Film Review: "Origin" by Ava Duvernay

 I watched Ava Duvernay's "Origin" on a plane. My thoughts would no doubt be better having read the source material book for the movie, but here is my take.

This is a movie in search of a central theme. Its ambition is to tell three intertwined stories, two of them historical and one contemporary. However the two historical stories are very undertold; the main focus is author Isabel Wilkerson's journey to write the bestselling book Caste. It is definitely an unconventional choice to tell a story about the making of the book; I love that Duvernay chose to tell Wilkerson's story. But the short shrift to the other stories is unfortunate since it means that earlier attempts to theorize caste in a US South context are not substantially addressed; though Allison and Elizabeth Davis are portrayed, their intellectual contributions to theorizing caste are not incorporated into the theoretical framework of the film.

The movie is beautifully shot by Duvernay, the lead actor playing Wilkerson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor brings emotional depth to her role as a writer dealing with the loss of her closest loved ones and embarking on a global exploration of oppression. In spite of the meandering of the narrative, the movie tells an effective story that holds viewers' attention throughout. As a meditation on loss, it is moving in its way. As a film about race and caste, it is deeply flawed in its historical presentation, its comparative framework, and the relentless didacticism of its mistaken conclusions.

The film's main issue seems to be the source material's main issue: it asserts that US Jim Crow racism, the Nazi Holocaust, and caste in India are "all connected" because they are all "caste." However, these connections are not really properly theorized, nor are the significance of these connections to practical action raised except in some general love for each other we all ought to have. nstead, caste is a poetic metaphor for the writer to affirm a radical Enlightenment view of human equality. In place of materialist theorization we are told that caste is omnipresent but invisible, which raises the question of how Wilkerson knows what is and is not caste.

There are attempts to theorize race and caste, but they are very muddled. Caste is defined in an amorphous way, as the phenomenon of placing one group above another in a hierarchy. This doesn't do adequate justice to the distinction within 'caste' between occupational castes (which do not necessarily imply hierarchy) and the spiritual hierarchy of the 'varna' system in India, from which the whole notion of untouchability flows.

Moreover, race seems quite adequate to understanding social hierarchy and social ranking in the US, but Wilkerson's character continually disagrees with her interlocutors who assert this. At one point, a character responds to Wilkerson's presentation of her comparative research, "It's all racism." To which Wilkerson's character responds, "No, it is caste...Why is the same thing happening in India, they're all brown? How is is racist if they're all the same race?" The movie attempts to drive this point home by arguing that in Germany both oppressor and oppressed were of the same race, therefore racism can't explain it.

This is a very contradictory even silly thing to assert if one has read the scholarship on the Holocaust or social dynamics in India. The reality is that both race and caste are categories of practice that have been wrenched into serving as categories of academic analysis, and are thus equally problematic for doing global comparisons.

Wilkerson's assertion on the centrality of caste seems arbitrary. The movie then misses the opportunity to tell viewers why 'caste' is a more explanatory comparative term; we are expected to trust Wilkerson, without being given compelling reasons to adopt the new term. There is an attempt to do this--a discussion of various comparative pillars--on which more shortly.

The film asserts that "the Nazi blueprint for the extermination of millions of people was directly patterned after America's segregation and enslavement of black people", that "America taught the Nazis", and that although the outcomes were different, the function of caste in America and Germany is the same. There is some evidence that Nazis studied US racial dynamics and laws, but the assertion that they needed a pattern to borrow from the US to exterminate the Jews is an exaggeration in the service of the film's American exceptionalism (of the negative kind).

Wilkerson's character then goes to India, where she meets real life Dalit intellectual Suraj Yengde, playing himself. This part bore out the US-centrism of the movie, since Yengde's prominence as an intellectual is almost wholly related to his proximity to US higher education institutions. There is some exploration of the life of the Dalit intellectual and activisit B.R. Ambedkar which is very interesting and welcome. However, the movie misses an obvious contradiction of caste-as-universal-framework in discussing Ambedkar's education: he went to school with upper-caste children in a way that would have never occurred in the Jim Crow South.

