One last question, but you've already dipped into this. What I want to ask really quickly is just as someone who is considered a critical and radical scholar, that I've only known you to be, what do you perceive as being some of the solutions to our plethora of racialized issues in this country and beyond? You've already gotten into some of that, of course, education. Oh, absolutely. I would say I like it so much when Malcolm X says of all of the areas of study, it is history that best rewards our research. For me, having a strong historical foundation is really important. If, in fact, Shawn, how long are we going to sit around and bemoan the fact that the American public education system teaches us little or nothing about Latinx folk, Native American and indigenous folk, Asian American folk, certainly African American folk. How long are we going to say that? At some point, we have to roll up our sleeves and get about the business of teaching ourselves. This is why I love Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Why? Because they are great symbols of self-education to me. Absolutely. We can't sit around and depend on the people in power to educate. What they're going to do is really indoctrinate. They're not going to educate you. See, education's going to make you think freely and critically about that. I don't know if they really want us thinking critically about a lot of these things that are going on in this society. Again, they might mentally manipulate people or these things. But for me, part of the solution, I think that the ancestors have already given some of those solutions if I could be honest with you. When I think about the Abolitionist Movement and all of the African-Americans involved in the Abolitionist Movement, we have to fight back. We have to combat our oppression. We have to disrupt structural racism, institutional racism. Even during the period of enslavement, we was already doing that. I've already invoked Harriet Tubman. I've already invoked Frederick Douglass. We have models. Sometimes we are only looking to models everywhere else, and we don't look within our own culture. That's really important, though. I'm not saying that we can't get models from everywhere else, from other places. Great. I'm all open. I'm in ethnic studies. You don't have to question me. I'm already open to multicultural, multiracial alliances and everything like that. I'm hip to it. I'm committed to it. Have been for so long, all my adult life. I'm really into that. But the reality of the matter is having African-American models resonates in a different way, having a Black model resonates in a different way because we see so many other people do so many other great things, we rarely get an opportunity to see, wow, who's an African-American, Sean, who may have done something similar to what it is that you want to do? That preceded you. Even asking that question is a radical act. That's a radical act right there, even being able to ask that question. Well, what are some of the African-American models I may have? Having said that, I think that that is part of the solution, being historically rooted and culturally grounded. I think that that is part of the solution. Having said that, we started out with the Abolitionist Movement. Then you go to the Black Women's Club Movement. The fact that the first major civil rights movement in this country was Black feminists inspired. It was African-American women who rose up first and got involved in a national political agenda to say, well, actually, even though we have the Emancipation Proclamation, we now been through reconstruction. But we still not getting treated like human beings and certainly not like American citizens. Absolutely. It was the Black Women's Club, there's a lot of models, whether we turned Ida B. Wells, or Anna Julia Cooper, or Mary Church Terrell, or Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. There are a lot of models out there. Then from the Black Women's Club Movement, the New Negro Movement. Wow. The artistic arm of the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance. Most people know more about the Harlem Renaissance than they do know about that civil rights-inspired movement of the Black Women's Club Movement and the New Negro Movement. That's how we start the 20th century. On that note, struggling. But if you don't know anything about it, then you don't know, wow, there's some. I'm not the first person to think these thoughts or want to combat this oppression or these interlocking systems of oppression. Then we go from Black Women's Club Movement, New Negro Movement, again artistic arm called the Harlem Renaissance. Fast forward, Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black women's Liberation Movement. You can't just say women's lib, why? Because there were a lot of people, they were feminists-racists. Absolutely. See, they was feminists, but there was also racist. There was also marginalizing of many non-white women, many women of color during the women's liberation movement. It's very important to acknowledge Black women's contributions to the Women's Liberation Movement. Hint, in African American studies, we have this thing called the Black Women's Liberation Movement. It's a brimming, beautiful, provocative, powerful area that we can all, Shawn, I'm saying this especially to the men and boys, we can all learn a great deal from. Then, John, what about the Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement of the 1960s and '70s? You had a lot of Black folk. Marsha P. Johnson, anybody? Absolutely. Talk to me. What about flow of candidate? Talk to me. I'm just saying, Audrey Lawd, anyone? Wait, James Baldwin anybody? I could do this all day long. I ain't trying to stay here all day. Again, these are models. We have been coming up with the solutions, we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Then, let me say, we talk about the combination of the Black Power Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement and what they called, at that time, the Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, the Combahee River Collective, and their assertion of what they called in 1977, identity politics. You have identity politics in the 70s, by the late 1980s, Kimberle Crenshaw is going to come with intersectionality. I'm talking about solutions now. As a social scientist, if we identify a problem, you have a responsibility to identify a solution, or