Violence, Racism and Dubois: the Relevance of Africana Studies

a short post I wrote for Binghamton University's ASO newsletter:

We live in an age of resurgent and wounded white supremacy. As a scholar of Africana Studies and History, I understand Donald Trump and his followers not as the aberration from the supposedly civil political norms of a previous age, but as the return to a mode of political discourse all too familiar in United States history, what the great scholar of Africana, Dr. W.E.B. Dubois called in his magnum opus Black Reconstruction, “the wages of whiteness.”

            We live in age where forms of toxic masculinity, alienation and white racism can combine to fuel destructive form of mass violence. I understand the ever increasing incidence of mass shootings not as the aberration from a previous age of peace, harmony and security, but as the result of our continued use of a mode of violent political action globally, and the inability to ‘wall off’ violence out there (Iraq, Afghanistan), from violence within US borders. 

            We live in an age where a resurgent xenophobic nationalism promises to deal with the ongoing economic catastrophes wrought by the 2008 financial crisis, by building a wall and keeping out Muslims, Mexicans and non-white people in general.   I understand this anti-immigrant sentiment not as the decline from a golden age of tolerance, but as the return to a time-honed mode of racist populism in our collective political discourse. While fascism and racism are common responses to economic anxiety, they only perpetuate the problem of violence, and eat deeply into the spiritual resolve of people who foolishly adopt them.

            In 1915, the great scholar W.E.B. Dubois published a prescient and prophetic piece in The Atlanticcalled “The African Roots of War.” In it, he located the roots of the destruction of Europe in World War One in the violence and genocide of European imperialism in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. Dubois’s central contention, still relevant today, is that “We, then, who want peace, must remove the real causes of war.” Those causes, which Dubois identified as racism, greed, and despotic unjust rule, are still with us today; in fact they define our present global condition as clearly as they did in Dubois’s time.

            Under these conditions, scholars and students of the Africana experience have an opportunity to speak and raise up the truths of Dubois, as well as many others—from ancestor Winnie Mandela to the martyr Marielle Franco—to a new generation. Their writings and their lives are a powerful legacy bequeathed to us, and we speak and analyze and do the work of Africana studies as witnesses to and heirs of their vision. It is up to us, to use these tools to trenchantly analyze and critique the racism, xenophobia, misogyny, violence and general callousness of the powerful we see around us. The problems we face as a society, whether here on Binghamton’s campus, nationally or globally are not insurmountable. But their solutions require courage, careful analysis and a steely, clear-eyed determination about the kind of future we can sustainably build together. In that perpetual quest, Africana studies has much to offer to knowledge-seekers and builders of all kinds.

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Conservatism, Conservatives and White Supremacy

Although I don't really consider myself a conservative, I have a few thoughts on modern conservatism. Conservatives basically believe in the unchanging preservation of legacies, moral, cultural and spiritual, from the ancient past. They look to these legacies as sources of guidance, and believe they are better guides to what is right and true than contemporary moral attitudes and ideas. Studying the Ancient Egyptians, I am deeply sympathetic to conservatism as a necessary corollary of cultural and religious preservation. When you've created a just society that has stood the test of time, there is something therein worth preserving. This is one reason why the Ancient Egyptians were so conservative. This is also why I respect those who choose to live according to conservative religious traditions, be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim. Conservatism free from attachment to state power or ethnic exclusivity is a powerful vehicle for preserving valuable moral dispositions. But modern conservatism doesn't deserve the name. It is mostly, if not solely, a form of ethnic nationalism based on the supremacy of European white Christian identity. It is not based on the preservation of old virtues, but on the spreading of new diseases of the heart, based on the lust for power. Perhaps there are a few strands of modern American conservatism that meaningfully connect to the universalist spiritual traditions and disciplines of medieval Christianity, but these are largely secondary to the preservation of group power of Euro-Americans in the space of a settler state. In its nationalist garb, this conservatism is basically the national and cultural expression of white supremacy. When a white nationalist like Jared Taylor talks about preserving white culture, he is articulating a conservative white nationalist critique of American liberalism. Listening to Taylor makes me think about how the founders of this American settler republic would react to the contemporary social scene. Arguably they would be more sympathetic to Jared Taylor than to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Which makes me think that Dr. King didn't represent an "American" tradition, nor a conservative one. Rather his work was an attempt to decolonize that American tradition, a herculean effort to reshape America into a more inclusive space. Whatever battered remnants of political virtue we cling to today are legacies of his and other's sacrifice, not the unchanging and hallowed traditions of this nation's checkered history. #BlackHistoryMonth #MartinLutherKing #Conservatism

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Some observations on the Michael Muhammad Knight versus Hamza Yusuf articles

Recently Michael Muhammad Knight published two provocative pieces on Vice critiquing Hamza Yusuf as a white convert and a spiritual salesman.

