- Hello, everyone.
I've been asked to introduce Cedric.
The hardest thing about putting together an introduction to
Cedric Robinson is keeping it brief.
The man is a towering figure in
the intellectual history and political science.
His seminal book, Black Marxism, laid the foundations for
the study of black radicalism decades
before the publication of works on the black Atlantic
and other diasporas appeared.
The book is a blockbuster, that quelled the sterile debate
about whether or not race or class is most important
and challenged western historians who
consign slavery to the margins of modernity.
Black Marxism surgically dissected 500 years
of a history of racism and enlarged our understanding
of racial capitalism.
Now, while Black Marxism is Robinson's best known work
after its publication he continued as a leading
voice in radical black scholarship.
His 2007 book,
Forgeries of Memory and Meaning:
Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater
and Film Before World War II, won the Errol Hill Award
of American Society for Theater Research and demonstrates
Cedric's expansive interests and acute insights on social
movements in popular culture.
Several collections of his works are now in the
pipeline to be republished, including an early
and almost forgotten gem, Terms of Order:
Political Science and the Myth of Leadership.
Robinson is a public intellectual in the finest sense.
Not one to court the limelight in the mainstream media, but
one who is actively engaged and uncompromising in his
progressive stance.
With the assistance of Elizabeth Robinson and others,
he helped develop the community radio program
Third World News Review, an alternative public affairs
program heard on both KCSB
and public access stations.
That's been going strong now for 35 years.
Provides an alternative to the fake news that still
dominates today's airwaves.
As director of the Center for Black Studies at
the University of California Santa Barbara,
Cedric has been available as a teacher
and mentor to decades of students like me, who had
the opportunity to have a dissertation fellowship at
the center there in the early years of my career.
As director of the center, he deflected various
bureaucratic attempts to make black studies
a poster child for budgetary retrenchment.
He protected it from political attacks while cultivating
several cohorts of dissertation fellows.
Those who have held dissertation fellowships from
the center include Marsha Coleman-Adebayo,
the policy analyst who blew the whistle on corruption at
the Environmental Protection Agency,
and Beverly Tatum,
formerly president of historically black
Spelman College in Atlanta.
The Center for Black Studies posed a vision of
czradical scholarship with communitarian objectives.
It sought to make knowledge available to
publics outside the academy.
Cedric understood the need for accessibility
and helped close the distance between the university
and the surrounding community by organizing a regular forum
that attracted local citizens.
Cedric Robinson is here
today to discuss the topic Why Black Radicalism?
Why, indeed.
We are facing a challenge today where we must
free ourselves from the chaos and criminal anarchy of a
failing political system.
In a moment when society is breaking down under
the weight of catastrophic public policies,
we must be the survivors.
We are fortunate to have guides along
the path to understanding and rebuilding.
And I'd like to present one of them to you,
Professor Cedric J Robinson.
(applauding)
- Thank you very much, Professor Plummer,
and thank all of you
for being part of
the reason I could come here.
When I talked to Karma last, was it yesterday
or the day before, she asked me,
"What title are you going to use?"
And I said to her,
after a few minutes of thought,
Why is there black radicalism?
Which reminded me of a talk that I gave 40-50 years ago.
I was still an undergraduate,
had a local reputation in the Bay area,
and was asked by the Richmond Police
Department to come speak to its officers
because there was some concern that the black
Richmond Police Department officers refused to leave
the cells where there were black prisoners
because they had been beaten overnight,
and they were being taunted, these black police officers,
with the question, "Which side are you on?"
So I began my talk with,
what do black people eat?
And it went over pretty much the way it did tonight.
(laughing)
So I said food.
(laughing)
Because we are human beings.
But, in any case, I got a call about an hour after
the lecture was over from a sergeant
in the police department, a female, who said,
"I just wanted to tell you be careful when
"you're' driving through Richmond because we all
"have your car's license plate."
So I never went to Richmond again.
(laughing)
In any case, in response to the query that I've made,
let me take you back to
about 1898-1899 in the Philippines.
There was a young corporal named...
