On modern tactics of popular protest since the 1960s

 Andre 3000 had it right, "The game changes everyday so obsolete is the fist and marches. Speeches only reaches those who already know about it..."

Popular protest tactics in the US are still stuck in a 1960s hangover and suffering from a deficit of Alinsky-style strategic tactical thinking. Despite the diminishing returns of street actions in terms of real political gains, there is resistance to investigating the effectiveness of actions like blocking traffic, chanting slogans, pulling down statues, carrying signs, etc and instead pivoting to "well, at least we're doing something!" In part this is symptomatic of a broader multi-generational shift in the US, a wholesale erosion of civic institutions and the growth of hyper-individualism. There are fewer and fewer places where new tactics and strategies of civil disobedience might be born out of everyday community reflection. Instead protest has become something primarily confessional in nature, something one does to make oneself feel less complicit in injustice as an individual.

The question is what to do in this dismal interregnum and my answer would be to take the long view and try to preserve and renew existing bulwarks of community while building new spaces for people of different generations and backgrounds to come together in real life.

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short note on the 'coloniality of power' thesis

The scholar Anibal Quijano defined "coloniality of power" as a new way of organizing reality produced by European colonial expansion from the late 1400s.

 I understand the impulse behind it, it is a potent metaphor, and it does offer a few useful insights, but I differ from the decolonial theorists in that I do not consider 'coloniality of power' to have much coherence as a concept, much less to be the sin qua non of 'modernity'. The way it is phrased and used, it is as if violent coercion was invented in 1492, as if before that time, humans were acting and being in ways that eschewed civilizing projects, violent conquest, and permanent antagonism. You have to ignore large swaths of earlier history in order to sustain this idealistic view. Moreover it would seem to also commit one to the view that this mode of power has not fundamentally changed since that time, and that we are still living in it. I find that view a-historical. 

In the end, I find the idea of coloniality of power extremely Eurocentric, as if somehow Europe invented a new way to be powerful in the colonial Americas that was distinct from the absolute mess humans had been making of that endeavor since the dawn of complex societies.

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the diminishing returns of liberal anti-racism

 The concept of anti-racism has a much more limited utility than might be suggested by the place it holds today in US liberal discourse. These days it has become something of a moral status game for elites and a lucrative capital accumulation lane for some. I have become increasingly convinced of the inefficacy of many-to-most current approaches. 

One of the major contradictions of anti-racism pedagogy is that on the one hand it is posited that x individual is racist by virtue of their membership in a “dominant” group that “actively benefits” from racism, and on the other hand, the trainings often make asks of that same person to bear the burden of “actively dismantling” the system. If we step back we can see that not only is the term “dismantle” being used in a vague metaphorical manner, but there is a huge contradiction therein: people who actually are oppressors do not dismantle things they actively benefit from. Asking an individual to dismantle that which the group benefits from is thus an impossible (not to mention impossibly vague) “ask”, unless specific policies and laws are actually at stake. Not only that but no “dominated” group ever got free trying to convince the “sympathetic” oppressors to voluntarily dismantle oppression by changing themselves or altering the language they use. The civil rights movement was primarily about enforcing laws in a rights-based society, not moral suasion. Frederick Douglass had it right: Power concedes nothing without a demand. 

Anti-racism is effective in a limited set of circumstances: when it can hold a mirror to an individual to show how the “active benefit” they imagine they receive from racism is really an illusion, how it has damaged them spiritually, and how it is in their own self interest to change. Beyond that it is not really worth it (for trainers or participants) to engage in long secular struggle sessions with people to get them to admit their “hidden” racism, or to “perfect” the language they use to discuss these things. Most of that energy ought to be placed into 1) enforcing and protecting the civil rights laws made since the 1950s (which have been and are being eroded by right wing power within the judicial system) and 2) building real economic and political power within groups whose primary obstacle to success remains lack of power. 

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Miscellaneous thoughts on history, objectivity, activism, and useable pasts

 I thought I'd offer a few thoughts about history and the historical profession from the vantage point of my own (limited) experience. Maybe it will be beneficial in clarifying what is at stake in the current US debates about "presentism" in history.

Coming from a grassroots activist before I entered a History Ph.D. program, I have been steeped in leftist and activist versions of history as "useable past". The relevant political question was always, "what is to be done?"

Gradually as I went through graduate school, I became interested in holding that question in abeyance, so as to ask another question: "what happened/what is happening?" Doing so meant 'unlearning' or complicating some common activist shibboleths.