Here is the first one. It's called "The Problem with White Converts" and features a huge picture of Hamza Yusuf.
Here is the second one. It's called "Michael Muhammad Knight vs. Hamza Yusuf." It has a picture of Knight with a cape on, about to get in the wrestling ring with Yusuf.

Perhaps most readers outside the US have not even heard of Michael Muhammad Knight, so the context will seem unfamiliar. If that is the case, I recommend skipping the articles altogether. There are likely better uses of your time. But if you are American, what MMK is saying is important and true, although problematic.

Here are my cursory observations on the two articles:

1. MMK is not know for having good manners, or rather I should say, since I don't know him personally, he is not known for conforming to the rhetorical and performative aspects that Muslim scholars and the larger Muslim community understand as good manners. That means he says things in a bald-faced way, which makes some Muslims uncomfortable and means they are more likely to write him off.

2. To imply, as MMK does in the above articles, that Yusuf is some kind of huckster who is spouting rhetoric he does not believe is disrespectful, and wrong. Not just morally wrong (in the sense of implying that Yusuf is not sincere), but unverifiably wrong. Whether or not another person believes as he/she says is not a matter for idle speculation on the internet. Hamza Yusuf deserves more respect, not because he is Hamza Yusuf, but because it is neither good manners nor good argumentation to imply that someone is insincere. MMK ought to know as much, given how many times he has likely been dismissed, attacked, called insincere, etc.

3. White converts using Islam to authenticate and thereby de-privilege and "de-whiten" themselves is a real phenomenon. It is not altogether a bad thing. There are ways of moving through these spaces with integrity, and avoid becoming a slogan spouting, cartoonish parody. An analogy might be drawn to William Wimsatt's famous essay in Bomb The Suburbs "We Use Words Like Mackadocious", in that the attempt to shed white skin privilege by becoming Muslim often mirrors similar attempts by white kids trying to be down with hip-hop culture. There is an elaborate "hyper-performativity" of Muslim-ness (thank you Mahdi Tourage!) that mirrors the hyper-performativity of blackness in its relentless search for authenticity. I think Hamza Yusuf is a poor example of this, however. MMK could have done some more research, or perhaps even offered up himself as an example (actually he has in his books), before targeting Yusuf in this article.

4. The racial rhetoric of the "white convert", and the use of Hamza Yusuf as an example obscure an important point MMK is making, which is:
   The "classical Islamic tradition" is being packaged and sold as a product in the US, and it is product that cannot begin to fulfill the expectations people have of it. Notice that Hamza Yusuf and others who study abroad rarely speak on the debates going on over interpretation in the places they studied. Take Mauritania for example: I have yet to hear Hamza Yusuf give an opinion on how the Maliki fiqh scholars dealt with slavery in that country. It was instructive to hear an Mauritanian activist talk about other activists who burned books of Maliki fiqh, because of Mauritanian fiqh scholars complicity and intransigence with regards to the issue of slavery! These Mauritanian activists symbolically enacted their belief that the "classical Islamic tradition" did not have the resources to "do what was necessary" in Mauritania. Whether or not they were correct, it is instructive that there is a deep and divisive debate within the classical Islamic tradition that touches on issues of basic human rights. The packaging of the tradition hides the dimensions of these debates from Hamza Yusuf's audiences.

5. Lastly, a major issue which prevents MMK's point from really getting a hearing is that, by and large, lay people do not see their religion as religious studies scholars see it. Religious studies scholars tend to see religions as historically shifting sets of discourses and practices without an essence that is constantly debated and constantly undergoing change. But everyday people prefer their religion as an ideal that humans need to realize through obedience. It is something to be lived and practiced as a route to perfection. Historicization is seen as a threat to faith, an undermining of metaphysical certitudes. One hears, for example, in conversations among Muslim Americans, "Islam is perfect, but I am not." The attraction of an ideal is very strong in human history and human thought, and the logic of the historian (or even the anti-historical, anti-essentialism of Nietzche or the Tao) is cold comfort to those attracted by this idealism.