I had his name on my mind the last three weeks,
and there it goes. (laughing)
David..
It's gone.
(laughing)
Anyway, David was a young black man who was serving
in the American military in the Philippines.
He became very concerned with how the Filipinos were
being treated by their saviors,
the American military.
So in 1900,
David defected to the Filipino
insurrectionary troops,
and for the next two years,
he fought with the Filipinos, commanded Filipinos in
the field, etc.
And, eventually, because there was a great deal of
consternation about his narrative,
which they had hoped
to suppress but made it into the United States
through black newspapers
because black troops were writing
letters to the black newspapers detailing all their
experience in the Philippines.
A reward went out from the War Department
to bring David's head
to military headquarters.
And in 1901,
reportedly a young thief brought David's
belongings and his head, decomposed head, to American
headquarters in the Philippines.
The issue I wanted to raise with this example
is the notion of the black radicalism does not
have borders, boundaries,
racial qualifications, etc.
Here is a man who understood,
and he was not the only,
there were nine black defectors
in the American military in the Philippines
between 1899 and 1901.
I want to remind you of another young person.
I may not get her name right, Rachel Dolezal.
- [Audience] Dolezal.
- Dolezal.
Her story was only told in bits and pieces.
She was accused by many of the professional blacks on
commercial television
of having stolen the pain of black women,
appropriated the pain of black women,
imitated the pain of black women.
That was an obscenity, those charges.
It turns out that she was responding to
a number of wounds
inflected upon her and her foster siblings
by her parents,
and they came out after her,
by challenging her identity.
She never pretended to be...
African American.
She constantly told the interviewers,
where they could hear it or not,
that she was Black.
Black, not Afro-American, not African American,
not Negro, Black.
And she paid
for that privilege.
Now, black radicalism
is spontaneous.
It's something that you've enjoyed here
in Madison, Dane County
for a little while.
It comes out of anguish and pain,
but it is not spontaneous.
People learn about it.
People learn how to be black radicals.
Some of you have read what is called
The Confessions of Nat Turner.
They're not confessions
any more than...
Socrates wrote the confessions of Plato.
Turner was explaining to the young attorney who came
to interview him in the jail
how he came to be.
And how he came to be was, in fact,
incremental, gradual, and organic.
His mother, his grandmother told him
that he was going to be special.
They knew that because they read
the scars on his body.
That he would witness extraordinary events.
So from childhood to
his adulthood, he learned
the black radical tradition.
And, of course, he enacted one of the most extraordinary
incidents in slave insurrectionary history.
There are 1,000s of such examples.
I was reminded of them a couple weeks ago when
my wife and I were attending
a postdoctoral manuscript
presentation by--
- [Audience] Justin Leroy.
- Justin Leroy on black radicalism
in the aftermath of slavery.
Justin began his manuscript with
the contest between Thomas Jefferson
and Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker.
Now, Phillis Wheatley is best known as a poetess.
Consequently, I paid very little attention to her until
a couple weeks ago.
She was remarkable
in a sense that she
took on Jefferson right where he could be most
effectively injured.
Leroy is trying to say "You understand
"why Jefferson could not consciously
"and publicly acknowledge that
"either Benjamin Banneker or Phillis Wheatley
"were ordinary or even extraordinary human
"intelligence because he could not envision
an American empire
"with blacks living in it."
And so he had to disqualify the possibility of blacks
living in the American empire by maintaining that even
the best of them, the most extraordinary of them,
were not quite human.
So it was not personal peak.
It was a political program
that inspired Jefferson to go
after what obviously now, from our vantage point,
very talented people.
They went after him with
equal energy and intelligence.
So, one of the things
that I wanted to raise when I was thinking
about Black Marxism,
when I was thinking about
Forgeries of Memory and Meaning...
Is how pathetic our racial constructions are.
They're not only pathetic but they're enormously vigorous.
It seems, as you now know
from our political culture, it seems
the more stupid you are,
the more influence you might have.
(laughing)
So, in any case.
I thought I could unravel some of that
by making certain kinds of
historical inquiries,
certain kinds of historical inquiries.
