the CPUSA itself. None are immune to this dynamic.

One aspect of this is what I call Wright’s “bulwark theory” of compensatory subjectivity. By this I mean the way in which oppressed people in his work often are shown to have internalized adaptive survival strategies which serve to protect them from the social and psychological violence, a defensive shield that is valuable, and even necessary, but it often comes with a cost. For at times the same “bulwarks” that protect the oppressed subject threaten to cut them off from grasping the coordinates of their actual situation, becoming a barrier to transformative praxis. The shell—whether in the form of religious belief, macho individualism, or nationalism—protects…but also can blind.

So the article you allude to in Mediations, is in part an exploration of how Wright’s work must be seen as again and again prompting us to understand this “heroic desire” in a deeper and dialectical way—as a perhaps necessary, but nonetheless inadequate response to historically oppressive social conditions. Thus, through a character like ‘Aunt’ Sue, but also through Bigger Thomas, Wright suggests the way that everyday people are capable of leaps of consciousness and resistance, while at the same time reminding us that life-long traumas and adaptive traits born of oppression are not overcome overnight. The very oppression these people have been so long subjected threatens to deform or divert their emergent revolutionary subjectivity in ways that reproduce elements of the very system they are seeking to transcend, and that—if not counter-acted—spell doom for their emancipatory aspirations.

At the same time, Wright—at least in his early work, the work of his pro-communist period—to me seems to avoid the pitfalls of cynicism. He avoids cynicism not because he gives us some perfect positive model of heroism, for us to ‘follow,’ but because he depicts the struggle within the newly emergent rebellious and resistant oppressed as a genuine and open-ended struggle, one that is not predetermined in advance, but which is decided by the particular interplay of ideas, habits, actions, and inter-subjective relations among and between oppressed people themselves and the comrades who are ostensibly committed to aiding them in their liberation.

If I may be permitted to quote a line or two from the essay you refer to above: “If Richard Wright’s major works offer readers a sense of ‘what is to be done,’ almost always it is negatively, relayed by dramatizing the limits and the consequences of inadequate, existing modes of social thought and action. His fiction further explores how an alienating social environment can pervert even positive human aspirations into their opposite, compounding rather than abolishing oppression.” One might ask: How does this not fall back into a cynicism that merely re-inscribes the ‘inevitability’ of failure on the consciousness of Wright’s readers? Can’t the people be permitted a clearer and more positive notion of heroism to help pull themselves out of the subjective despair of the present? Perhaps. But in my interpretation, the best of Wright’s work during his critical communist period offers us something better than a romanticized revolutionary hero: he stages for us a dramatic subjective struggle that calls us all to transform conditions and relations, in society, and within the revolutionary movement itself, so that a new, less individualist, more collective—more trusting, more caring, more truly shared—form of heroism can emerge, not just as a flicker of rebellion, but as a sustained movement that can remake the entire world.

BD - Based on your essay, “Richard Wright’s Lost Lessons for a Lunatic Left”, in what sense do you suggest that our acceptance of “the published version of Wright’s autobiography as the authoritative word on Richard Wright’s relationship to American Communism” also influences our ability to appreciate the discursive potentialities in Wright’s writing towards a “broader project of emancipatory social revolution”?

JGR - Great question, Shahid. This gets at something essential to what I’m working on these days.

Compared to the unpublished drafts of Black Boy, which I’ve been studying for the past few years, the published version of Wright’s autobiography substantially diminishes our sense of Wright’s deep, enduring, and passionate intellectual engagement with Communism. Consequently, it also diminishes our sense of what the hard-won lessons of American Communism might still have to teach us today. American Hunger (as the published version is often titled) acknowledges in Communism only a fleeting radical appeal, leading readers to view this emancipatory project cynically, ‘doomed from the start.’ Alongside this comes the similarly false sense that we are somehow ‘above’ falling into the kind of pitfalls ‘those Commies’ did. But we very much are not above them, in my view, and in fact, today’s would-be radical Left is falling into similar pitfalls all the time.

In short: the published version makes it too easy to disown our radical predecessors, rather than to really learn all we can from them.

Found in the drafts of what he originally entitled “Black Confession,” the unpublished account of Wright’s pro-communist period offers a much more nuanced and less easily dis-owned account, one that leaves readers better equipped to see 1) why the communist project attracted Wright—and so many other radical workers, intellectuals, and oppressed people—in the first place, 2) what the concrete obstacles and challenges were for that movement, as Wright experienced it, and 3) why working through the lessons and limits of that prior project might still be worth doing.