Duvernay has Wilkerson's character explore several pillars of comparison, but these pillars reveal the dissimilarity of Jim Crow segregation, Nazi Germany, and caste in India. The first pillar, asserts Wilkerson's character, is control over marriage and mating in the form of endogamy. To me this is a bizarre way to begin. Notwithstanding prohibitions on intermarriage, none of these systems originate primarily to control marriage and mating strategies. Moreover endogamy as an informal institution is fairly widespread in all human communities; not all endogamy is casteist. Finally, while endogamy might apply to Jim Crow segregation, it certainly does not apply to US slavery, which can only be characterized as an institution for protecting endogamy if one ignores the history of the sexual dalliances of the master class with their slaves.

The second pillar is terror, but again one is hard-pressed to understand why race isn't just as applicable a term here, given the centrality of violence to racial hierarchy. The third pillar is purity and pollution. However, this is contradictory because endogamy as a strategy is often based in purity and pollution, making pillar one essentially a sub-pillar of pillar three.

Wilkerson's character asserts that the connective tissue making all three situations (US, Germany, India) caste is 'deference', which again seems to ignore the central role deference plays in racial and class schema.

Indeed, the movie has almost nothing to say about class, which was a central theme in the work of earlier African American scholars who used caste as a category of analysis, like the aforementioned Davis and Oliver C. Cox. Wilkerson is presented regularly hobnobbing with elites who praise her intellect and encourage her to continue writing.

In conclusion, though the aesthetics and emotional tone of the movie are impressive, its substance is not. The concept of caste is rendered definitionally incoherent by its use to connect the three cases. We don't really learn anything about the actual history of US, Germany, and India. Complexity is sacrificed to the simplicity of a single explanatory variable to create an emotionally satisfying framework. And Wilkerson is presented as creating a comparative theory of caste whole-cloth, with short shrift given to previous scholars who tested (and often rejected!) the comparison Wilkerson builds her book around.

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Would a return to "indigenous religions" be a progressive move within US society?

 There are a number of people in the US who, discontented with their childhood religious indoctrination as well as the seeming soulless and anti-human character of our technocratic society, imagine if we only could remove Christianity conditioning of our consciousness, we could get back to some primordial pro-human reality in which indigenous spiritual tradition would provide a basis for new human flourishing, removing things like shame, guilt, and other “foreign” ideas.

Notably, a methodology for this recovery is rarely proposed or specified, so it typically takes a very idiosyncratic form and is often draped in a naive nostalgia, uninformed by history.

A scientific way to study the viability of such assertions would be to look at a contemporary society where rejection of Christianity and Islam in favor of some other religion are actually in ascendancy today and study the practical significance of such views. 

India is an ideal case study: the current government’s legitimacy rests on an assertive Hinduism, which is contrasted with foreign ideologies of Christianity and Islam. Elements within government and civil society assert that these foreign ideologies have had Indians in a mental chokehold for millennia and that only a return to a primordial idea of religious coexistence under Hinduism can revitalise society. Essentially the government is advocating a return to what Christians and Muslims would understand as neo-paganism, only this time with modern characteristics.

I really wish more critics of Christianity in the west, especially those in the wellness industry, would pay much closer attention to the practical consequences of the realization of the idea they cherish in Indian society. If they did, I think they would see there that an assertive and victorious non-monotheism has produced as dangerous a fundamentalist reaction as any monotheistic faith, complete with lynching, widespread religious persecution of minorities, and a thorough-going purity culture as virulent as anything produced in Christianity and Islam. One cannot really avoid the conclusion that the assertion and attempted implementation of Hinduism as the indigenous tradition of India has resulted in many of the worst dynamics present in Christian fundamentalism, and even the resurgence of several anti-human dynamics that Christianity as a belief system had attempted to eliminate or reform.

