By a Committed Group
of Black Cultural and Thought Workers | with thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Thursday, July 9, 2015.
We write today as a group of over 100 black writers, readers, artists, thinkers
committed to justice and intellectual inquiry. We have taken time away from our
scholarship, research, teaching, activism, and other life-affirming practices
to assist in smothering the fire that threatens to engulf the entire academic
industry. We are wholly aware that the American surveillance and discipline of
black bodies and expression extends to cyber space.
This recognition has been reinforced
by recent circumstances involving our colleague, Zandria Robinson. We write to
thank Zandria for stating firmly and thoughtfully positing that blackness is a
critical creative politico-cultural formation, and for pushing us to question
the particular ways black southern lives have mattered in the face of brutal
physical and discursive violence.
“This is a moment to have a
discussion about black southern identity,” Zandria recently wrote, “and not
white southern identity, which is remarkably unchanged just like the whiteness
upon which it is and has always been and will always be based. This is a moment
to center blackness in our discussions of America, the South, freedom, and the
future, not to talk about what black people should do, but to learn from what
black people have been and are doing in this centuries-long battle against
whiteness.”
Some of us teach Zandria Robinson’s
work. Others of us actively read her work. She is the now and future of
intellectual freedom fighting, for her work is rooted in ritual, black southern
communal love and real intersectionality. It is in the spirit of Zandria’s community
based intellectual work that we band together in the knowledge that in coming
for Zandria, particular forces of white heteropatriarchal supremacy and
anti-blackness are coming for all of us. We know that radical surveillance and
disciplining are a constituent element of American terror. Like many of our
ancestors, and most recently like Bree Newsome, like Zandria Robinson, we will
not be afraid to step through fear into justice.
Social media, and particularly
personal Facebook and twitter pages, are now recognized as but one of the
current battle grounds where whiteness as power labors to adversely impact
black people’s reputation, finances, access to healthy choice and influence.
Not unlike the case of Palestinian intellectual-activist Steven Salaita, the
overseers who patrol the public-private thoughts of academics will find,
isolate, and publicly interpret snippets of people’s frustrations, thoughts,
and theories in an effort to condemn an entire body of work, a literature, a
field, a community. This has deep and penetrating consequences for individual
thinkers, public fields of inquiry, the academic industry, and, indeed, the
very American ideal of freedom of expression and dissent.
While we welcome conversations about
the range of expression teachers can and should offer on their pages, we will
not do so in a vacuum. We cannot talk about the responsibilities of teachers
and professors until we first scrutinize and hold accountable the policies,
practices, and projects of the neoliberal university and its appendages in
publishing, media, and government.
We say to any person, publication,
organization, institution trying to violently undermine the work of loving,
curious geniuses like Zandria Robinson, we see you. We know your labors
intimately, as we write and live it everyday. We will not accept these
aggressions in silence; we instead will rally our collective energies of
exposure and critique, coalition and mobilization, in order to protect our
minds and bodies and work toward the ideals that animate our collective visions
for justice.
With Love and Justice,
A Committed Group of Black Cultural
and Thought Workers