An Interview with Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson
Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson have influenced generations of scholars, activists, and community journalists. Their work is a product of conversations through the global struggles against racial capitalism, militarism, and imperialism. Accordingly, their conclusions arrive through dialogue both with the world and with each other. Together, they co-hosted the Third World News Review, a weekly television and radio show in Santa Barbara. Elizabeth Robinson was the advisor and associate director for media for KCSB 91.9 FM in Santa Barbara. She produces the weekly radio show No Alibis and is a longtime grassroots activist and community radio advocate. This two-part interview took place in Robinson’s home in Santa Barbara, California, in December 2013 and 2015.
Heatherton: This interview is taking place partially in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, first published in 1983 by Zed Press and republished in 2000 by the University of North Carolina Press with a foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.1 Reflecting on the past thirty years, how do you both feel about the book’s reception?
Cedric Robinson: I have been deeply appreciative of the reception. The book was written in an extraordinary frenzy of work. In a sense, it was an attempt to respond to several remarkable moments in American scholarship, most directly of course Harold Cruse and, in terms of the style, Immanuel Wallerstein. Cruse’s Crisis opened an extraordinary space of recalling that there had been a radical Black intellectual past.2 As a participant, he had every right to recall it in the terms that he did. But in doing so he, in a sense, succumbed to the conceit that I was addressing—that radicalism is dependent upon an intelligentsia. One of the things that I’ve been most impressed by is Black Marxism’s extraordinary following. I expected the book to be a site from which people did work. Those whose work has come after Black Marxism have deepened the original work.
Elizabeth Robinson: In the same way that Cedric was jousting with Cruse, he was certainly doing the same with C. L. R. James. At the time he was writing, there was new attention being paid to people like Amilcar Cabral and others in Africa and the West within leftist progressive thought. This happened while we were living in England for the first time. There was an anniversary of the Paris Commune and a lot of focus on Marx and Marxism there, much more than in the United States, where universities were focused on Freud, psychology, and so forth. These things all informed the work that you started doing.
CR: In a certain sense, my own training in the Cold War incited me to do something of this nature. We had gotten a grant from the Ford Foundation for Black Marxism. When we went to the foundation’s annual gathering of past and present recipients, I was astounded by the depth of fear that established the ceiling of work that could be done with respect to the Left at the time. A British editor for Zed Press [which eventually published Black Marxism] later commented that he never encountered as much fear about the Left in his own country as he had in the United States. There was a compelling impulse to try and get something better on page for both Americans and those beyond.
Heatherton: I’m guessing the Ford Foundation didn’t support a lot of projects like Black Marxism during that period.
CR: Actually I was the first recipient who was supported to go outside the United States. My fellow recipients of that year were confounded by the book’s subject and astounded by the choice to do work outside the United States.
Camp: As you’ve described, Black Marxism was intended as an intervention in multiple conversations. It contributed to debates about the origins and development of the world capitalist system among your colleagues at SUNY-Binghamton, including Immanuel Wallerstein. It was also the product of dialogues with your colleagues at the Institute of Race Relations in London, such as A. Sivanandan, Jenny Bourne, Colin Prescod, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Waters, Lou Kushnick, and others. Can you talk about the transatlantic conversations that you were participating in at the time—specifically as you developed the concept of racial capitalism? How was it shaped by those dialogues?
CR: There is a kind of liberal historiography about race which sees it as thin and superficial and presumably antithetical to capitalism. My research revealed racializations which anticipated capitalism. This is the context, the field, the very cultural tapestry in which capitalism develops. I was trying to make the argument that race became a way of controlling labor. I was unsatisfied with the notion that in the modern new world experience, there had only been one labor force. There were many academic propositions that insisted that that was the case. I was trying to burrow through these imaginary histories, particularly imaginary American histories.