Unfortunately global dynamics militate against westerners developing a more critical understanding. The dynamic of muscular Hinduism in Indian society is obscured by the rebranding of Hinduism in the US as a tolerant New Age belief system, flattering the sensibilities of the many post-Christians and other lost souls who migrate to the wellness industry in search of meaning. Our New Age wellness advisors have fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. But they are not the only ones misled. Put in terms familiar to decolonial scholars, modern Hinduism exemplifies the "coloniality of power", but absent any of the ideological geneaologies decolonial scholars impute to coloniality's origins. A similar geneaology of power's coloniality could be revealed in many to most non-western religions, suggesting in turn that decolonial scholars have fundamentally misread the historical situation, and that coloniality is not a historically specific situation but a perennial human dynamic inherent to our attempts to build social groups and create collective meaning. It might also be said to be an artifact of the development of consciousness in our species, inherent in our evolutionary descent from our nearest non-human ancestors.  This is something our decolonial scholars could profitably examine, if they were able to break from the romantic mental shackles imposed by the idea of 1492 and Descartes "cogito ergo sum" as epistemological ruptures producing the ideology of coloniality.

My personal belief is that most such projects of ideological “return”, not only Hinduism, are doomed to produce these types of dystopian outcomes. I believe the way is not to return to a past that only exists as an imaginary construct, but to look boldly forward and define the customs and values worth preserving from our various traditions and try to live by them. Tolerance will play a huge role here. However I will die on the hill that there is nothing inherently tolerant or utopian about pre-monotheistic traditions; their appeal to ex-Christians in the west says more about the psycho-dynamics of romanticism in our secular US society than it does about the practical consequences of reanimating the ethics of those belief systems. I think the decolonial turn is the academic version of these psycho-dynamics. We need a much more sophisticated approach.

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Review of Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel

 Azad Essa has written a book critical for understanding recent right wing developments in India and Israel. Essa's book draws on, and is enriched by, reporting on the ground from multiple contexts, going back over the last decade. Hostile Homelands reviews nearly nine decades of history that begins with both countries under British rule and ends with the ascendance of right wing, religiously conservative, and xenophobic political parties to governance in both countries. Along the way Essa provides necessary historical context on the evolution of India-Israel relations: the way Indian leadership resolved its statements on Palestine with increasing interest in diplomatic rapprochement with Israel, how New Delhi used the war on terror as justification for labeling all internal dissenters to its militarizing policy in Kashmir as terrorists, how the election of Modi emboldened the Indian right wing, and how Modi's administration has extended its influence into diaspora. Essa explores the evolution of Hindutva, and its tangle of organizations as well as their diaspora arms, thus linking the issue of Israeli and India relations to their increasing influence on U.S. 'soft power'.

The book's ambition is to weave together a comparative narrative of accelerating relations with a particular emphasis on military and weapon sales between the two nations, alongside chapters exploring Hindutva and Zionism as ideologies of exclusionary ethnic nationalism. The stakes of the ambition to compare state relations and ideology shines through very clearly in a chapter on Kashmir, which compares its struggle not only to Palestine, but also to the Chinese state crackdown in Xinjiang on the Uighur population, as well as Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. The war on terror had the negative effect of causing the misrepresentation of nationalist demands made by Muslims as a form of Islamic extremism. 

At a moment when Biden is under heavy pressure from younger Democratic leaning voters to change U.S. policy towards Israel, particularly the disproportionate amount of military aid given towards its war in Gaza, Essa shows the historical background of Israeli and Indian militarization. These questions are particularly acute in both democracies, reflecting the fragility of the democratic idea of consensus in an international order still ruled by the de facto law of power and force.

Both India and the US will hold elections this year, and if Israel held elections, it is likely Netanyahu's government would fall, a not inconsiderable factor in the conduct of the war. The possibility of a second Trump term looms, as both India and Israel have been increasingly emboldened to conduct war near and far--Israel through an illegal bombing campaign, and India through targeted assassination of an Indian citizen in Canada. India has become the most populous nation in the world (In this way, Israel is very dissimilar to India), recently sent an expedition to the moon, and recently recorded fantastic levels of economic growth.  It has nuclear weapons (as does Israel). Its government increasingly understands itself as a global superpower. 