Inshallah, I am developing some further thoughts on the idea of tradition, empirical certitude, faith, belief, law, practice and the text, which will elaborate in more detail some things I have been thinking of in relation to the issue MMK raised. I hope to post it soon.
-NLM

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Pambazuka - The downside of the Kony 2012 video

If you live in the United States, you've probably heard about Kony 2012. I am curious to know more about how readers of this blog outside the US respond to the Kony video. I watched a powerful Youtube response from Ugandan journalist Rose Kagumire that raised many important points. I invite readers to watch "Kony 2012" and Rose's response, and then make your own decision.

The video itself is powerfully shot and edited, but its message is incredibly problematic. Kony 2012's message is: If only we (US citizens) could mobilize enough pressure to convince certain powerbrokers, they could take steps to eliminate Kony, and then things in northern Uganda would return to normal. You can google the many critical responses to this "white savior" mentality. Mahmood Mamdani makes an essential point in the following piece: that further militarizing an already over-militarized conflict will not solve the problem.

Pambazuka - The downside of the Kony 2012 video

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Whiteness as a Global Phenomenon: Some Observations

And, yet, a certain word, a glance, a guise, will mirror, never show, reflecting not my gaze, but my uncertain question caught inside a shadow of our shifting eyes.


A man's errors are his portals of discovery.
--James Joyce


Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something... we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

--from The Good Shepherd directed by Robert De Niro

I've had a lot of time over the past few days to think, since I am currently holed up in Mombasa with a dwindling cash supply. I've been thinking a lot about race and racial identity. Even though 'mzungu' calling here seems to have dwindled a bit lately (the kids in the building where I;m living finally know my name), reminders of the ongoing importance of 'whiteskin privilege' are ever present.

Yesterday, I was sitting in the baobab forest on the west side of town, munching on coconut biscuits and litchi juice, when this young man came and sat nearby and struck up a conversation. Turns out he is a new arrival in Mombasa from Kampala, Uganda, recently graduated from highschool and looking to get a job in I.T.
He spoke excitedly of his love for America and California, American television (Prison Break anyone?), and of his ultimate desire to marry an American woman. When I asked why this was so, he replied how much he liked their attitude and their freedom. Apparently though, as I soon clarified, this only applied to American WHITE women, because black women, he had been told, cheated on their men, and if their man found out about it, he would kill you.
Again, it got me thinking about the pervasive attitude I have observed over here of mzunguphilia...I am talking about in casual conversation, as well as the numerous women who have approached me telling me they love white men. Is it money? Yes. Is it self-hatred? This I find to be more complex answer.

It brought me back to a reflection about race and white identity that was published in the Liberator Magazine about "Positive White Identity". That article was my attempt to piece together all the disparate parts of my experience into some coherent philosophy for moving forward and living wholistically in world where the standard for what is right, as much as whites don't want to admit it, is still based on what powerful white men think.

My article was interpreted by some as an unequivocal stance against identifying as white, as if the identity itself was the virus and not the privilege, power, and arrogance that rides shotgun. Yet I was not trying to call whiteness the enemy so that every white would feel guilty when that identifying word was used. I wrote provocatively because I wanted to use the emotions of that word to spark a deeper probing of identity in general for people like me, family members, friends, and others who may have struggled with these questions and issues.

My own probing began in highschool with history, primarily American history, and looking at how the edifice of white supremacy in America was built and sustained from the first European settlement all the way through the Black Power movement. When I moved South for the first time, the ongoing reality of this system and its effects hit home in a powerful way.

Many years later, after a visit to South Africa, I began to understand how the system that whites built in America had been duplicated in other parts of the world where European migrants settled. Reading Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism made me aware of how the intellectual lineage of European thought was grounded in an attempt to universalize the mix of dynamism and fratricidal warfare that characterized intra-European relations (the specific heritage of European development through history) as a pattern for global development. To some extent this became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the effects and after effects of European expansion and colonialization still reverberate through our modern political order.

At the same time that the historical link of whiteness and power was entering my understanding, my consciousness was penetrated by a second, more profound realization at the deepest levels. This was stimulated by going to school in majority black envirornments at Howard and Lincoln. Already radicalized going into these experiences, I was unprepared for how much I actually enjoyed the respect and affirmation I received for being (more often than not) the only white in most every situation. I didn't keep quiet or censor my views, but I did find that I was forced to grapple with viewpoints that were far from the rainbow view of diversity-for-personal-enhancement that I had been spoon fed by my public education.