My own experience as a young man was with a multiplicity of ethnicities: Mexican, Chinese, Asian, particularly Japanese, and so forth. I saw how many communities had accepted a certain kind of amnesia about their past. I was stunned by my Nisei [second-generation Japanese American] peers in high school and university who knew less about their experience than I did. I grew close to several of them and inquired about their parents and their grandparents. I wondered why they knew so little about their past. Why, for example, did my friend Sandra not realize that she had been born in a relocation camp? I was trying to make sense of an accumulation of experiences, of multiple forms of abuse, expropriation, oppression. I wanted Black Marxism and subsequent works to constantly challenge duality as an appropriate racial configuration. Concealed behind the privileging of one particular oppression was a failure to recognize those moments when there was a convergence, an overlap, as well as resistance to those oppressions.
Heatherton: You’ve mentioned some of the events that were happening in the production of Black Marxism. I want to invite you to talk a little bit more about other events in the late 1970s and early 1980s that shaped the research and writing of the book.
ER: The first time we lived in England and moved from one social context to another, we saw how race played out differently. We had encounters where, for example, we were each identified as Pakistanis—whereas most people in the United States would rarely put us in the same racial category. In that context, I discovered that Arabs were not considered white. With the conflict between the British and the Irish in the 1970s, we also encountered very negative reactions to Irish people, the telling of “Paddy” jokes and the like, even among progressive British people. These were all significant realizations that were very important to the research Cedric did, especially his work on the role of the Irish. During our second period in England in the early 1980s, we encountered a different notion of Blackness altogether. The uprisings in Brixton had occurred. We explored those things at the Institute of Race Relations in London where people very warmly embraced Cedric’s work.
CR: The first time we were in Britain we also encountered Veronica Sankey, who had just arrived in Britain from Nigeria. She was Irish and a raconteur. I have never heard anyone tell stories like she did. She had gone to Nigeria in about 1948. On the ship with her was a man named Francis Nkrumah, who became her son’s godfather. She had lived in a British colony and subsequently in the Nigerian Republic. She was an Irish woman who married a Black man, so she was doubly cursed in the eyes of the English. Because she came from an Irish Republican past, she deeply appreciated her expulsion from the colonial society. To a certain extent, the beginnings of our appreciation for the Irish experience came through her.
One day she showed up at our house with a woman who had been out of a convent for about a week, an Irish woman.
ER: May I just add that she had come from a cloister in which the women were not allowed to speak. This woman had been there for years.
CR: There was a huge silk screen of Angela Davis on the wall. This woman walked in, looked at Angela Davis’s image, and the first words out of her mouth were, “You know they framed her.” [Laughter.] We had many encounters with remarkable Irish women, not only in England but in Central America, places like Nicaragua, and so forth.
Camp: Let me ask you about another famous political prisoner and Black revolutionary of this period, Nelson Mandela. We witnessed various commemorations and co-optations following Mandela’s death. The struggle against apartheid spurred intense debates about the relationship between race and class and the apartheid state, debates which influenced liberation movements as well as the social sciences. To what extent did these debates inform your theoretical work around racial capitalism?
CR: I think I became much more aware of that later on. In the period of writing Black Marxism, the anti-apartheid movement was a ghost in the world.
ER: One of the people who had been involved with Third World News Review, almost from its inception in 1980, was a young man named Peter Shapiro who was entirely focused on the apartheid horror and the freeing of Nelson Mandela. I think the anti-apartheid movement may have had more impact on some later things.
Camp: Your book Forgeries of Memory and Meaning demonstrates how apartheid became an instrument of American capital. You interrogate how appeals to a mythical racial unity have helped justify class formations in the United States. In doing so, you offer a rather complicated analysis of whiteness as a system of class discipline. Can you elaborate on this insight?3
CR: The American context is still to be fully realized, in my thinking. Recently I’ve been reading historical research into “poor white trash.” I am fascinated by this formation. One of my current students is researching white women in Appalachia. She’s lived there for many years. I’m trying to get her to think about their political consciousness. The rebellions and resistances that were emerging from the poor whites before and during and after the Civil War is of real significance in terms of the constant reinvention of whiteness.
Another area that I’m currently fascinated with is the intersection of gender and Black studies. I think I would’ve written some things differently in Black Marxism if I had been more aware. Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women is just a brilliant intervention.4 It is so central to encounter plantations in Barbados that are all female and to begin to transfer our sense of the fundamental economy of slave production and how African and Black women were involved in it. Talk about the kind of resistance that some African women put up in the nineteenth century in West Africa and elsewhere! I allude to them in my description of the nanny towns in Jamaica, but there’s so much more to discuss.
