By Ismail Khalidi, May 20, 2021
I had the pleasure of being able to chat with the renowned scholar Robin D.G. Kelley this week to get his thoughts on history, hope and revolution for Call & Response. We delved into the question of Palestine, Black Lives Matter and much more. Among Kelley’s books are Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and his writings are regularly featured in Boston Review and included in our bi-weekly Read to Resist section.
IK: There is much to be pessimistic about these days, but also many revolutionary sparks of hope globally, from the farmers strike in India to the general strike in Palestine to the movement for Black Lives and the popular uprisings in Columbia and Chile. There seems to be a reawakening of a radical politics of resistance and re-imagining. Would you agree? If so, what do you attribute this to and what gives you most hope about this moment?
I definitely agree and it doesn’t surprise me. Certainly the scope of these movements surprise me—250 million farmers, workers, students in India represents the largest general strike in human history; Palestine’s general strike is the first of its kind to bring together the entire population since 1936; the insurrection in Columbia, despite violent state repression, shows no signs of slowing down. And it goes without saying that these rebellions erupted under unprecedented conditions of a global pandemic.
I could go on, but my main point is that while this moment we’re in might feel exceptional, our movements have never disappeared. They ebb and flow; they’re cyclical much like the boom and bust cycle of capitalism, but they are not the result of inherent contradictions or some kind of law. In Palestine itself and within the global solidarity movement, we’ve bore witness to dedicated, consistent organizing to get us to this place. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have never rested, not in my life time. The unremitting state violence against Palestinians is proof of the threat posed by Palestinian organizing, from the Freedom Rides to Land Day demonstrations to the resistance to the war on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, etc.. The wave of delegations of activists visiting Palestine, the ongoing work of the BDS campaign, the brilliant defense of activists by groups like Palestine Legal, the list goes on.
Similar to the George Floyd protests last summer, I don’t believe his killing caused the rebellion. Rather, it catalyzed an ongoing resistance movement rooted in an emergent vision of abolition that can be traced to the long 1990s, to opposition to Bush and Clinton-era neoliberalism, the war on drugs, the war on terror, prisons, police brutality, anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism, Islamophobia, and violence against women of color and the LGBTQ community. The same could be said about Chile and Colombia. As you know, revolts have erupted in Chile like clockwork, from years of opposition to Pinochet to the student revolts about nine years ago demanding relief from staggering student debt and a halt to the severe privatization of secondary and college education. Of course, those uprisings coincided with the global occupy movement, the anti-austerity protests in Spain and Greece, and the Arab Spring. I remember being asked the same question about what brought on this global eruption and what gives me hope.
The fact that the question keeps coming up is precisely what gives me hope. Our struggles are protracted and they have always been. The same can be said about the state’s response, which is why—if we’re going to be honest with ourselves—there is a massive global defense industry, why so much of the world’s national budgets are spent on weapons and the military and domestic policing, covert operations, border police, surveillance and cyber war, ad infinitum. True, the U.S. is way off the charts because it continues to play the role of global cop, but my point is that those weapons are meant to be used on us. They are not mobilized to bring down a fascist dictator or stop genocide. They are mobilized to protect capital, discipline labor, privatize natural resources like water and land, dispossess indigenous people (still!), and crush any opposition either fighting for justice or even fighting to remove U.S. military bases from their land—from Saudi Arabia to Okinawa.
IK: For those not familiar with the term “racial capitalism” and the work of Cedric Robinson, can you give us a brief breakdown, and why the term matters today?
RK: First, “racial capitalism” is an old term that was recently revived as a way to understand the class and material dimensions of racism. It was used by Cedric Robinson and South African Marxist Neville Alexander in the early 1980s as a way of signaling that capitalism always operated within a system and ideology that assigns differential value to human life and labor. Land enclosure, slavery, dispossession, displacement, disfranchisement, segregation, exclusion happened to people who are deemed less valued—people turned into racial subjects—and these acts enable the extraction of wealth for the owners of capital by suppressing our wages, taking our land, taxing us and using the proceeds to build a first-class world for white elites and a third-class world for the rest of us. Settler colonialism always operates through regimes of racial capitalism, though for settlers the objective is the elimination of the “native.” Israeli apartheid and the ongoing effort to eliminate Palestinians is racial capitalism at work.
