Events & Calendars A Conversation with Imani Perry

Transcript of Imani Perry in Conversation with Anthony Jack ’07

- Good evening everyone. I want to welcome you to this event about which we are all very excited. This is the first in a series of colloquia in which we have invited distinguished scholars two distinguished scholars for each colloquium to have a conversation with one another about race, racism and democracy in the United States in the general sense, and actually to talk about whatever they wish. Those of you who've attended and I'm delighted that so many of you have, please feel free to put questions in the chat at any point during this colloquium. And we have someone behind the scenes who will collect those and make sure Tony has them for the question and answer period. And thanks to those of you behind the scenes for making this possible. I'm delighted to introduce first Imani Perry. Professor Perry is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies at Princeton University. Her work as so many of you know focuses on the history of black thought, art, music and imagination, highlighting what an enormous contribution and resource that legacy is. She's the Hughes-Rogers professor of African-American studies at Princeton, where she also teaches in the program in law and public affairs, gender and sexuality studies and jazz studies. All of her work and teaching are profoundly interdisciplinary. She's the author of a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning books, including "Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry" "May We Forever Stand" a history of the Black national anthem and her latest book, which is slightly different in style from the others and a gorgeous read, "Breathe: A Letter to My Sons." Her earlier books, "Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation" and "More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States" contend with the intersections of sexism, racism, homophobia, highlighting the ways in which racial inequality and systemic racism persist, despite some formal declarations to the contrary. Imani Perry earned a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University, a JD from Harvard law school and the LLM from Georgetown University law center and got her BA at Yale College in literature and American studies. When it comes to thinking about those titles and achievements, I recommend highly that everyone who hasn't read "Breathe" to see what Imani Perry recommends to her sons about the relationship between prestige and who we are as people beyond those titles. Thank you, Professor Perry, for agreeing to be with us tonight. And our moderator tonight is none other than Amherst's Tony Jack. Professor Anthony Jack is an assistant professor at the Harvard graduate school of education as so many of you know, he's also the Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for advanced study and a faculty fellow at Harvard's Pforzheimer House. Tony is a sociologist whose research has had an extraordinary impact on higher education showing the many ways in which lower income undergraduates, particularly those who enter college from public distressed high schools continue to be underserved once in our colleges, elite and non elite. The impact has been amazing for this point in anyone's academic career. And we're all better for Tony Jack's work. His award-winning scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and his work has been featured in national media many, many times. He is the author of the "The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students." He earned his PhD in sociology from Harvard and his BA from Amherst college. Tony, welcome back. And thank you both for being here.

- Thank you.

- Oh, thank you.

- It's always a pleasure to come home in any format in any kind of way. And Imani, it's such an honor to welcome you to Amherst. It really is. I mean this is like a dream, like this is like, everytime I get to do something like this, I like big smiles all the way around. So, thank you for this.

- Oh, well thank you. That's really wonderful. I hold and I kind of told Biddy this, I hold Amherst in the highest regard. It is an extraordinary institution. So it's always a joy to be in conversation with Amherst folks, unfortunately not in person, but we do what we can virtually. [Laughs]

- But again, thank you, Biddy. I want to thank you and Norm for convening this series and inviting me to be a part of it, let alone to bring me in conversation with the Imani today. I just am, like I said, I'm over the moon because I'm straight fan girling in a very real way, 'cause I had a chance to return to, for this conversation, Imani, your work, and realizing the impact that it had, not only as me as a scholar, me as a person, but also someone who has, who followed in your footsteps a little bit in Cambridge and at Harvard and navigating this space, which is at once a glorious and tremendous honor, but also not the easiest thing to do. Position, propositionality and so I really appreciate this conversation and I want to make sure we have time for the community's questions. I have some that really, three questions that really stuck to me as I was returning to (holds up. Books) and I actually, like when I say I went through these like "Breathe" and the "Vexy Thing," I mean, these are the two books I'm drawing questions from tonight so that we can have a conversation, yes, on race and racism, but also on how it impacts different systems of inequality and power in the United States. And I also have two questions from, one from an Amherst alumn, Will Pruitt, who is a doctoral student PhD candidate here at Harvard University, and Diana Tiburcio who is a junior at Amherst college who worked with me this summer. So I want to make sure that I want to get to their questions as well. 'Cause they were really, I was like, who do I want to help me craft the question? And I was like, I sent over the gchat. I mean, not the gchat, but the WhatsApp. And then I emailed Diana and she was like, you're talking to Imani, like, can I ask a question? I was like, yes. And so I want to make sure I get to those. The first question I want to start with grief because especially in this moment, when we're talking about again race and racism, from statements that we've heard with Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and countless others, that could have been my child. And then others of us who have spoken, who have had positions to speak on it, that could have been me, to knowing as you write of your own children, an experience that was haunting, when you write, "I can not clip your wings as though cowering in respectful tribute to the beauty we have lost. No, I want your wingspans wide to honor the departed ancestral and immediate be. Living defined by terror is it destructive of the spirit?" Those words were haunting and yet beautiful and signified too many moments in America's present and America's past. And I wanted to see if you could use this moment to reflect on that passage of both your words and also the passage of time that had been littered with too many of these moments.