ER: I think of the conversation you had with H. L. T. Quan about Black Marxism and feminism in Race & Class.5 An Anthropology of Marxism also explores the role of women, not just in resistance but also in the practice of Christianity.6
Camp: One thing that was really vivid for me in Black Movements in America was its focus on the centrality of Black women’s activism in the freedom movement—particularly as carried out by figures like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer.7
CR: I was just bowled over when I read Erica Edwards’s Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is a bold thesis which reflects what Baker was saying so many years earlier.” Erica’s thesis describes, in effect, how a gendered political construction is exchanged for political currency.8
Heatherton: In addition to this being the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Black Marxism, 2013 also marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, a historical event depicted in films such as Lincoln, Django Unchained, and Twelve Years a Slave. Forgeries revisits this moment. You describe how film emerged at the very moment in which the slave system had disintegrated and, as you say, a new racial regime was being stitched together. You argue that motion pictures critically mobilized racial imaginaries that were tied to the needs of finance capital. Can you explain the concept of racial regimes and its importance in analyzing the relationships between race and class, culture, and capitalism?
CR: What I wanted to stress in Forgeries is that racial regimes are inventions. As inventions—and this is something that I wanted the movement to hear—resistances are always leaving residues. As E. P. Thompson said with respect to the English worker and the British working class, there is going to be documentation of rebellion, resistance, outcry, and so forth.9 In An Anthropology of Marxism, for example, I draw on Franciscans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who attended the trials of people who claimed they were not heretics. I wanted to show what inventions were used to constrain and contain the memory of the issues they were raising.
As I said in the introduction to Forgeries, racial regimes are not actualities but inventions; they constantly fray and fall apart, so they have to be repaired. We were talking about the advent of moving pictures at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, how so many suppressions had to occur and what phenomenal possibilities were available through technology. Lester Walton, a Black theater owner and film critic, among other things, was so impressed by the impact of these moving pictures that in 1909 he wrote a column about an on-screen fabricated lynching. Whiteness was being contested in so many ways, and it responded through brutality, brutal violence, and what we would call pseudoscience: eugenics, sterilization, and so forth. Some of the earliest thinking about moving pictures recognized their function in repairing a racial regime.
The regime had to be reformulated so that it could capture all these fugitives. Earlier, we were talking about the film series The Godfather. How could you imagine transforming Italian immigrants into white people, Polish immigrants into white people, Irish immigrants into white people, Eastern Europeans, Central Europeans, Southern Europeans into white people? One way is that you had to invent an imaginary Blackness.
Camp: There’s a continuity between Forgeries and Black Marxism: specifically your chapter on W. E. B. Du Bois and his Black Reconstruction in America (1935), which claims that the Reconstruction period was “one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian Revolution, had seen.”10 In Forgeries you show how mythical constructions of the Reconstruction period obscured how Black workers and poor whites cooperated at that time. You argue that it was this concealment, this obfuscation of a radical past, that was critical in finance capital’s project to make European immigrant workers identify with an ideology of whiteness. So there’s a persistence in this focus, isn’t there?
CR: And you know how remarkable it is because of its obfuscation. It took me until the research on Forgeries to find it necessary to look at the etymological origins of the term “slave.” I have looked at slaves other than Africans and Blacks and West Indians, but I don’t think it had yet occurred to me that when you talked about Black slaves, you were talking about transforming Blacks into slaves. I’d done the research about the implications of that, but I hadn’t put it as simply or as directly as the linguistic evidence would allow. That’s the answer to the notion of racial regimes.
Heatherton: You highlight three figures in Black Marxism: W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright, all of whom were critically shaped by the 1930s. This was an era that witnessed war, depression, and the most profound crisis in the history of world capitalism. These were conditions that propelled many Black radicals to the Left. The Black freedom and labor struggles of the period determined the liberation agenda for decades to come. Could you talk about the importance of the 1930s to the Black Radical Tradition?