In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning,
I began with the anomaly
that William Shakespeare had published
Othello in 1604.
And that 90 years later, practically exactly 90 years later,
a British tragedian
had disqualified Othello from being
a tragedy because, as he said,
"It was based on an absurdity
"that any white women would marry a black man."
But why did Shakespeare write Othello?
It's not as if Othello was his first
adventure into race.
He had, 10 years earlier, written, what was that?
- [Audience] Merchant?
- No, he did Merchant in '92, I think.
But in '91, he had written--
- [Audience 1] Tempest? - [Audience 2] Yeah, Tempest.
- [Cedric] No, he had written Tempest as well.
(laughing)
Titus!
- [Audience] Titus Andronicus.
- [Cedric] Titus Andronicus.
And Iago and Othello
was Aaron in Titus Andronicus.
Aaron was a moor, a black man,
who was evil as sin...
and was a lover of the Gothic queen.
Tamora, I think was her name.
And at one point they have a child,
and Titus, and Aaron...
Picks up his child and says to him,
"If only you were the hue of your mother,
"you could be an emperor,
"but you're my color.
"Consequently, you will never amount to anything."
So, Shakespeare had had plenty of opportunity
to explore one kind of racialization
after another, some of you mentioned
Merchant in which he is very often accused of
being antisemitic because of
his portrayal of the Jew in--
That play.
But here, Shakespeare, in 1604,
wrote a play which is
based upon European, English,
and Mediterranean history.
Othello is chosen
to command the Venetian military
around the defense of Cyprus.
And why is he brought in to that?
For two reasons.
One because the Venetians have set up a constitution so
that no Venetian could ever command
the Venetian military,
That way that could lead to coups
and so on and so forth.
The other reason Othello is chosen
because as one of the
aristocrats in the play says,
"We have no one of his family.
"We have no one who knows
"military art as well as he does."
And why, in this early 17th century,
Shakespeare would invent a black man
who is a military commander
was hidden from us
for 300 or 400 years.
As some of you know, Shakespeare
was adapting an Italian play
for Othello, the moor.
The play was called Desdemona by Cinthio.
And the moor in
Desdemona was never named.
That was something that Shakespeare contributed to.
But the Italian play was done in the 1560s
or something like that.
40 or 50 years before Othello.
And the Italian play was based upon
Alessandro de' Medici,
who was the son of one of the popes,
and his mother was an African maid, domestic.
And Clement, his father,
created a duke-al authority for
Alessandro in Florence.
All of that was pretty much wiped away
in the process of privileging Shakespeare's Othello,
that there was a historical basis
for all this material.
What I was doing in
Forgeries and had done earlier
in Black Marxism, was to mark everything
that I could find that
had been suppressed
from our consciousness
because that suppression provided
the mystery of why
there is black radicalism.
There is black radicalism because there is,
in fact, social injustice.
There is black radicalism
because that social injustice
has in the modern times, been very often...
Has very often targeted African and African American people.
But we have to understand that that's not the way to
understand where the social injustice comes from.
In Black Marxism, in the first chapter,
I spent a lot of time talking about the Irish.
I do that again in Forgeries
of Memory and Meaning.
I do that for several reasons.
One because
in 1980 the American census
for the first time in its history had asked about ancestry,
and it came as a surprise to me
that the second greatest ancestry
among whites is Irish.
That many of the students I was trying to relate
racial matters to had Irish ancestry
and perhaps could make the leap
into the imaginary
of black people
by remembering their own histories.
Remembering that in the 1640s,
the lord justices declared
that Irish women should be killed in Ireland
because they were the basis of the rebellion.
That Edmund Spenser,
50 years earlier, had put out a plan
for the conquest of Ireland by saying, "You start in the
"north, you march to the south,
"and you kill everything you come across."
That the Irish understood, or should understand,
something about oppression
and something about racialism.
Now, you and I know that you can tell very
little from English complexion
and Irish complexion.
Yet they created a racial division
between those two peoples.