- Right, thank you. And thank you both for your work and for this conversation. And for that question. I take very seriously what it means to live a life not in, not denying the reality of racial terror, but not defined by it. That that seems to me to be the something indispensable to the struggle for liberation. And as such, I have to let me, I'll say this as a comment, I grew very frustrated with all of the conversations on media about the quote unquote "talk" that Black parents have with Black, the talk especially with boys, but really Black children, period. The "talk" to...that was, that is described as a protection against the prospect of police violence. And I grew frustrated with it for several reasons. One because the moral responsibility does not lie with Black children to prevent themselves from being killed or Black people to prevent themselves from experiencing summary injustice in the street, right? The responsibility lies with those who would do the killing or the society that fails. And so I didn't want to talk about the talk because I thought the conversation that we have needs to be about the injustice. And I also did not want to raise children to have a third person consciousness, to see themselves always from the outside in, I wanted them to feel. And I want them to feel from the inside out to have a sense of possibility to have a sense of the truth of their being, irrespective of how the society might see them or treat them. And so to do that requires though some acknowledgement, some letting go like to allow their wingspans to be wide means that you have to live with certain kinds of, it's not just fear, but you have to like, let them do things that you want to hold them close, because they know that the world is a dangerous, terrifying place, right. But I also know that it's a choice that my grandmother made it's a choice that my mother made. It's a choice that all of these people before had to make for the possibilities right along the generations to be actualized. So, that's, I guess that's sort of where that passage was, sort of where I was emotionally and intellectually with that passage. Does that get to what your asking?

- Yeah, I mean head on because we always, people almost assume that it's only one talk that we hear. That is an everyday thing, Depending on what store you go in, you get a different message, depending on what city, are you on it that's it's not a one-time thing. It's an everyday reality. And you learn to not fear the sun, like Icarus, you fear the sky in general, right. And that because the talks weigh on you to the point, you're saying I'm just wanting to stay on the ground. And it makes me think about "Whistling Vivaldi", right? When Claude wrote Whistling Vivaldi, I, my first thought was, I'm not necessarily afraid of individuals who will be able to know that I'm Whistling Vivaldi as compared to something else. In this day and age it's, there's something in the air that I, that you learn to fear...that fear becomes like this ubiquitous thing, like it's ever present. It's not something that I'm trying to decipher. Why should I make someone else feel good by whistling a particular tune when sometimes I'm more afraid of what those people do at the polls than what they do individually. Right, and so thinking about all of that, and, that passage really, really stuck out to me, because it is about the fear of possibility on both the side of privilege and the side of pain. The second question I had, and it flows directly into your point about let's talk about systems and how rooted they are, how race and races are rooted into the very core of the systems. I want to talk about George Washington's teeth. I think you can remember. I'll read what you wrote about it in "Breathe". But it also speaks, I think, to some what, to the state of politics and denial today. In "Breathe" you asked about, like, you talk about the myth of George Washington having wooden teeth and you write that they actually were not wooden teeth to but they were actually real ones. But you say, Did they pull them off cadavers, like entitled grave robbers? Or was it a form of torture? One of the many rituals of slavery. And in this time, right now, when we are still dealing with and grappling with some, and some of us grappling with the experiences of those rituals of slavery that engenders what you call that epigenetic terror, the threat of losing one wholeness in the face of violence, how do we deal in this moment with the willful denial of racism being... racism being intimately connected with capitalism, racism being rooted into some of our most historic institutions without, but then also yet facing executive orders that say you can't use certain words or talk about oppression, especially if it's going to say that a white person is in a position that isn't framed in a glorious light.