CR: Part of the narrative that I was looking at was the degrading of Black labor in the post–Civil War period, and particularly that of skilled and semi-skilled laborers. This new racial regime that I’m looking at in Forgeries has to expel the possibility of skilled and semi-skilled Black labor. In the same way that poor whites remain excluded, it’s rather remarkable that poverty is still portrayed as an aberrational phenomenon. Now in public discourse, poverty is only refered to obliquely. No public official will run on a platform of addressing the American poor. There’s a racialization of the American, not in Black/white terms, but in terms of genetic inferiority. They are deemed biologically incapable, disqualified from being Americans.
ER: One thing that I always want to do when you’re talking about these imaginaries is to stand up and shout, “They’re purposeful imaginaries!” It’s not just that they’re fanciful; they’re pernicious because they’re so intended.
Camp: One thing Black Marxism shows is that Black radicalism and the turn towards Marxist theory during the radical 1930s were fashioned in a crucible of imperialism and fascism. Indeed, Black Marxism critiques European Marxist history for not coming to terms with the impacts of racism and nationalism on the organization of labor under capitalism, and argues that radical intellectuals such as Du Bois, James, and Wright made that theoretical advance. It concludes that “Marxism was (and remains) a superior grammar” for the critique of racial capitalism. Can you reflect on the connection between Black radical historiography and Marxist theory?
CR: Over and over again we’re led to misrepresentations of the responses and reactions to exploitation and oppression. I think I was reiterating Du Bois when I said Marxism is a superior grammar, as opposed to James in Black Jacobins trying to reconfigure the Haitian events in terms of class.
Camp: James argued that enslaved Africans working on the sugar plantations in Haiti were the most well-organized proletariat that the modern world had seen.11
CR: It’s rhetorically powerful.
Camp: I was captivated by it, as you know.
CR: So were we all. So were we all. It’s an intervention by James, making the case that Black people have a radical history. In a sense, I was making a rhetorical gesture. I knew it was easier for a radical intelligentsia to be drawn to James and Du Bois, but what about Wright? He came from the peoples to whom all the earlier parts of Black Marxism is addressing itself. He came from sharecroppers. We have to pay as close attention to him and to the dilemmas that he was addressing as we do to James and Du Bois. Wright was trying to say that capitalism doesn’t always or ordinarily produce rational opposition: racial capitalism also produces a kind of insanity.
Heatherton: In the conclusion of Black Marxism, you note that Black radicalism remained a currency of resistance and revolt for revolutionaries like Angela Y. Davis. In the present moment, how do visions of liberation articulated by the Black Radical Tradition help us in developing a philosophy of praxis?
CR: Part of it is, in effect, developing a method of understanding the world around you. Our communities are marvelous phenomena. In a sense, the totalities that we have experienced historically have each, in the moment, seemed unassailable. At each crisis we shouldn’t have survived, but we have. The current ordering of the world is so fragile. That is the lesson: in each historical moment, justice, social justice, and moral authority are questioned. They seem to be on their last legs, but that has never proven to be the case. That’s one of the lasting lessons of Black Marxism.
ER: I always have thought that Black Marxism was badly received or not received at all. Without Robin D. G. Kelley’s intervention, it wouldn’t have been reprinted. The work that all of Cedric’s students have done has, in some sense, saved it from what was meant to happen. Robin said something in his foreword [to the 2000 edition] about how the work is dangerous; it’s not meant to be seen and read.12
One of the things I learned from Cedric is that there are these repetitions of the Black Radical Tradition. Sometimes it’s scholarship and sometimes it’s the audaciousness of individuals. Whether it’s Oliver Cromwell Cox, Du Bois, or any number of people, their work has disappeared. My presumption is that this is the course that Cedric’s work should have followed and often has. His book Anthropology of Marxism, and until recently Terms of Order were essentially unavailable. But the way younger scholars have taken up his work and pushed it, as Cedric has said, beyond where he intended it or was able to go, is critical.13
That, for me, is the lesson. This work will be buried unless there are people like all of you who are refusing to let it happen. It’s not just Cedric’s work, of course. The academy is not amenable to scholarship like this. It’s not amenable to things that are meant to be transforming. So everybody’s tasks are cut out for them. As Cedric says, we have not been defeated, but the attempts are there. It will probably take thirty years for the work to be really appreciated. In some ways, it’s still invisible—as is Forgeries, unfortunately.