Another fascinating dimensions of the book is the way it portrays the 'roads not taken' in international statehood. On the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, India opposed the partition of the region between Arab and Jewish national interests and advocated a federal solution. Assuming for a moment that this road had been taken in the 1940s, would the resulting state still be anxiously dominated by a right wing Jewish voting bloc? Could there have been an alliance between progressive parties in both camps that could have aided the integration of newcomers without leading to violent displacement?

I will leave it to those more familiar with Indian politics than I to comment on the practical questions raised by the book on that topic. For me, the book raised the crucial issue of what a federal solution means currently to the issue in Palestine and Israel. This is an urgent issue for global stability, security, and peace, as well as being relevant first to the Palestinians (who have never had a state inclusive of them in their modern history) as well as to the existential identity of the Israeli state.

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Why read Zanzibar Was A Country?

Why should you as an English language reader from the United States (as a large portion of my friend circle is) choose to read a long(-ish) non-fiction book about two small islands off the coast of East Africa?

In truth, this book was written primarily for Zanzibaris, wherever they may find themselves. In particular, it is for a diasporic Zanzibari community--East African-born Swahili-speakers in Oman, with whom I did oral histories during a Fulbright fellowship in 2012-2013.

Second, the book is written for East African Muslims more generally. My hope is it might assist them in thinking about their historic relations with Indian Ocean states, religious and cultural pluralism, and comparative approaches to integration and dialogue within the civic arenas of those countries.

Third, historians may be interested in the book as a new historical synthesis of modern Zanzibar history, written emphasizing the interdependence of material and ideological factors and focusing specifically on the transnational, diasporic, and extraterritorial dimensions of Zanzibar nationality.

So what about the average reader then? Well, in essence, my approach has been to weave real life stories of escape, covert travel, border crossings, detainment, and dilemmas of separation, into the narrative. These stories are extremely compelling in their own right, though I have had to anonymize a number of them. I treat the subjective dimensions of experience of my interviewees as evidence for several interwoven theses about historical change in the littoral societies of the western Indian Ocean:

1. There was a notable economic divergence between East Africa and the Gulf between 1950 and 1970 which drastically shifted patterns of migration between the two regions.

2. The migrations out of Zanzibar after the 1964 revolution are connected to this divergence and reflect its growing practical effects: the movement of littoral communities, especially those of Arab descent, to the Gulf.

3. Zanzibar nationalism has had an extraterritorial dimension in the modern era, which is also connected to the deeper history of Oman in East Africa.

https://www.ucpress.edu/.../978052.../zanzibar-was-a-country

#zanzibar

#oman

#eastafrica

#indianocean

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Zanzibar Was a Country (UC Press, 2024)

 My book comes out with University of California Press April 9, 2024.

"Zanzibar Was a Country explores the transregional impact of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 through the historical memory of its exiles. Thousands of former citizens of Zanzibar and their offspring live in Oman and are a significant contemporary example of an Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in diaspora. These “Zanzibaris” (as they are often known in Oman) speak Swahili, sustain community originally formed in Africa, and continue to remember Zanzibar’s history as an independent country. Drawing on their life histories, their historiography of Zanzibar, and the archival traces of their migrations, Nathaniel Mathews demonstrates how these exiles were important to nation‑building and economic development in Oman."

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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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on the fatuous 'taboo' of 'Arab slavery': addressing anti-black racism without mutual ethnic recrimination

Recently I had the chance to listen to a very interesting podcast in which Bamba Ndiaye interviewed Fallou Ngom about various aspects of his research. At the end of the conversation the two delved into a controversial and wide-ranging conversation that occurred in 2020 on the Research Africa about anti-black racism in the Arab world. It is evident that the conversation stuck with Ngom, and there is no doubting he is very passionate about this issue, and sensitive to attempts to sidetrack it. Since I was one of those responding to his initial foray, and subsequently wrote a whole piece on the topic, I thought I would respond to Ngom’s characterization of the issues and of the conversation and to expand on why I wrote a piece asking people not to use the terminology of “Arab-Islamic slavery”.