I came to appreciate the notion of objectivity as incredibly relevant, urgent and necessary to this work. I came to the gradual conviction that characterizations of objectivity as an outdated idea in service to the status quo, err mightily and consequentially. In fact, I concluded the opposite: that embrace of objectivity's irrelevance leads to the gradual hollowing out of an ability to say much of anything of substance. I came to this conviction through a period of soul-searching and encounter with post-modernism, which at the time I was in graduate school, was being treated by many graduate students in diverse disciplines as a kind of academic activism, the path to liberation from the tyranny of reason.

In short, I have become more and more convinced of the value of objectivity, problematic as it may be, for appreciating the strangeness of the past. We are still in the infancy of a comprehensive understanding the evolution and development of ourselves as a human species and civilization; enormous realms of human activity in the past, stretching over hundreds of thousands of years, continue to remain opaque to us in the present. History's relevance goes well beyond present political concerns.

Now what I've observed of the discipline is that a significant number of my senior colleagues came through opposite routes, privileging methodological mastery and academic professionalism all along. For them, I gather, politicizing history and questioning objectivity can feel like a fresh and necessary break from what may have become a stale 'academic' pursuit. The idea that the study of history can and ought to reflect presentist concerns, is liberating for them. While I respect the efforts of colleagues to combat the hide-bound conservatism of the academy, and remain fully committed to the idea of reading history to inform one's activism, I am starting to embrace the reality that my unique past experiences have led me to very different conclusions about the relationship between the academy and activism.

For one, from what I can see, a good deal of those I've observed pushing this direction, are taking their cues from a professional class of media-anointed activists and personalities, rather than the 'grassroots' as such. In my opinion, well-meaning efforts to push the historical discipline to embrace as axiomatic a form of "usable past" activism, has and will continue to contribute to undermining the broader societal relevance of historical thought, rather than contributing to its revival. There are more than a few people I've met over the years under the impression that by criticizing more conservative interpreters in the discipline they are combatting actual Nazis. This lack of perspective is a direct consequence of the lack of contact they have with the grassroots they claim to be producing a usable past for.

Useable pasts are necessary (and unavoidable in politics), but in my opinion historians ought to beware of making their production central to the discipline. In doing so, they undermine the very thing that makes the discipline unique. For me, at this juncture, a historical study conducted with methodological rigor and a commitment to objectivity, is something thousands of times more valuable, enduring, and interesting to read, than a study written to resonate with contemporary orthodoxies, often by those who fatuously claim to have transcended or outgrown the notion of objectivity.

And this brings me to my last notion. A certain dynamic ideological tension is necessary and good for the discipline and for the academy at large. I prefer to inhabit a university where the ideological landscape actually reflects the full and splendid ideological anarchy of the grassroots, not an ideologically purified sanctum. I have no truck for scholars who are serial abusers and do actual material harm. But the problem with mid-career historians embracing activism to go with the times, is that most of that energy is (naturally) turned inward, on others in the discipline who express IDEAS or OPINIONS deemed problematic or even harmful. These sort of efforts alienate me, as I find them highly myopic and often cloyingly self-righteous. In short, while I remain on the left, I find the push towards liberal ideological conformity within the discipline (reflected in the belief that bad ideas are equivalent to harm) incredibly dull and reflective of the alienation of historians from the grassroots. Some of my most interesting presentations have been to an audience of people who sharpened my thinking through vigorous disagreement. This sort of low-level 'conflict' sharpens faculties, increases acuity, and improves my thinking. In my experience, academic aversion to this sort of conflict is also reflective of kind of an alienation from the necessary life experience of encountering frank unvarnished disagreement. I'm grateful for my time as a grassroots activist because of what it taught me about the importance of this kind of contained conflict for a healthy civic life. It is my conviction that such disagreement is normal and necessary to human flourishing, and that it helps, not hurts, the 'left' and the project of studying the past from a 'left' perspective. Demands that historians apologize for the expression of ideas, and the apology for "offensive" ideas, are both symptoms of a more general malaise of bourgeois alienation from the grassroots.

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secular forms of Christian perfectionism within academia

I can vividly remember in the cult I was raised in, moments where we were made to listen to Christian apologetics--'proving' the inerrancy of the gospel, 'proving' how evolution wasn't real, or how Christian courtship was the only way to have a happy marriage. The function of these sessions, no matter how much it was asserted that this was so, was not to genuinely explore evidence to arrive at an unbiased conclusion, nor to encourage a genuine diversity of thought, but to find the pathway through to the predetermined 'correct' idea. In this way, otherwise outlandish and illogical ideas were able to appear to well-intentioned and perfectly intelligent rational people as having a strong patina of plausibility. When the factor of subtle communal pressure was added to this, it meant that anyone who wanted to remain in community would not challenge the orthodoxy. This meant that what was really at stake epistemologically and methodologically was obscured by gnosticism, in which God's will on earth was presumed instantiated by the group's leaders. To ask uncomfortable questions about groupthink was the same as questioning God's will.