- I mean, I think the answer to the question is that we become kind of epistemic freedom fighters, right? Knowledge is actually a site of contestation, right. So one of my least favorite phrases in response to when you tell a story, like, George Washington had black people's teeth in his mouth is well, he was a man of his time. Okay. But so it was John Brown, right. So my response is we just tell the story true, right. We just tell the truth, right. It's not. And the fact is that all nations rely upon these myths. They become part of national identity formation, and we can see the pernicious effect of so many of the myths of this nation. And so I think we have to decide to tell true stories because we know the violence that myths do over and over again. And that doesn't, I think the reason to me that it has become so plain is I have decided that nobody has clean hands, right. And decided and said that, I think that that's what's true. Particularly those of us who are in positions of relative privilege. So when people say some things to me about Princeton, I'd say that's true, right? Like I don't have an aversion to acknowledging. So then I say, but then what is my role, right, as a person who is in this institution, that is part of the inequality of the society. That is an institution that is part implicated in the reproduction of inequality. And this is what is my role to try to upend some of that, what is my role as someone who has a relatively high degree of access, who has people who can write books and those people, what is my role to try to tell the truth in a way that is meaningful for people to imagine a better society and a better world. That is what, so if I feel like if we get away from some of the anxieties about our precious figures and just try to grapple, honestly, with our history, understanding that this is what we have to grapple with, right. We don't have something else. This is what we have. This is what we have inherited that we're in a better place. Now that the latter part of your question about people who like want to erase any reference to race or racism from the history of the nation. I mean, that's, I really do think that that is a meaningful fight. It tells you why scholarship, why study are so important, because it does change the way you understand the world, right? And you can't, and when you are afraid of studying it, when you are afraid of having your core ideas challenged, that should be a cause for alarm from across any perspective, right. That should always be a cause for alarm. If they're meaningful enough ideas, you should be open to their contestation. You can have a debate over this, over their substance. So I mean, it is what it is. I also, at the same time, and I said this in talking to some students earlier, I am of the school of thought, that Toni Cade Bambara school of thought, that the job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible in the sense that I want to convince people of the sweetness and beauty of a truly humane society and world. That's part of what I think the work is about for me, it's central, right? So it is in a sense, like, I want to present a vision of what we could be, that feels potentially much more hopeful than what is now. So.

- Yeah, I wonder, like, did we even need an executive order when there have been studies that looked at how history is taught across different States, where even in a 300 page textbooks, slavery has given a half a page. And as if it was, literally just about farming or just about something, it was like, never about oppression, never about anything. And it was just very interesting when you talk about those myths, right. We talk about the way in which we try to create gods of men in many ways, when we think about the American founding that we get lost at it. And so the question is, how can we, 'cause we see the backlash. I mean, that executive order was as part of the response to 1619, right? How do you begin to, how do we really truly begin to have that kind of conversation?

- Yeah, I mean, I think it's happening all the time. We have to understand that we will lose frequently in the battles, right? This is a long-term conversation, like one of the projects, and it's not been announced yet, so I'm probably not supposed to say it, but I'm going to say it. But one of my next projects is actually a series of kind of histories for middle grade students that are an attempt to respond to those gaps that are not, and this is really important to me. They, there is really important work that is being done about anti-racism, but there is not enough work about Black life. And to understand why anti-racism is so important one must understand the truth of Black life in history. That you can't, it's almost like if you don't have a full picture of a people, it is nearly impossible to understand how important it is to transform the society, right? Like it's the beauty of human beings, their complexity, irrespective of their identity, like what lies behind the stereotypes has to be shared for us to even get to the point of wanting to change the society, or to envision it. So, I think it's in the work. I mean, I think, I don't think the problem is like, the work has been done. It's always been done. It's ongoing, it frequently gets marginalized or diminished. We've had this period recently where there's kind of this uptick of recognition that this is important that will recede, right. This moment will not be sustained forever, but the work will continue. And so it's like, you sort of, you do the work as the attention ebbs and flows. And you do the work even when folks don't really want to publish it or hear it, or like there's no, for example, my son took African American history last year at a phenomenal high school. There was no textbook. There's no in print textbook for high school African-American history. How could that be, right? That's because there's, it's not for a dearth of scholars, right. That's a decision that has to be made at the level of the publishing industry. That's a demand though that has to be made, right? That's something we have to talk about. We're starting to talk about those things in a way that's becoming more visible, but it's going to be a long journey.