Undergirding this archival research are a few assumptions: That how we sum up past attempts at changing the world shapes our present sense of what is possible (and not possible) in the world, and thus also our sense of what kind of emancipatory future we might aim to create. And that how we relate to those past attempts is structured in an important way by how we see ourselves as identifying with—or dis-identifying against—the historical agents and efforts who constitute that history. Who do we see as relevant to “our” attempts at changing the world? Whose successes and errors to do we see as in some sense relevant to ours? Who do we consider the protagonists of this history, and who do we look upon as forces somehow “other,” entities that are fundamentally different or opposed to “us” and what “we” are about? Who do we take seriously, and who do we dismiss?

As I’ve noted above, Wright’s work, and especially his autobiographical writings, offer us a rich historical reflection on the experiences and psychology of race and class oppression, as well as on the attempts to radically transform the world, through art and politics alike. The original drafts of “Black Confession,” are loaded with observations and critical reflections that have much to teach would-be radical writers, artists, and organizers today. From Wright’s reflections on the dangers of allowing fear and suspicion—whether of police infiltrators, or political “traitors”—to poison the culture of radical organizations, to the difficulties of organizing among people who have often developed mental illness and traumas as a result of their long-oppression, to the danger of romanticizing the oppressed as ‘ready for revolution’ in ways that overlook the true challenges of transforming consciousness and subjectivity, to the logistical and even philosophical tensions between the short- and long- term goals of radical organizing, for instance, the way that the construction of a nurturing revolutionary culture (including alternative institutions) can often be short-circuited by a movement focus on the immediate needs for protest and agitation—as important and necessary as the latter remain. (There is more here than I can indicate in this interview—thus the reason I am writing a book about it!)

However, the published version of Black Boy/American Hunger, which reflects Wright’s subsequent and bitter falling out with the Communist Party USA, though it still retains some of this valuable material in some form, also incorporates retrospective revisions and, at times, stock anti-Communist gestures that distorts the picture. The accumulated tropes and trimmings add up to a qualitatively different framing, one that encourages contemporary readers to distance themselves from—and perhaps even to “laugh at”—the outrageous “lunacy” of the mid-20th century Communist Left in the United States, rather than, say, encouraging them to take this historical experience seriously, as relevant to their own emerging emancipatory theory and practice.

I characterize the early version of the autobiography (the book went through three full drafts under the title “Black Confession”) as expressing an outlook of critical communism. The published version in my view tends towards a radical cynicism.

But let’s be clear. Even the early versions of “Black Confession” are not romanticizing of the CPUSA—far from it. They too are exceedingly critical of the Party, and in particular of the Chicago-area comrades and leadership. (To cite on example: both versions of the book end with the young Richard Wright being physically assaulted by erstwhile comrades, tossed head first out of a Chicago May Day parade.) To his credit, in my view, Wright consistently pushed back against the romanticization of the oppressed, whether in the form of the Masses, or their ostensibly political representative, the Party.

But while Wright’s critical communism still foregrounds the problems, challenges, and blunders of American Communism, it presents them for the most part as genuine learning experiences, the vexed product of genuine and sincere collective grappling with real historical obstacles that must be overcome if we are to make radical social change in a country like the USA. The stumbling of American Communism, painful and even tragic as it is at times to witness, is nonetheless still for Wright a part of the process of fertilizing and ploughing the ground from which the “first green fruit of materialistic rebellion” is emerging...and from which more ripe red future fruit may come. On the other hand, the radical cynicism that comes through the published version—the only version that most people know—inclines readers to see the obstacles and mis-steps of Communism as somehow petty or pointless. It encourages readers to abandon rather than pick up and extend—or reroute—the pathways our previous comrades began to chart. The book expresses a diverse array of sympathies with the communist project, but alongside more openly anticommunist literary works such as Ralph Ellison’s canonical Invisible Man, and even Wright’s own later novel The Outsider, Wright’s American Hunger has often been cited as a central piece of evidence as to the fundamentally inept, hypocritical, hopeless, and manipulative nature of the CPUSA, and of Communism as such, especially as it had related to African Americans.

So the danger here is that the many lessons that Wright’s autobiographical reflections potentially offer us for today don’t get incorporated into our emancipatory legacy. Instead they get sloughed off in a kind of dismissal of “The Communists” or “the Stalinists” of “the authoritarian white Left.” But we don’t get beyond the errors of previous revolutionary attempts by waving a magic wand of denunciation at them. We have to do the hard work of learning from these past attempts, and Wright’s critical communist writings enable us to do that.

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 Joseph G. Ramsey and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of Joseph G. Ramsey for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from October 2nd – December 10th of 2018.)