But equally important, racial capitalism entails the “capture” of exploited white workers as junior partners in the settler state through the myth of white racial superiority. Cedric Robinson called it, “the theft [white workers] themselves endured and the voracious expropriation of others they facilitated. The scrap which was their reward was the installation of Black inferiority into their shared national culture. It was a paltry dividend, but it still serves.”
It matters because it still serves. Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us that Capitalism is “never not racial,” and it is impossible to dismantle racism without ending capitalism.
IK: You’ve written about your decades-long connection to the Palestinian struggle. Can you talk a bit about black-Palestinian solidarity, then and now, and about what connects racial capitalism and settler colonialism in the U.S. to settler colonialism and imperialism abroad, specifically in Palestine?
RK: The history of Black-Palestinian solidarity begins, in earnest, over half a century ago, but I’m always reminding us that there is a longer, more deeply entrenched history of Black support for Zionism. I’m cautious about making general claims about Black-Palestinian solidarity because there is no unified Black position or community, so for many of us in this fight, the Black political class has been on the wrong side of the struggle—and continue to be. Here in the U.S. the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to come out strongly in defense of Palestine and to call out the Biden-Harris administration for endorsing this genocidal war was Cori Bush, a young activist who came out of the Ferguson, Missouri, struggles against police violence and who topped a Black Democratic political dynasty (the Clay family) that never challenged Israel. New York’s Jamaal Bowman also took a position though a bit more tepid. But then we get Representative Ritchie Torres, with a history in progressive movements and Black and Brown working-class struggles, and he writes a dumb op ed titled, “Here’s Why I’m Supporting Israel—Despite the Twitter Mob.”
So if we’re going to be honest, it is—and has always been—the Black Left that supports justice and self-determination for the Palestinian people, that has fought consistently to end the occupation. Christian Zionism continues to capture a portion of the Black community due to a Biblical interpretation that conflates the modern settler state of Israel with the Israel of Exodus. But for the most part, Black folks have been indifferent. That has begun to change after 2011, when more Black and Brown delegations began to visit Palestine, spawning a whole bunch of new organizations, such as Black4Palestine and African Americans for Justice in the Middle East & North Africa” (AAJMENA), linking Israeli apartheid to anti-black racism, supporting BDS, and evoking the global anti-apartheid movement for South Africa. And as we all know, the Gaza-Ferguson nexus in 2014 deepened the relationship when Palestinians in St. Louis and abroad stood in solidarity with the protests against the killing of Mike Brown. In August of 2016, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over one hundred organizations, issued a forceful statement labeling Israel an “apartheid state” and characterizing the ongoing war in Gaza and the West Bank as “genocide.” And then Jewish Voice for Peace launched its “Deadly Exchange” campaign, exposing and resisting the ongoing role of Israeli military and police in training U.S. law enforcement in “counter-terrorism” and other tactics that reinforce racial profiling, hyper-policing, and militarization.
The parallels of state-sanctioned violence is definitely one basis for solidarity but not the main one. Historically and in the present, solidarity has been rooted in the realization that our struggles were linked, not only to each other but to injustice and oppression around the world, nearly all of which can be traced back to settler colonialism and imperialist expansion. The rise of capitalism and its violent expansion through a global settler regime is how our modern world came into being. This is why the struggle against settler colonialism, against regimes of racial capitalism, is fundamental. And that does not mean simply democratizing the settler regime by dismantling structural racism (as if that’s even possible). Settler colonialism is a system designed for wealth extraction, dispossession, accumulation, and as I said, the elimination of the native (bodily through killing or segregation, culturally through stripping indigenous people of identity and institutions, etc.) But because settler colonial regimes were modern, capitalist societies often driven by ideas of sovereignty, freedom, independence, the process of dispossession also required legitimizing settler sovereignty over both land and people. This is why it is impossible to “unsettle” and dismantle colonialism without ending capitalism. This point is made crystal clear in the Red Nation Manifesto (the Red Nation is an incredible revolutionary indigenous formation here in the U.S.). Point 10 reads:
We demand the end to capitalism-colonialism on a global level. Native peoples, youth, poor and homeless, women, LGBTQ2 and nonhuman relatives experience extreme and regular forms of violence because the whole system relies on our death. Capitalism-colonialism means death for Native peoples. For Native peoples to live, capitalism and colonialism must die.