- This is my last question. Before I get to the one submitted by Will Pruitt and Diana Tiburcio is, and it also plays in touch again with the founding myths. And we all talk about the founding fathers and I love your work on gender and feminism because it forces us to you talk about liberation feminists, which you invite us to conceive of feminism, not primarily as a set of positions or doctrines, but as a critical practice of understanding and working against gender forms of domination and I guess the way gender becomes a tool of domination and exploitation. And in a lot of the conversation on race, on capitalism, women are often left out. Gender is often left out of that conversation, leaving our understanding of domination and power and privilege weakened and our fatigue for any kind of system that we've put in place in response to it incomplete. And I was very interested in how you think, especially when you think about quote unquote, "the market," how do we separate, how we begin, especially in this, we had comments about like how we don't have supply and demand type of system. Is there a way to separate feminism from the market and the way that you envisioned it to again, invite us to that conversation of understanding more critical practice of gender norms and the like and how do we build out that kind of agenda to be at, not to be inclusive, because that means almost as if we have something and then we're bringing something in, but rather to actually build it in from the beginning and let it serve as a foundation for critical understanding of society.

- Thank you, that is a really powerful question because part of what I describe liberation feminism as is I understand feminism, for me, as most and I talk about all of these previous generations of feminist thinkers that shaped my work really profoundly, particularly feminist of the '70s and '80s, many of whom are disregarded for how complex they were thinking about gendered forms of domination, right. And lots of axes, right? Like, and I think it's like almost everything. It, official stories, oftentimes sweep whole communities of thought under the rug. And then people think that they're coming up with something totally new even though these issues have been brought before. I think of feminism as a reading practice, right. And a read...by that I mean is we look at the world and we analyze who's being excluded from this conversation, who is being, who is the disfavored amongst the disfavored. How do structures of domination layer on top of each other, Patricia Hill Collins wrote beautifully about matrices of domination, right? So you could be on one axis relatively privileged and on another oppressed, or you could be implicated in the oppression of others even as an oppressed person. And so for me the vision is to get to right relation, right. To get to ethical relations with one another. And to do so you have to be willing to read through the layers of domination, which often requires difficult reckoning with oneself I think, and also requires pushing against like two dimensional descriptions of gendering. So one of the things that I write about is sort of global markets like the circulation of various goods, whether they're handbags or artificial, like, or counterfeit handbags or human hair that is harvested from temples in India, and then processed in Asia and then sold to Black women in the United States with the sort of, with packaging that is about sort of fantasies of colonial domination. Like there are these cycles, these market cycles. And if you read through them all, and I very clear...nobody in these cycles, except for those who are raking in lots of dough are subject of criticism to me. But I want to understand how in all of these sites, there are forms of gender domination about beauty, about labor, that are happening, right. And that we have to learn to read beyond our particular experience at being gendered to see the structures that are layered on top of each other. And I think that that's important just to get to the position of taking a position on various issues. Like, so when you do the one decides, we decide, what do I think about this or that I want to, I want us to be in the habit of thinking, well, how does this affect all different kinds of parties? Like it's part of, for me, I just give one more example. So when I teach sexual harassment law, the history of it. I teach sort of the official history, but then I also ask this, ask my students, why do you think it is all of these major cases that started the discussion around sexual harassment law all came from Black women? Usually working class Black woman, right. And that has to do with layers of domination who is seen as having a recourse. And then we move from that to talking about the experience of harassment, of undocumented women who really have no recourse, because the second you report it, then you become vulnerable. Like, so you can talk about here's what is deemed criminal behavior, but here is actually how it operates and who is not protected by the category, by virtue of other categorizations. And so that's sort of what I'm trying to get to, like how I think about markets in the midst and identities in the midst of what we say is sort of a cat... a form of gender domination, but it impacts people distinctly.