Part II
Heatherton: There’s been a renewed interest in the Black Radical Tradition, particularly in wake of protests against police killings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, and beyond during 2014 and 2015. You both coauthored a piece titled “Ferguson, Gaza, and Iraq: An Outline of the Official Narrative in ‘Post-Racial’ America,” which points out the difficulty of fighting racism in a world that considers itself post-racial. You make a compelling argument about how Ferguson was depicted in a “familiar, manageable, and seductive narrative” along the lines of the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. You say that the freedom movement has been covertly reversed through race projects such as mass incarceration.14 How do we think about freedom struggles when those histories are presented as if they’re resolved? How can we struggle against racism in a world that considers itself post-racial?
CR: Those of us who are active in the liberation movement are sensitive to when we can speak directly and candidly and when our listeners might be so alienated by hearing a bold truth that we might lose credibility with them. Obama’s campaign in 2008 presented him as capable of turning America as a culture away from blatant, vicious racism. We were saying that that was merely an obfuscation, that the naked opposition to racial justice can only be encouraged by Obama’s presidency. Obama’s presidential success was supposed to have eviscerated racism, when in fact it reanimated it. In other words, beneath the surface, something very different was happening: not post-racialism but, in effect, the anticipation of the deployment of racism.
Jordan may remember that I used this exercise in my undergraduate courses: I had people look at the labels on their phones, their shoes, their shirts, and so forth, and imagine the conditions in which those people were working and the conditions in which they were living. It’s really remarkable how seldom we think about the people who are feeding us and clothing us and the conditions in which they labor. Obama’s presidency made American society more accepting by obscuring the fundamental nature [of labor].
Camp: In that same article, you note that Black and Brown people are targeted for surveillance, harassment, police violence, and state terror. You write that “Ferguson is about poverty and the lengths to which the state and its local tributaries have gone to control the poor.” You conclude that “race and racism are merely covers for class.”15 We wondered if you could say more about this conception of the relationship between race and class?
ER: Well, that’s a position that Cedric has certainly long held and that gets obscured very often. I see race mentioned a lot more than I see class. Racism is a moving concept—it appears when class interests become threatened. That’s a really hard thing to grasp for a lot of people—that racism is not about color.
Camp: It turns out phenotypes have been poor indicators.
ER: I think it’s about how narrowly we define race and how exclusive it becomes.
CR: A more narrow appropriation of it. That is one of the reasons why the Irish sections are in Black Marxism.
Heatherton: Forgeries offers a provocative quotation from Otis Madison: “The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people, not black people. For blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.”16 Can you talk about why this is an important insight?
CR: We can describe this moment in many of the cultures with which we are most familiar as a modern phenomenon in historical terms. The blatant, vicious characterization of the Irish by English spokespersons, writers, and so forth has largely dissipated since the early part of the twentieth century. Irish communities carry these wounds much longer than the rest of us. Irish historians reminded me of these earlier moments when they were defined as objects of vilification. As E. P. Thompson suggests, much of the vilification of Blacks was transferred from the Irish in the nineteenth century. Racism has the advantage of being able to move and transfer its disaffections from one group to another without being held accountable.
ER: Otis’s quotation is a very clear way of addressing the issue: Who is racism serving?
Heatherton: How do you understand his claim that the purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people?
CR: Well, as I understood it, “white people” is a voluntary identification. If you put enough pressure on European communities, they will re-imagine their identity in terms of race—in terms of whiteness. It embraces extraordinarily distinctive people. One of the things we found when we went to England the first time in the 1970s was how many South Asians had been considered white in England. But it was not a clear, all-or-nothing sort of division. Many of the South Asians we met were moving away from white working-class identities, white middle-class identities, English identities, and so forth, and toward a kind of militancy which whiteness would’ve denied them. After the militancy, they were often reenergized by their ethnic and historical identities.