More than being respected, I found I desired to be totally accepted by blacks. Since I increasingly did not find myself comfortable in the lily-white envirornments of armchair leftists, I gravitated towards black culture, and I saw my move as a cultural, as well as a political stance. If I wasn't going to be white (at least in spirit) then I would try to be black (at least in spirit). I felt I was solving two problems with this move. First, I was confronting my own segregated heritage and the cultural and social divide along racial lines that is absolutely real in America, Obama notwithstanding. Second, I believed I was dealing in an active way with the 'white guilt' that seems to overtake 'liberal' whites who attempt to confront race. (I used to observe despairingly the extent to which these whites let their guilt virtually paralyze their ability to analyze independently in discussions of race; it was as if their logical circuits shut down, and they put themselves down as the de facto oppressor.)

However, my growing adaptation culturally--deepening friendships, serious working relationships, dating, and even the ability to master linguistic cues in Black English--was not without its problems. Some blacks found my 'passing' into black culture less than authentic and actually quite pathetic. Those who disliked me likely did so for one of three reasons (that I either overheard or was told directly) 1) Genuine suspicion--ie, this guy has got to be a spook or 2)Belief that I was basically an interloper snooping where I didn't and couldn't belong. (commonly held by the 'conscious' crowd) or 3) Envy--ie, how could this white guy be so successful at a school for 'us'?

At the same time, I think my immersion raised concern among my family that I had really lost my foundation and didn't know who I was. I am quite sure other whites had even more unkind thoughts: Who the hell is this 'wigger' and what does he think he's doing? But there were many whites, who even if a bit quizzical, admired what I was doing. For my own part , I (uncharitably)found their admiration evidence of their unwillingness (or, more likely, inability) to do what I was doing.

I got so accomplished at being racially ambigous that black women customers at the Silver Spring Kinkos where I worked would frequently ask what race I was or comment how I must just be lightskinned. My personal favorite was, "Are you related to my cousin in Newark? Because you look just like him." This phenomenon even occured internationally. Two years ago, in Tanzania, an elderly man asked me, "Are you mixed with Negro?"

It made me very happy to not be considered white, I must say. At first, I felt like some kind of pioneer, or maybe a new hero, someone like the few whites I idolized--John Brown, Bob Zellner, Heather Booth. I was motivated by the idealistic feeling of a higher calling to do something no one else was willing to or capable of doing. I was that 'special white boy.' I was 'different than the rest.' And maybe I was, indeed am. No one can take the experience I have had from me.
But the inescapable fact, despite my abilities, my openmindedness, my ability to break down cultural barriers, despite the acceptance I have gained, is that I am no closer to being 'non-white'. At the end of the day, I have privilege and power I didn't ask for, benefits I have not earned, simply because of my skin color and my passport.

Indeed, the immersion into majority-black-envirornments actually helped me avoid dealing with the fundamental issue of who I am. In a way, as long as I was the only white, and I was down enough to hang around, I could enjoy myself and not have to think about a more fundamental problem: who the hell is Nate Mathews? That question only popped up when other whites came around, and I was forced to interact with them on some interpersonal level. Maybe that's why I found myself often a little suspicious at other whites and their motives for being where I was.

At the root of a lot of my suspicion, as well as white guilt, as well as the pervasive fear in the American body politic, is a lack of knowledge about who WE truly are? What collective identity do white people (now many generations removed from European descent) have other than living in the most powerful nation on earth? As a colleague put it, if America were to fall, what would 'whites' really have? What cultural foundation do we have to stand on? Where are our roots? Who the hell are we?

Now this is a question I found that African Americans (that is the descendants of those Africans brought to America to be enslaved) had to grapple with historically, and did so on a collective level by drawing on their remembrances of West African culture and tradition and attempting to extend that in an unfamiliar context. However, white Americans, by virtue of their political position, have not had to do this to any great extent. This is because of the relative economic position and illusory security offered by whiteness (in the form of land benefits, better jobs, family wealth, etc). Yet it is something that we must do, if we imagine a future beyond the United States as a people. I am reminded of that immortal quote from James Joyce, "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." I hope I am too modest to claim to be forging the uncreated conscience of my race, but G-d willing, my experience can offer some food for thought on how whites can both look at themselves critically and take action as REAL participants in the struggle for justice, not mere sideline contributors driven by latent guilt or a need for identification with the other. May the 'battles behind my forehead' be something worthwhile to someone, somewhere.

P.S. You know, as close as 6 months ago, I could not have written this post. I was still working so hard to be accepted. But thanks to some great conversations with people like DH, NP, and TN, I have been able to see the importance of admitting to myself certain things I did not want to see for a long time.

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