- Yeah, no, I mean, when I was at Amherst, I actually was a women's and gender studies major and it opened my... I'll never forget when reading [Indistinct] and in the responses, right. By doing gender and all the responses that came happened in [indistinct] Patricio calls his response to, and it is very interesting to think about these different systems. The next two questions put us, in a forward-thinking way, as we've been moving, especially as it deals with politics and the Academy today. And so Will Pruitt, who writes on race politics and the boundaries of America imaginings, as how should, especially in this moment, how should progressives and leftists maintain pressure on the political system, and a Biden Harris administration specifically, to pursue policies that are central to expanding the conversation about different forms of inequality that we have been ignoring, or at least not paying attention to in the same way for awhile.

- So I have a somewhat probably unpopular perspective on this, in this era which is, I think we have to de-center presidential politics from left disorganizing. By that I mean, there are, you can, you take positions on particular policy matters, but the way in which presidential elections take up so much space to the detriment of local questions, where there is often much more ability to bring pressure and transform governance models, and also the way in which then you become sort of caught in a relationship of being beholden to. Like, so you ask for something and then you say, well, this is the consequence. And then it happens or it doesn't happen. And then, so it becomes a sort of overwhelming frame. So I often, my model is often thinking about how Snick functioned in Mississippi, but throughout the South. And that like people would try, and it also happened within organizing in Birmingham, right. People would say, "hey, can you like chill out 'cause this, we're in the midst of a presidential campaign." And they were like, they're going to do what they're going to do, right. We're involved in our organizing. And I do think there's a certain degree of that that has to happen such that one, people organizers aren't so moved about by presidential elections. Not that they're not important. You vote and then that's the thing. And then you go back to the day to day work that you do, like in various moments, I've been asked to endorse presidential candidates. I don't do that because of my politics, but also because I'm a scholar and I'm not a representative of politicians. Like I think that understandably this has become a huge subject of concern, obviously with the current administration in particular. But I think we have to, you put, you take positions, but then you have to think about the structure of the society as a whole and how the transformation doesn't really come from presidents by and large. It just doesn't. It's more likely to come through courts or through Congress than it is through pres... or than it is through presidents, frankly.

- Yeah, and this is my last question for this. So for those in the audience, please submit your questions so that we can continue this conversation. And this was from Diana Tiburcio who was again, a junior at the college and who worked as my RA this summer, she asked, How do you think the digital age has impacted and influenced social justice efforts? And where do you see it going in the next 10 years?

- Oh, such a good question. I sort of feel like she should answer the question more than I should given that she's Generation Z, but I will say it's a double-edged sword. So on the one hand, I think that there's a lot about the digital landscape and in particular, the kind of the simulacra, the way in which we're cyborgs and that this sort of screen space becomes extensions of ourselves, of our self, but also extensions of ourselves that can very easily be detached from sort of on the ground organizing or actual sort of deep interaction, even by virtue of the structure. Like, so people say something and then somebody else criticizes. And then the position is a defensive one almost automatically. It's not a discussion almost ever, right. Not a space where you can engage in a transformation because that's a representation of yourself. Like that is you and it circulates beyond your control. So you say something and you might regret it. And then it may have a thousand views or 10,000 people who've seen it. And now you're in a position of feeling vulnerable. And then you dig in. And so there's not a lot of, so there's certain kinds of transformations that are very hard to affect on digital platforms because of this, I think. But it also has allowed people to network in ways, especially young people who are in the most vulnerable positions, they can find community with other people with like interests and concerns. And I think that is extraordinary. So I think the question is how do we attach the possibility of the digital landscape with the necessity of analog connection in order to really do deep transformation? The other piece that's hard is these are public spaces are owned by corporations that do manage our conversations. They manage what we see, right. They, it is just true. They are, they, there is a lot of, it took so long for so many of these platforms to control a lot of the most disgusting homophobic, transphobic, racist, misogynistic stuff, because they make money off of that because lots of people like to get on there because they can say those things. It feels cathartic. So now they, some of them are starting to do it. They, it was not, they're not real public spaces and they are driven by profit. That's what they're supposed to be. That's what supposed to be their logic 'cause that, and so we have to also be, have a not, we have to have them like, okay, wait, I can use the space, but we can't be too attached to them because it is not an objective neutral space. It's not a public sphere really. So yeah, we have to have a kind of skepticism, even if we use it a lot. And I'm someone who's on social media, like multiple social media platforms. But so I don't mean like get off of them, but I just mean, understand what they are.