Heatherton: In “Ferguson, Gaza, and Iraq,” you’re careful to describe the ways in which the media sanctioned the death of Michael Brown during the very same summer that they were sanctioning the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. Can you say a bit more about understanding both processes at the same time?
CR: The basic division of humanity between the rational and the irrational has for centuries been coded by color. The current debate over who has the right to atomic weapons and who is going to hold managerial authority over weapons of mass destruction continues that.
ER: One thing we wanted to say in the Ferguson piece is that this is not new; this has been going on and on and on. In the mid to late 1990s, there was a group in Los Angeles who published a book documenting police killings. I had a bunch of students record a PSA with me in which they read from the book, reciting the names of each person and a description of the circumstances of their death. Young people, old people, and people of all races had died at the hands of the police. The issue was not just about policing; it was and continues to be about determining legitimate and illegitimate authority.
Camp: You both recently produced the last episode of the Third World News Review in 2015, a show which had been airing in Santa Barbara for three decades. You were also awarded the 2015 Media Access Award by TVSB in Santa Barbara for building community and increasing diversity in local media. Can you talk about the importance of community-based media in providing an alternative to the corporate media?
ER: Well, where else are you going to hear it? That is my short answer. Corporate media is critical in the way it constructs our reality. Creating a little alternative space is always really important; it’s always about being able to think about things differently. You might not be able to do anything this very moment, but at least you can hold up some alternate possibilities. That’s part of what alternative media does.
I think social media is doing a little bit of this sometimes, but it’s not the same as coming together in person and talking about something. There’s something about the dialogic nature of community media that makes it different than social media. Or maybe I’m just an old dog. I don’t know. I’ll allow for both things.
CR: Well, I won’t. (Laughter.) We had this conversation thirty years ago when you were thinking about No Alibis and I was thinking about Third World News Review. We continue to have this debate about format, presentation, and so forth. Eventually each of us reconciled the corporate media with the theater of distraction. Every now and then the Third World perspective leaks into the very severely restricted space of that theater. Have you seen the Obama imitation that Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele do?
Heatherton: The anger translator?
CR: Yeah. And they couldn’t keep that up because it started bouncing against the wall of actual Black and Latino anger.
Heatherton: That’s a great point. I would love to figure out exactly when they stopped doing it, when parody maybe started cutting too close to the bone. One last question: What do you both consider the most important thing for activists today to grapple with? What are your resources for hope?
CR: Simply walking down the streets of Goleta and in many locations in Santa Barbara, you get a sense of the vivid and vivacious alternatives that exist. That’s politically crucial, but even more encouraging are the lyrics of much of what they play on the popular music stations. When Elizabeth and I came back from England in 1971, we were listening to the radio while we were driving across the Bay Bridge and marveling at how acute Marvin Gaye’s representation of Black ideas were and how stunning and direct his critiques were. But of course, he was writing about a whole culture, a whole community’s critiques.
ER: Cedric answered this in probably the boldest way when he was at University of California, Irvine, a couple of years ago. He’d done a two-day seminar there. At the end of it, people wanted to know, When does it all get better? Cedric said something to them about the struggle being important, regardless of whether or not you are going to win. If it’s some kind of salvation you’re looking for, I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s not like a football game that’s going to end with your team either winning or losing. We have to understand that there is value in trying, not in winning. It’s important to recognize small victories and celebrate them and one another. There is not just victory at the end of the struggle. There’s value in recognizing that. Trying to change things has a value in and of itself.
I’ve told students in the past that they can make choices about what their lives are going to be like when they leave the university. I’ve told them that most of them are going to go into all-white environments or racially and ethnically segregated environments, unless they choose to do something different. And you can choose to do something different. You can choose to participate in racist and classist structures, or you can choose not to. That is really important.
I want people to be free to enjoy the fullness of their experiences, whatever they are, wherever they are. Cedric was talking earlier about being able to say boldly what it is we think about something. There’s so many instances where we can’t do that. To try to create more spaces where we can at least approximate it, where we can talk openly and freely with each other, that is important.