There are massive differences between a small cult and the secular academy, but some of the more extreme progressive academic discourse resembles nothing so much as the gnostic theology of a cult. Like a cult, the goal is not independent thought but to find the way to the 'correct' idea, stated in the 'correct' language, that broadcasts that you belong to the 'right' people. There is not an independent method to arrive at truth, because truth is (like it was in the cult) purely a function of where you stand in relation to who is in power.

Now there is nothing wrong with forming a group around certain ideas; every group's foundations are to some extent a matter of social conformity rather than independent moral reasoning. But this tendency in academia concerns me because of the gap between what these groups imagine the stakes of their ideas are, and the actual state of the university within US society today. They remind me of warriors who have lost the map of the terrain of battle, and have become deluded that their real and ultimate enemies are within their academic disciplines. As neo-liberalism and austerity carve our vocation as humanities scholars into bits, and as the right ramps up the culture wars against the university, some of them imagine that it would be a good thing for certain departments or disciplines to be destroyed in the name of progress towards a 'revolution' deemed to be held back only by a cabal of 'status quo' scholars who lack sufficient faith in this alleged progress.

The end result of this secular form of Christian perfectionism seems nearly the same on the left as the conservative Christian cult I grew up in: a proportionally tiny group who imagine that the walls of the academy are the world itself, and that they are at the center of the site of a tremendous battle purifying the evils on the way to remaking the world. Like the cult I grew up in, this type of thinking appeals to the alienated and disaffected among the intellectuals because it is full of hubris that is made to appear morally justified. But this tendency is limiting. Such groups are inherently weak, easily divided by ideological infighting over small issues and thus easily picked off and overwhelmed by ideological opponents who really understand power. Not understanding power except in theoretical terms, this academic 'super-left' (to borrow Ali Mazrui's phrase) remain on the margins of it, and this place itself comes to seem like a form of exceptional virtue, as well as a form of evidence that there is a conspiracy against the truth they possess.

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The cave at Hira and the importance of place to mystical experience

I've long been fascinated by the earliest "revelation" received by Muhammad, which he interpreted as being from the angel Gabriel. I believe Muhammad's experience in the cave with the Angel Gabriel was real. While I accept that Muhammad is the only valid source for what happened to himself, I am also convinced that the orthodox interpretation of the experience is only one of a range of possible interpretations one could have given to it. For instance, if Buddha Gautama was in that cave, I do not think he would have spoken of the Angel Gabriel, for the Angel Gabriel would have been culturally alien to his worldview.

When I step back from Muhammad's interpretation and think about the sacred space of Hira, the impression I'm left with is the fundamental importance of that cave as a 'gate' to another reality, where there is always the potential for humans to have an experience of, an experience that lies beyond the sensory world of common sense experience. All revelation and mystical experience in human history, if it is not the specious invention of a complete charlatan (a possibility!), is made possible by the intersection between these spaces and the personalities of certain sensitive individuals.

In studying the life of Muhammad, I've come to understand that it is only natural for one who has such an experience to interpret it through the lens of their own linguistic and cultural frame of reference. And I also hold out that it is always possible for the one experiencing this to misinterpret its meaning, since even the greatest of humanity are potentially unreliable guides to an experience that by design overwhelms one's senses and sense of normalcy. These interpretations in language are almost always a partial understanding of phenomena that remain fundamentally mysterious. But I am convinced there are other places on this earth very similar to Hira cave. This is actually one reason I can think of why the recovery of indigenous epistemologies is very important work, not only politically, but spiritually.

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Lamya al-Mugheiry and the global worlds of the Swahili

One of the fascinating minutiae of the global Swahili-speaking Omani diaspora is the late great Lamya al-Mugheiry. Born in Mombasa, Kenya and raised in Oman, Cairo and the UK, according to Wikipedia, she ran away from home at age 16 to pursue a musical career in New York city. A brilliant vocalist with a five octave range able to hit the 'whistle register', she sang vocals on Duran Duran's "Come Undone" during their Unplugged tour, worked with Soul II Soul, and released a highly underrated solo album, "Lamya". She passed away suddenly of a heart attack in Oman in her mid-forties [thanks to Sa'ad for the correction]. Someone ought to write her posthumous musical biography. Because otherwise I'm gonna do it, once this first book is done.

