I came to Cedric J. Robinson’s work through his people, through the jagged network of students, colleagues, and friends that he taught, mentored, laughed with, and argued with over the many years that he was on earth in struggle with us. This thing about Cedric’s work—that it travels in the academy and beyond through gestures of affiliation or touch—is significant. If you started graduate school around the time that I did, you would have probably been introduced to Cedric’s work by Robin D. G. Kelley or Ruthie Gilmore, or Avery Gordon, or Wahneema Lubiano. And you probably had the University of North Carolina Press reissue of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, the one with the pristine black matte cover and the simple blue and red geometric letters whose stark clean lines masked what was between the book’s cover: more than a history of Black Marxists, the history of the world, the worlds, of the Black Radical Tradition which was of course before and more than Marxism. But the other material history of Robinson’s work kept on shaping the social world that continued to swell around it, and by “the other material history,” I’m referring to the one that Fred Moten describes in the special issue of African Identities that H. L. T. Quan and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard edited in 2013:
For a long time … Black Marxism circulated underground, as a recurrent seismic event on the edge or over the edge of the university, for those of us who valorized being on or over that edge even if we had been relegated to it. There, at least, we could get together and talk about the bomb that had gone off in our heads. Otherwise we carried around its out, dispersive potenza as contraband, buried under the goods that legitimate parties to exchange can value, until we could get it to the black market, where (the) license has no weight, and hand it around out of a suitcase or over a kitchen table or from behind a makeshift counter.1
If you had to know someone who had their hands on a copy, there must have been a certain handedness that built the discursive and social field around the work—we might even call it a force field in the darkness that now in retrospect, in the tragedy of our time, appears only slightly less obscure. Those were the Reagan–Thatcher years, the post-1968 decades of prison and police buildup and privatization, the invasions of everywhere from Grenada to the Gulf, the neoliberal assault on everything that resists possession.
Now in the wake of the 2016 election I have found myself turning even more urgently to Cedric and his people, our people, Cedric people. I started by returning to Tiffany Willoughby-Herard’s Waste of a White Skin, a stunning book about the history of white vulnerability and the Carnegie Corporation’s Poor White Study, where she writes:
As human being and the realization of human rationality in the aspiration toward and the achievement of the nation and the bureaucracy that organizes it is imagined, the racial politics that rely on black people as the fundamental antagonists of human being and the nation must continually erect new racial regimes and forgeries of memory [of course, that’s Robinson’s term] to paper over this relation. The study of poor whites, white poverty, and the idea that poor whites were an intractable social problem was one such racial regime. That the racialization of poor whites could occur both as privilege and misery is fundamental to the workings of this relation.2
Willoughby-Herard’s work, like Robinson’s, is the work of Black Studies, as Robinson says, as a critique of Western Civilization, where “critique” signifies, more than criticism, the kind of negation and other world-building that is necessary for the survival of Black thought and Black being. The time for the Robinson intervention is here with us in the work of his people, and it is also here with us in its urgent demands that we stand with and struggle with those of us who are protecting the water, those of us who are abolishing the prisons, those of us who are building the sanctuaries, those of us who are finding other ways to refuse the terms of our present order.
The work Robinson left us is a record of radical thought, of efforts to rethink and remake the world in a historical epoch when such activity has been deemed not only dangerous or subversive (by conservative ideologues and architects of defense) but also naive and idealistic (by those on the decimated Left). And Robinson’s metaphysics of the anti-political in books such as The Terms of Order and Anthropology of Marxism are not only based in Robinson’s “deeply historical”3 work; they are also based in the heresy, the dreamworlds, the ancestral visions, the folktales, the church life, the non-evidentiary stuff that makes up that other authority, that other call to duty, that Robinson theorizes.4 Against security and order, Robinson gives us—gifted us—a sacred universe of disorder that confounds politics.
There are two vital strands within Robinson’s work that, for me, are central to how we will remember him and his work. One is what his work made recognizable: not only the history of white supremacy but the nature of those worlds exiting alongside and in negation of the culture of capital. The Black Radical Tradition is not simply the dialectical antithesis of capitalism or the blind spot of those movements that have posed a challenge to capitalism (such as Marxism); the Black Radical Tradition is, in Avery Gordon’s words, the “living and breathing” entity that “stands in the place blinded from view.”5 And the nature of that tradition is a collective consciousness informed by the history of liberation struggles and spurred by “the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”6 Let’s remember the claim that Robinson makes about African captives who took to the bush or who denied themselves salt to sustain their belief that they could “fly, really fly, home.”7 While captives often attempted to escape to Africa or to the maroon communities, their attempts to flee cannot be understood as simple individualistic reactions to plantation servitude. Rather they must be understood as complete rejections of their lot, generative instances of collective world-building in the face of utter devastation and in refusal of the world that still must be refused.
The work asks profound questions over and over again: What are we made of? What is all the stuff that we are made of? What is the nature of the “we” that has survived the world?
The other important impulse in Robinson’s work that I want to remember is its measured optimism. At the end of Black Marxism, Robinson leaves us with a profoundly prescient statement about Black people and the new world order. Diagnosing what he calls the “degenerating mechanism” of Western culture, Robinson writes:
Physically and ideologically … African peoples bridge the decline of one world order and the eruption (we may surmise) of another. It is a frightful and uncertain space of being. If we are to survive, we must take nothing that is dead and choose wisely from among the dying.8
This was after Nixon, in the midst of Reagan, and Robinson was writing of the new world erupting into the darkness. Robinson’s work across his monographs was to invite us into this “frightful and uncertain place of being,” moving in the profound expectation that the Western powers had already been weakened by Third World resistance and were facing their ultimate decline even as he wrote.
For so many of us, Robinson’s work continues teaching us in excess of itself: teaching us something about the social, collective labor of our work; pushing against the headlong drive toward the professionalization of the knowledge commodity; and calling into being, into actual being, the world he imagines when he writes of that ontological totality, the deceptively simple creed that oppression is only one of our realities.
The time for the Robinson intervention is, has to be, now, and we must move in that same expectation that propelled it: that Western culture is degenerating and we are the bridge to the new new world order. Let us dance on ocean water, let us take to the interior. Plan and study, as we say, organize, as we can, protect, as we must, and keep responding to the call of this giant who we will all so terribly miss. As we remember.