First of all, Ngom and I agree that anti-black racism in the Arab world is an undeniable phenomenon. I have observed it during my research, and I know it to exist. Some US Arab immigrants also perpetuate this racism in their interactions with US Blacks. But Ngom still labors under the impression that those seeking to reframe the conversation are the same as those engaging in apologetics for Arab slavery. I reject that conflation as misguided. There are serious objections to Ngom’s framing, that go well beyond a pedantic debate over terminology or ancillary issues of hurt feelings, but rather strike to the core of how to effectively address a complex issue. Though Ngom might disagree with my conclusions, I hope this will contribute to his stated goal of having the issue addressed more openly.

I will argue that Ngom’s framework, as discussed in his conversation with Ndiaye, will be ineffective in accomplishing what he hopes, because his discourse is largely preaching to a choir of Anglophone western academics interested in inciting discourse around Arab racism. It is there he is guaranteed a sympathetic reading of his project, as a result of the peculiar sensitivity of the US to issues of race, and interest in globalizing the issue. The most likely outcome of Ngom’s interventions, given his own positionality, is that more 'white liberals' and Arabs based in the US will become aware of anti-Arab racism towards Africans. Given the already regnant association between Arabs and slavery among many USians, both right and left, this is hardly a salutary development, and will not contribute meaningfully to Arab reckonings with racism.

First, it is vital to note that in Ngom's opinion, attempts to provide nuance and historical context are unwelcome distractions from the main issue of moral complicity in racism which he characterizes as endemic to the Arab world as a whole. Ngom believes that the nuances of motivation serve as a form of apologetics for racism. At one point he even accuses Arabs who reject blanket explanations for Arab racism as themselves racist: "if they are Arabs they are perpetrators because if not they would denounce it." This is a logical fallacy, and antithetical to a prophetic approach. The accusation of collective complicity itself partakes in the logic of racial thinking that Ngom wishes to fight against. The majority of Arabs throughout history have been non-slaveowners. By making the charge about ethnicity instead of slaveowning, Ngom has shifted the terrain of engagement and committed a tactical error with consequences for addressing actually existing slavery.

Ngom constructs Arabs and the Arab world as a monolith in which racism is not specific to one country, but exists among all members of the imagined community due to the legacy of slavery. For Ngom, Libya and its slave markets are archetypes of a racism that can be traced back to this same history of slavery. Few specifics are offered, nor are the issues in Libya fleshed out by Ngom. It is enough, we are told, to break a supposed “taboo” on discussing the issue. There are many people opposed to, and opposing racism in the Arab world, including many Afro-Arabs, who know that world well enough to know that one must be strategic if one is serious about the goals of addressing internalized racism among Arabic speakers. The truth is the vast majority of Arabs are poor and face similar issues to the ‘African’ world related to education, finding a job, and making a living. In fact, many of them have been similarly victimized by human trafficking in places like Libya. If one wants to prevent situations like that which happened in Libya, then one must place one’s focus on strengthening state capacity in Africa. The extremely poor conditions of the average person are what motivate risky and often illegal journeys across state borders, placing them into positions of extreme vulnerability that lead to their immoral trafficking.

Ngom’s perspective will also be ineffective in addressing the issue among any but the true believers because it is low information and engages in conflating issues that ought effectively to be treated as distinct. In the podcast conversation there is a vague mention of fiqh texts, a discussion of a rude Arab who greeted Ngom with his left hand, and a mention of slave markets in Libya, as if these are all symptoms of the same underlying psychic attitudes. But the issues in Libya are separate issues from addressing racism on an interpersonal level among Arabs. This latter project must proceed from a sense of it being in Arab self interest to address racism. What interest has the average poor Arab in an abstract moral conversation by an academic located in a prestigious western institution, that condemns them out of the gate, as an ethno-linguistic group, and assigns to them a collective attitude? Defensiveness is entirely understandable and is not necessarily a symptom of complicity. Any effective anti-racism strategy must take it into account.