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Between CRT & me

 If I may, I'd like to share some brief reflections on the endurance of racism in US society, and the absolute need to teach critical histories of that racism, from the perspective of a white male American, born in the midwest, who now teaches history in an Africana Studies department. Perhaps these limited reflections will offer some insight into parents who wish to understand the meaning of the calls to "ban" the teaching of critical race theory.

I was raised in an evangelical Christian cult. Through the good graces of some earthly mentors, I was delivered from the stultifying anti-intellectual foolishness of that group, through an opportunity to work for Habitat for Humanity in Farrell-Sherard, MS, two small towns near the levee in Coahoma County, MS. What I learned about American racism there, forever changed the course of my life. The images I saw and experiences I had in Mississippi brought me to the ineluctable conclusion that racism was an inextricable part of US history and an enduring pattern in US society, and that I had to find a way to address the conditions that helped spawn it, to play my small part in a human drama of struggle against the immoral forces of racial domination and supremacy that pre-dated me by centuries.

I thought these grandiose thoughts with all the moral passion of the eighteen-years-young man I was. I made up my mind to apprentice myself to and learn from, as many elders from the black freedom movement as I could find. At the time, New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church gave me a new reference orientation on Christianity. I learned about grassroots organizing from my supervisor Dorothy Jenkin's many lessons, while meeting many elders from the Mississippi wing of the movement (such as my Delta Service Corps supervisor, Euvester Simpson). Among and through these elders, I met committed whites of an earlier generation who thought as I did.

But in spite of these noble "accomplices" like Bob Zellner, Heather Booth and others, it was hard to ignore one significant and depressing dynamic that dwarfed their important work: most of the earlier generations of US whites were laughably, criminally ignorant of black history and black 'forms of life' in a way unlike the knowledge blacks had of whites. A great many American whites, I observed as a young man, seemed to have difficulty openly and honestly communicating with blacks without layers of guilt, condescension, or contempt. They often mistook pity for blacks as compassion. Some were only capable of treating black people as individuals if blacks conformed to their rigid expectations.

These observations, born from my sociological scrutiny of the awkward habits of interracial socializing in the US, fired a passion in me, to try to develop forms of speaking and communicating across these gaps, and to help more of my US 'tribe' become conscious of how the ideologies of anti-black racism, in addition to their other human costs, have socially damaged some white Americans to a shocking degree.

This brings me to critical race theory. When I see US politicians today ranting and raving against CRT, I cannot help but think about where they grew up, who they grew up with. Many were socialized into all white communities and never developed the necessary tools to deal with the cultural pluralism of their own society. Many powerful leaders in US history have chosen to remain behind this 'veil', a studied posture of innocence about racism which often conceals a basic attitude of domination. Many of their much less powerful white constituents have become proud of this ignorance, wielding it as form of identity politics and taking refuge in anxious patriotism to shield themselves from dealing with the corrosive effects of US racism on their own psyche. When I think of the relevance of CRT, I think of efforts over the past two centuries to change this dynamic in the US. As I sit here over 20 years later, I think of Derrick Bell's words, "If I could get that message [what racism has done to US whites] across, you could carry me away."

We can debate the effectiveness of anti-racism initiatives, observe that it has been co-opted by liberals, and criticize those who use it as an entrepreneurial venture. Racial reductionism and 'racecraft' (belief in race as a hidden ontology) are indeed as rife as ever on both sides of the US divide. But critical race theory didn't 'cause' that divide, nor does critical race theory artificially keep open a wound that otherwise would have healed, as many of its critics imply. Rather the critics, along with a great many white Americans, would simply prefer to believe the wound doesn't exist anymore, or that it can be closed with well-intentioned gestures of friendship. A more thorough recipe for spiritual rot would be hard to find than this particular brand of "know-nothing-ism."

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Webinar Presentation: Slavery and Anti-Black Racism in the Modern Indian Ocean

A short and very basic introduction to how slavery and racism interrelate in the making of the modern world, particularly the societies of the Indian Ocean. This webinar was originally given to a virtual audience of students at Christ University in Bangalore.

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Arab-Islamic Slavery: A Problematic Term for A Complex Reality

Here's a link to a short essay I wrote for Research Africa on the conceptual and historical problems with the term 'Arab-Islamic slavery'.

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