- Yeah. I clapped today because I got to follow back. So it made my day even better. So I just want to put it out there. [Anthony and Imani laughing] But I want to turn to some questions from the audience. There are two at the top of my list. One is inspired, is connected to the question that, and your response to Will's point about centering and centering of presidents in movements, and then the other is about the K-12 curriculum more generally, I'll start with the politics one. And then, so we can branch out to the K-12 education talk. [indistinct] asks a question regarding presidential influence and power on social change. What would be your perspective on, for example, FDR, social security, LBJ, Medicare, and thinking, and how does that, I think the question is how does that then fit in with the centering or not centering of presidents with respect to leftist or progressive agendas at the time and once they're in office.

- Okay, so that, it's a complicated question to answer because they're all of these variables right at each moment. So one is, yes there's exercise of presidential power, but it also required Congress and there's also movement. And the social movement is functioning in two ways, right? So one, the social movement is bringing pressure to bear on the executive and the congressional branch, but it's also challenging them. There's a feat... so for example, you can't, you, it's hard to read the New Deal without also thinking about the red scare. So when there is this proposal, this is the sort of the beginnings of the seeds of the cold war. There's a lot of leftist movements in the United States. They are making propositions about a different way that society ought to be organized. And there is a concern, from the mainstream of American politics about, yeah, how do we respond to the suffering of Americans, but also not wanting it to destabilize the structure that exists. So you get things in the New Deal, like, the majority like, so for example, my grandmother who was a domestic, she cleaned folks' houses would not have received social security but for the fact that the last family who she worked for, the husband of the family got her a job at the house at the hospital. And that's because domestic laborers were excluded from the social security program in order to appease southerners, southern white politicians at the time. So, and same thing with agricultural laborers. People who worked like, so the jobs that most Black people did were excluded. And so when you tap, so in substance, that history becomes a perfect example. On the one hand movements can bring pressure, but also they are not the same thing as movements because they often sustain aspects of the status quo that are unjust. So that couldn't be like getting the New Deal couldn't be the end of the story for Black protests, even though that is precisely what sort of ushered in the shift of Black people to begin the process of moving away from the Republican party.

- Yeah, I mean, and we've seen this over and over again, like, progressive policies with some kind of with backwards tenants of it, even when you think about the GI bill, think about FHA loans, things that have created the middle-class specifically the white male middle class, because we weren't able to get access to it. And who was by virtue of race or birth or gender or were prohibited from accessing it. So it's very interesting to see the K-12 question came from a number of people. And I'll try to put them together. A question about for those of us who are not in the Academy, how do we contribute to the demand for inclusive publishing of texts? Then also a couple of that, another question asked by Joe Richardson, does an acceptance by boards of ed matter when each elected parent is a stakeholder? And so thinking about the ways in which people have voted on and/or agreed with school systems and the relationship to the system and the publishing of the books they use.

- Yeah, so, one, elected school boards matter. I think that they're important, especially in racially diverse cities. Two, I think the question of sort of how people who are not active, not in academia or not educators, play a role, has a lot to do with the way that we sort of function as I talk about this in "Vexy" sort of we curate what comes into view and it's, one side of the, one of the little saving graces of the pandemic is that all kinds of incredible work has come into view and we can access sort of thinkers and ideas. So for example, Jason Reynolds, who has so many events on Instagram, who writes young adult literature, but you can see a whole and who co-wrote the youth, the young adult version of "Stamped" Ibram Kendi's book, but you can see like both the backlash against him, but also a whole sort of different world of ideas that can be opened up to children through his work. So, sharing that work, like being, engaging it, giving it to young people in your life, reading it yourself as an adult. My mother, who is an education scholar, has talked a lot and I think this is really important, is getting the right balance between advocacy and self activity also, so there is advocacy from the that you engage in for the institutions, the school boards, the schools, the government, and then there's also the prospect of self activity. Communities can do a lot to provide alternative narratives sources for the community. So Kim Parker, who is an, you may know her, is an educator in Boston, has reading clubs for Black boys. And that, you know, and they get, oftentimes books are donated. Like there are ways to build communities of knowledge that don't require the mediation of the institution. It's hard to change a school system, but you can do a lot with the community. And if community is more and more empowered, they can collectively change a school system much more readily than we can as individuals.