Very clearly similar to what's happening in Korea,
which, according to Orlando Patterson,
is the longest, surviving
system of slavery in human history,
over a 1,000 years.
And I said to
some of my Korean students,
""How could you tell the difference
"between a slave and a free person in Korea?"
And they looked at me like I was an idiot.
You tell by which hand they wrap
their clothing with.
Right hand wrap, left hand wrap.
They could not tell, phenotypically,
a slave from a free person,
except for the way they dress
and other similarly
subtle indicators.
So...
One of the things I wanted to say about
particularly those two books,
Black Marxism and Forgeries,
that we had to deconstruct radicalism
from its racialist and racist moorings.
Marx didn't understand that much,
and, as a consequence,
he left gaping holes in
history of capitalism.history of capitalism.
I wanted to make the argument
that capitalism doesn't product racialism,
but racialism produces the kind of capitalism
that we have all experienced.
That capitalism emerged
three or four times in world history,
that we see markings of it in
Aristotle's discussion of profit.
We see markings of it...
Everywhere
But when it comes to fruition in the 13th
and 14th century, maybe slightly earlier,
was coming to fruition in a thoroughly racialized culture,
and that thoroughly racialized culture pinned to
capitalism ceratin kinds of racial imperatives,
certain kinds of racial markers,
certain kinds of racial instructions.
And those instructions
sort of got obscure by
the powerful imaging of African
and non-African people that
began to emerge in the 17th century.
So here's a moment when Shakespeare
is writing Othello, which stretches
from the European and Mediterranean past,
a moment when the moors
and the Muslims were powerful people,
sufficiently powerful to control southern Europe,
the Mediterranean, etc.
As I mentioned in Black Marxism,
the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne,
characterized the Mediterranean as a "Muslim lake".
So Shakespeare is dredging forth with this character.
Othello is not simply an Italian
figment of imagination.
Othello is not an English
figment of imagination.
Othello is grounded in
historical materials.
Historical materials which would be evacuated by time
and even more thoroughly and rigorously evacuated by
the appearance of the Negro.
So, that's something that I tried to
accomplish with Black Marxism.
And secondly, with Black Marxism,
I was concerned with the remark made by a radical,
that a Negro is a Negro.
This was contrasting black people with the proletariat,
which had a historical role.
We, however, were Negroes
and had no historical role.
As Trevor-Roper, the English historian, said
once, I think he in fact wrote it,
"There is no African history.
"Only the history of Europeans in Africa.
"Savages do not leave history
"because the succession of one savage
"after another is not a historical event."
So we had many disadvantages, particularly those of us
who went through universities 30-40 years ago,
had many disadvantages from the get go.
There were no ethnic studies.
There were no gender studies.
We had to invent those.
We invented them because
it was a way of surviving
in an academic and intellectual world
in which we'd been negated
on a continuing basis.
Black Marxism was an attempt
to reiterate
because numerous scholars had done part of this work
before I came along,
to reiterate that we are
of historical importance,
and what you're doing here in Madison
is another kind of
investment in that page
of history.
So, I have to congratulate you for
the remarkable work that you're doing.
To establish the fact that there are
boundaries to injustice.
Now, one of the complaints made recently by
several police authorities is they can't do their jobs
because there are cameras.
They cannot do their jobs
because they're afraid of being recorded,
documented, etc.
What kind of job is that?
What we have told them
again and again,
if your job is in fact
worthy, you should do it in front of a camera.
You should document the value of what you are doing.
The rest of us do it
over and over again.
Why can't you do it?
So, why is there black radicalism?
There's black radicalism because of all the other
radicalisms in the world.
Black radicalism is not the master
narrative of radicalism.
It's the master narrative of a radicalism that comes out
of a particular culture that emerges in that
particular culture that confronts
particular injuries,
particular inadequacies.
When I was a young man,
I became very proud of being black.
I'm prouder and prouder since then.
But my pride has to be
tempered by the fact that
other people have reasons to be proud as well
but no one has reason to be proud
of being unjust.
So we have to
draw the line somewhere.
I think that's about all I have to say.
Thank you very much.
(applauding)