Even colonial relationships not based on settler regimes have yet to decolonize. Formerly colonized nations, for example, never dismantled the colonial state which was designed to facilitate extraction, suppress rebellion, and discipline labor.
Return the land to indigenous people? That might not appear feasible for those of us who believe we could actually “democratize” settler states without some fundamental transformation, but I’d much rather be living under indigenous governance of the Quimbaya, the Chibchas, the Raizal and Palenquero, the Maya, the Mapuche, the Aymara, the Quechua, the Dine, the Oceti Sakowin, Potawatomi, the Ute, Yaqui, Shoshone, Palestinian and Bedouin, etc. Waaayyy better than our weaponized racist, patriarchal, capitalist regimes that have brought us to edge of earth’s destruction!
IK: It seems that the neoliberal order is trying to appropriate and commodify the popular outrage against white supremacy in the U.S. and, in terms of policy, inching towards milquetoast reform as a way of mollifying and channelling the uprising without undergoing any real change. Would you agree with that? And if so, how do we counter that counterrevolutionary trend as artists, scholars and activists?
RK: Yes I agree and capitalism, even before its neoliberal turn, has always sought to capture, domesticate, and commodify popular outrage, and it has always used what we call “non-reformist reforms” to shut down opposition, to resist revolutionary changes. Of course, we should expect no less since appropriating/absorbing opposition is, in many ways, the classic definition of reform. Tweaking the system, not changing it. We saw what happened in the aftermath of the protests around George Floyd. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos dropped $10 million on various Black and social justice orgs., including Black Lives Matter. Commercials popped up everywhere, from Cadillac, Target, Google, ad infinitum, declaring that Black Lives Matter, showing young crunchy Negroes spouting bad poetry wearing natural hair, all to give the illusion that these companies are with us, even as workers in these very companies are fighting for living wages, dignity, benefits, and dealing with anti-black racism. None of this is new. But it is a warning against just how easy it is to appropriate our social justice language if it is not explicitly anti-capitalist. The most absurd but telling example is the viral video featuring the Latina CIA agent droning on about being intersectional and proud to be part of the agency that can “see” her value.
The other part of your question is too hard to answer briefly but I can say that artists have always stood at the fulcrum of struggle, both against ruling power and in the service of it. There are many stories of artists whose work intended to be critical of oppressive regimes was incorporated by elite circles and simply served to titillate the ruling classes. And here are perhaps more stories of artists being jailed, murdered, exiled, or simply having their careers destroyed. There are artists who have chosen to reject the venues and platforms that might advance their careers and instead make work with and for the people. Some of those folks we’ve never heard of.
I do think theater is a unique cultural space since it has long served as a means of creating commons and community, and it’s most radical (known) practitioners have been persecuted, exiled, blacklisted, and assassinated—Bertolt Brecht, Federico García Lorca, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Ghassan Kanafani (a novelist but also a playwright), Juliano Mer-Khamis, among others. Their work often reveal the machinations of the rulers and the dignity and power of the ruled, in language and movement that emotionally connects audiences to the characters, histories, memories, and to each other. Still, in a liberal settler state or in the imperial metropoles, outright violence isn’t always necessary. Enclosure and arrest are enacted through more subtle forms—through the distribution of largely corporate funding, through boards of directors and trustees overwhelmingly comprised of representatives of corporate power, and through censorship. The liberal language of free speech obscures how censorship functions as an expression of power: it is a euphemism for arrest, silencing, and enclosure. I go back to your brilliant adaptation with Naomi Wallace of Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, “Returning to Haifa,” that was commissioned by the Public Theater in New York. The fact that the Public Theater pulled the production in response to Zionist political pressure from its board is a prime example of the ongoing warfare on artists who speak truth to power.
We just have to continue to do the work. Clearly it makes a difference, otherwise the state and corporate interests wouldn’t work so hard to suppress it.
* Ismail Khalidi is a playwright, screenwriter and a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.
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