- Actually, it's, this is a question from David Moore, and I think it speaks to where you just left off is, can we talk more concretely about the work beyond writing books and teaching elite students? I can tell you the question one or two ways. I was thinking more about the role of an engaged scholar is the way I initially read the question, like, what is like, how do we go beyond either our books or our teaching or rather, or it can be taken in another way, the public intellectual, or I don't know how, I'm a little bit lost about how to read the question, but the question was saying, can you talk more completely about your work beyond writing books and teaching elite students?

- Okay, well, I will begin by saying this. I am not an organizer and I have never deemed myself an organizer and I would not because I value it far too much to attribute what I do when I, whether it's school groups in Philadelphia or my mentees to the same kind of work, right. Part of what my writing is doing is providing resources for organizers. People who, but you can't, and I'll say it this way, you cannot identify a major social transformation in the history of this nation that did not depend centrally on intellectual work. And the only reason we don't understand that is because the histories are told poorly. So for me, like, sort of, for example, in my book, May We Forever Stand A History of the Black National Anthem, part of the reason that was important for me to write is, people tell this story like there are these people who just have this emotional surge to sort of become free. Not that there are generations of people building bodies of knowledge for Black school children. Not that there are Black intellectuals who are directly involved in crafting curriculum, they may not be in the classroom, but their crafting curriculum, not the Black newspapers covered international news. Not that they became vehicles for the publication of sort of every major Black writer that you can think of in the first half of the 20th century published in newspapers and magazines, not just books. So we think, we tend to talk and think as the intellectual work is somehow outside, that it is always central to struggle. You can't find an example where what, whether you're talking about the Black Panther party, which is an intensely intellectual organization, or you're talking about Snick, we're talking about the NAACP that all have required intellectual work. So the premise of the question as though that is somehow outside the struggle, I don't think is, and I understand why, because there's, these questions come up all the time because we're the way we're taught is though these are different. Now that said, I will say this to be a Black public intellectual now, or to be a respected sort of Black academic in this era is, does not require any form of accountability to Black communities even if the person is speaking on issues related to race and that engenders some deep skepticism, oftentimes from Black communities, because people say, well, how are you speaking for us and not accountable to us. And that's a fair critique. And I think it's a fair critique at the level of particularly the level of punditry. Like what does it mean to speak and you don't have any organic relationship. So I don't, so I could rehearse a series of relationships, but I feel like in some ways that that's also disingenuous because I do work at an extremely elite university and I live a life that is very distinct in terms of socioeconomic status from the majority of Black folks in this country. Although, you miss two paychecks. I mean, given the way being middle-class works for Black people, that that kind of begins to de-stabilize. But I will say that I do think that intellectual work matters. I think organizing work matters. I think the meaningful part is when you bring those pieces together. Substance.

