It's getting harder to talk about things
But Assata Shakur is here to help
It’s probably no surprise that it’s getting harder to talk about important things. And I think that there’s a strong contention among liberal elites that the problems with being able to talk about hard things boil down to lacking charity, not being able to hear others who are different than us, and a refusal to “cross the line” to engage with others. Polarization is the zombie idea we can’t seem to shake.
A few weeks ago, I heard a paper given by a theologian who’d written off, virulently and intensely, the writing of a famed theological voice of the 20th century. After years of working alongside someone who found this theologian helpful, someone who became her friend, she decided she would look at the work again. And what she found surprised her. There were certain ways she could bridge her own work and the work of this theologian.
I think it’s actually a good practice to read things because your friends are reading them. Unless they are not good people and then you should get new friends. My concern came at the question-and-answer time which turned towards this practice – reengaging theological voices we’d decided to jettison. What are the grounds for this reengagement? What would prompt it? To what end? The suggestions were the well-worn argument of how we need to draw near to those with whom we disagree, that we are better when we find the best in the arguments of others, that we need to build bridges across difference. We could get “right up next to” arguments of disagreement before we set them aside, and then only hesitantly.
The problem, as I saw it, is that we need better criteria for engagement. Some arguments are not good and you are under no obligation to engage them. How do we go about this assessment? This week I went back to Assata Shakur’s autobiography because her book has helped shape my understanding of the political ground of engagement.
For me, one of the memorable scenes of that book is when Shakur first starts working in revolutionary movements. Early on in her interaction with revolutionary movements, we find her talking with a group of people who are deeply involved in the work. In that conversation she realizes how silly she sounds. She doesn’t know enough, and she feels like she’s making a fool of herself. She realizes the ways in which her formal education was truncated, and she takes up a life-long project to learn. She reads everything she can get her hands on. She learns about Algeria and slave revolts and Haiti, Communism and political theory. “You couldn’t catch me without a book in my hand.”
All of that goes hand in hand with investigation. Shakur goes to check out the non-violent Civil Rights movement, the Garveyites, the Black Panthers, Republic of New Afrika. She’s astute and inquisitive. Her knowledge and commitment to history, politics, and movements as well as her own experience and story provide the grounds for assessment. It’s a remarkable book because we get to see her working out the revolutionary struggle in real time. She wants a new world and she needs to know who can help her get to freedom. Shakur walks through how she learned to differentiate between fictive and real power, different iterations of Communism, her encounters with Black class politics. She discovers new people and movements not as competition but as possible sources of liberation, potential comrades, mistakes and failures to learn from.
At one point while imprisoned, Shakur meets the political prisoner Lolita Lebron, a hero of hers from the movement for Puerto Rican liberation. Earlier in her life, Shakur had met a Catholic nun named Mary Alice who taught her about liberation theology. Lebron’s activism was also rooted in liberation theology, and Shakur writes that Lebron’s religious life “helped her to remain strong an committed all those years.”
And then Shakur makes this remark about liberation theology: “I knew a little bit, but I had too much respect for Lolita to open my mouth carelessly. I decided to study liberation theology so that i could have an intelligent conversation with her.”
That was the basis of inquiry – to have a conversation with someone whose life she respected that could lead to something generative for a new world. That commitment grew out of shared recognition of common struggle even as that struggle materialized in different forms, as a global struggle. Shakur was invested in learning about the roots that led Lebron towards the commitment and the passion that animated her political action.
Shakur saw people in Black liberation movements who lacked historical context and political education. She describes seeing Black Panthers mimic slogans and pick up guns with no engagement beyond rote participation, and then she watched those movements fracture. She believed that for Black liberation to be succeed the people needed political education, a sense of the sway of history, and how our lives shift the movements of liberation.
I thought about this a lot as I was reflecting on hearing an ecclesial leader, a member of the LGBTQ community, talk about building a friendship with a leader in another denomination that actively works for the destruction of LGBTQ people. The lesson was supposed to be that, if these two could be friends, then we could all build bridges across difference.
But there were other questions for me. Perhaps there were shared material interests between church bureaucrats that transcended even the survival of their community. Or perhaps there was something here about the myth of befriending our oppressors as a mechanism of survival (the results of this have proven very poor). Or perhaps there’s something here about class or race politics, or alienation from people in the pews that disconnects the ordinary experiences of people who are vulnerable to death because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. What did they hope this friendship would produce? How do we reckon with a friendship with someone who actively pursues the devastation of our people?
I wonder if it’s getting harder to investigate this kind of ground because we’re on the defensive from a lot of toxic and evil trash. I was thinking about the height of Critical Race Theory nonsense spewing from the GOP. I watched a lot of folks jump to the defense of CRT. I’ve benefited a lot from critical race theory, and I know that, as a social philosophy, CRT garners quite a bit of contestation, not because it talks about race but because there may be other theoretic structures that can get us where we want to go – and that is towards freedom. Do we need the ontological premises that CRT inserts into a variety of disciplines? Does CRT offer a usable racial theory? Those are live questions among social activists and leftists. Not only that, CRT is so diffuse that it can contain two virtually opposite assessments of racialization at the same time, like Wilkerson’s Caste and Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race. I’m guessing both books are outlawed in Florida. Which CRT am I defending?
None of this mattered because all we could hear was a shattering siren from race-baiting conservatives and that left no room to explore what is helpful and what is not about Critical Race Theory, how it can and cannot benefit a larger project, or even how we collectively define that project. You were either for or against, defending or detracting. That makes it harder to talk about thing, and that is a very big problem because most ideas we encounter, even within our own movement work, will have something useful for us and unhelpful, or that needs to be addressed, or that we need to work through.
Next week I’m going to talk more about a more interesting discussion around questions of appropriation, and how thinking about anti-racist worship practices and paying attention to Fred Moten took me beyond “should white people since Black gospel music.”