Even though the main advocates of ‘Arab slavery’ as a construct are pan-Africanist in orientation, I think the idea of 'Arab slavery' or 'Arab-Islamic slavery' is a very dangerous one for those with pan-Africanist sensibilities to adopt. These rhetorical framings continue to serve as resources for fomenting moralizing rhetoric because they are highly seductive. The attempt to draw a neat line around slavery and ethnic discrimination using the metaphor of an unchanging hostility between two ‘races’ or ‘ethnicities’, African and Arab, will rebound against those using it. It will do so because it relies on metaphors of racecraft that ought to have been left in the dustbin of history. The notion of a free-floating and universal antagonism pitting Arabs against Africans will inevitably be turned against Africans once it is pointed out (and it is and will be pointed out) that for thousands of years “Black” Africans sold other “Black” Africans into slavery. The logic of collective guilt is a double-edged sword. This is also 'taboo' to discuss, depending on who you are talking to. The Wolof rulers were as complicit as any Arab, for perpetuating slave raiding in Senegal. The Asante raided communities now part of the same nation of modern Ghana. Amhara state-builders raided and enslaved Oromos, who also raided and slaved communities in Kenya. Mijikenda engaged in the slave trade even though they were also victimized by coastal traders. Does that mean we need to have a global dialogue about each ethnicity’s racism rooted in a past of some members of them engaging in slaving? Can we really distinguish slaving that proceeds from pragmatic ends from that which proceeds from hatred and racism? Or ought we to junk these projection of ethnic distinctions as an anachronistic exercise in racecraft? Victimhood confers moral privilege in American academic morality but history shows us there are no perfect victims/victors. Ethnicity as shortcut for collective moral complicity is worse than useless for problem solving the issue where it matters, in the realms of law and culture. The point is not that Arabs have a collectively racist mindset, but that anti-black racism is immoral, un-Islamic, and unethical.

None of this ought to be construed to mean the 'Arab world' is perfect, or that there are no issues between North Africa and the rest of the African countries, or that there is some generic third world liberation front that requires silence on these issues. I reject the idea that one should stay quiet for these reasons. But I also reject Ngom’s discourse because it engages in the kind of rhetoric that will have unsalutary reciprocal consequences. The idea that reluctance to engage in discourse about this issue is motivated by a belief that Islam and Muslims are perfect, and that to criticize them is Islamophobia, is fatuous at best, and bad-faith at worst. There are many ways to fight anti-black racism that don’t involve such sweeping generalizations.

I wrote my application for the Ph.D. on Arab racial attitudes in East Africa. I was convinced at the time, that there was a form of racism among Arabs Muslims towards Africans that was unaddressed and indeed taboo. I have had occasion to revise those views upon studying the issue in depth, both for East and West Africa. Inter-state and intra-state relations are more relevant contexts for discussing this issue than racist fiqh texts or the more distant issue of Arabs slave-raiding in Africa. The language of Arab slavery was a seductive pretext for violent retaliation against Arabs in 1964 as an ethnic group in Zanzibar, even those who were not involved in politics. Anti-Arab racism in East Africa partook of the same reciprocal spirals of dehumanization as anti-black racism, as anti-Tutsti racism, and as anti-semitism. These spirals had nasty consequences for ethnic minorities, both Black and Arab, in both Mauritania and Senegal in 1989.

I do not think my objections can be dismissed as mere academic 'liberal' concerns. If anything, I have sought to go beyond contemporary anti-racism frameworks common among white liberals, and to argue they are inappropriate to other contexts. If Ngom and others interested in this issue would like to reach the Arab street, they will have to talk in the language of that street, just as Ahmadu Bamba wrote in local languages when he wanted to reach his audience. Anything other than that isn't about breaking 'taboos'. It practically functions as moral grandstanding before a western audience eager to see their views about Arab perfidy confirmed.

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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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