- I really appreciate that because I was thinking about the work of Jarvis Givens, who is my colleague at the Ed School and his book, "Fugitive Pedagogy" which is coming out next semester with HUP [indistinct]. [indistinct] in the art of Black teaching. These were intentional ways of spreading knowledge, even while being policed by school boards and white teachers. And that you have to teach just one 10th of the curriculum, but you, again, the fugitive pedagogy, were willing to go above and beyond, even at the risk of your own life and how knowledge is itself, a very political enterprise. And I appreciate your comments about the state of public intellectualism because in many ways, Black Studies, African Studies, Latinx Studies, Asian Studies, have always been more public facing in their scholarship and in their orientation than other quote unquote traditional departments. And so there's always that level of engagement, but you're right there's like now a push where you don't have to even have any kind of credential or stamp, or you have a platform by virtual of just being on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And as a young scholar myself, I, people always ask me like, oh, like, how did you become a public intellectual? I was like, I'm very clear. I'm an academic who engages the public. I will always air on the side of commenting only on things that are like one degree of separation from my wheelhouse, like the things that fit within the study, what I studied as a sociologist, because I think it becomes too easy to just comment on everything. And then when news agencies find their coherent, eloquent speaking, Black person, you will forever be the person who they call just to almost like be a parent at times. And then you can easily lose... like it becomes, things become off the rail a little bit. And so I appreciate the discussion about being in this position, because even though, yeah, I have a whole bunch of titles that say Amherst and Harvard and degrees and stuff like that, I will forever be that first-gen, broke person who came to Amherst with like $10. That's just whatever my understanding and how we also don't, we view titles as one thing, but don't actually then begin to investigate the social trajectory of the person. Not saying that gives them any more or less credence, but the way in which we just began to present or depict people based upon what you see, you lose that. And then I love you bringing in the fact that white wealth and black wealth is totally different, especially in the context of the pandemic. When some of us are more likely taking care of families as compared to who lost jobs, who didn't who works in, who are more often be frontline workers and who's not, when we think about Latino, LatinX families who are, and native families, Black families who are disproportionately affected by something that's hurting us all. Like these are very, very real things that the Academy does not protect you, is not, there's no, there's like, there's no perfect shield. I think we have, and so I really appreciate that. And I think we have time for one, maybe two questions that we can be quick with it. I love this one. And especially given that we have a lot of students on the call today, thinking of generations of activism, how are today's younger activists different from the past?

- It's so hard to answer that question in the present. I mean that the valuation will be in the hindsight I think. What I have noticed is that there are many young activists who are in line with what I think the very best of the traditions of organizing are. And by that, I mean, so when I think about, and I've referenced Snick all the time, because for me that's the standard. But when I think about an organization that internally is contending with questions around the politics of gender, are contending with questions around sexuality are contending with questions around sort of internationalism and capitalism, right? One of the things that this young people who say, I don't, I refuse to wait on, to set these issues aside while I'm dealing with this particular thing. I think that is going to be the hallmark of this generation. That such a large group of young organizers are refusing to say, okay, well, we'll deal with that later. No, we're going to deal with it all right now. And so that all of us can be recognized in this moment, I think is very powerful. I don't know, I can't say though, that that's like across the board because there's a wide range. Like there always is. But that's the young people who are in my world. I really admire that about them.

- I want to end the night with a question from Marlin Cave and one, because it invites us to connect past, present and future and how I'm reading the question and it reads, are there Black intellectuals the past that have, or continue to impact change today?

- Oh yeah, so many.

- Yeah, that's all [Laughs] in with that kind of in that forever imprint and how we move forward, who comes to mind?

- Yeah, I mean, there's so many people and I think that's why we return to them, whether it's, DeBois or Baldwin or Lorraine Hansberry or Ida B. Wells, I mean, we there is such a font. Ella Baker. We keep, we go back because they still have things to speak to us in the moment. I just want to briefly go back to something that you said, Tony, because this was so important and part of why your work is so important. That the public intellectual moniker, like means more than one thing. For some people, it means television media, for some people, it means being in service to the public in multiple ways, some of which might bring you to those sorts of public venues, but most of which is not visible. And I think that that's a really important distinction because punditry is a lot about that piece of it is just one dimension and what you described and what you described also is shaped by your relationship. If you have a relationship to a wide array of communities, it affects the work that you do that is public facing, but may not be publicly visible. And I think, so thank you for doing that work. And also for adding that dimension to the conversation.

- I appreciate that. And before we turn it back to Biddy, I just want to say, thank you for this conversation, for enriching a community that I, to this day, still call home. And I really, really, really appreciated this conversation in allowing both students and alumni's voices to be part of it, even in this format that we find ourselves, it still reminds me of the best days of Amherst. And so I really appreciate it, the time, and the wide ranging conversation and the ability to, again, really dig deep into these works and relate them to present day parallels and possibilities. And so I just want to say thank you.

- Thank you. Such a joy.

- I want to thank both of you. Thank you so much for spending time with us investing the time and giving us so much to think about with your questions and responses. I want to thank everybody who attended everyone who worked on the event, especially Norm Jones who's the co-organizer with me of these colloquia. There will be several starting in January. Well really, sorry, in February, with the new semester and going through the spring and we'll send ample word of the speakers and the times and dates. Let's just end by thanking Tony Jack and Imani Perry again and again. And I hope you all stay well and I'll see you at the next colloquium if not before. Goodnight.