don't call yourself a scientist. See, if you got a problem, Du Bois, WEB Du Bois. Shawn, he spent his whole life, he identified problems, but he also offered up solutions, and he did it so long, sometimes, he would have multiple solutions to the same problem. If you live long enough, you'll begin to disagree with your earlier self, say, "I'm old enough, now, to say some of the stuff I wrote. You see, earlier, I disagreed with that, and now I want to practice a self clarification. Let me get clear with myself, so I can be clear with those folks that I want to share some of this knowledge with." But identity politics, Combahee River Collective, Kimberle Crenshaw, intersectionality, 1989, you got the Critical Race Theory Movement or the Critical Race Studies Movement. You've got a lot of different things going on, leading up to this thing called the Black Lives Matter Movement, something near and dear to my own heart, but I think it's very powerful to point out that, for many of us, BLM is part of the solution. But let's get clear, not what you're seeing on Fox News, and not what you're seeing on many of the mainstream TV shows. If I went to somebody right now, and they say that they disagree with BLM, I often ask them, "Okay. Well, what are the core principles of the movement?" They can't articulate those core principles, they can't identify them, because what they have mostly received, about the movement, is a bunch of misinformation. Again, when you try to get clear, well, what is the movement really about? It's about more than angry young people shouting black lives matter and trying to get politicians to say black lives matter. The movement is so much more than that, and Shawn, it goes well beyond police brutality. Absolutely. Right. It goes beyond police brutality. We're also talking about environmental justice for black folk, we're talking about pay equity. We're talking about immigrants rights. Sometimes, when people say immigrants, they act like there's not a lot of black immigrants in the United States of America, y'all need to talk to me. Somebody need to talk to me. We talk about food justice, we certainly talk about gender justice. We know the founders of the movement, all three, black women, if you will, and two of them identified as black, radical, queer, feminist. When we start talking about BLM, we're also talking about gender justice, we're talking about women's rights, we're talking about queer and trans rights. There's a range of it, it's not just racial justice, and police brutality, but I humbly submit that part of the solution is politically in play, right now, as we speak. I think that we have a mechanism, right now, that when the system fails us, we have a way to rise up, and our team will have a platform, a forum, a way to speak our special truth to the world, and even as we say BLM, even as we say black lives matter, we're always already including progressive people from any other group that want to ally, and advocate, with BLM. It's not a biology based. Shawn, say this all the time, you've heard me say this a lot, in the critical race theory class that you took with me, but blackness is not biological. See, it's cultural. Do you have a respect for this culture? In so far as you have a respect and a real relationship with the culture, and let me say this, beyond black popular culture and beyond black popular music, some people start, and stop, with black popular culture and black popular music without understanding the deeper recesses, you can't really understand the music unless you know the history, the culture, and the struggle. Absolutely. To close out, Shawn, it makes me also think about Frantz Fanon, and that famous chapter, The Lived Experience of the Black, in terms of a solution. Fanon wrote that book, Black Skin, White Mask in 1925. He was already saying that, I know that there is a lot of other racial groups, out there, groups that have been racialized, racially colonized, but there's something about blackness and its relationship to whiteness, that they seem to almost hyper-race black folk. Blackness is almost this juxtaposition, if you will, of different positionalities with blackness. This centrality, if you will, of blackness and again, you and I have talked ad nauseum about this whole notion of getting beyond the black-white binary, I am so with that, again, I'm in critical ethnic studies, I'm certainly in solidarity with Native American and indigenous folks, Asian American folk, Latinos folk, at the same time that we open this thing up and make sure that it stays open so that we all can rise up together. It's important that getting beyond the black-white binary, we don't dismiss, erase blackness. Absolutely. Because again, saying that is great, but really what some people really need to be saying is, let's get beyond whiteness, let's transcend whiteness, because that's the real issue is white supremacy you see. Again, I think it's really important though, because some people are saying, let's get beyond black, they've never taken a single course in black studies. All they've done is listen to some music and engage in black populism. What do they really know about the complexity and the creativity of black folk? Furthermore, Dr. [inaudible] , if you've never engaged in critical whiteness, in critical white studies seat. It's just that, where then do you fall? If you don't know anything about yourself, how can you possibly know anything about anyone else? Shawn, I have students as you know, you've been right there as my teaching assistant. I have students that will say that they have no culture. I have white students in Boulder, Colorado. They have said, well, actually, I don't have a culture. What they really mean is that, their culture is so ubiquitous, it is so pervasive, it is so normalized and universalized that it seems natural that everybody would think if you get a chance to take a real vacation, you're going to end up somewhere in Europe. This is a strange thing, that's the Eurocentrism, that's the colonization of your mind. In the 21st century, all of the colonization, the racial colonization isn't simply happening of the colonizing of land. But they're also colonizing labor, they are colonizing lives, and they certainly colonizing your mind. So even sometimes when they're not present, they're present in your mind, in your head, it becomes really interesting if you can dictate, if you will, the views of the elite colonial class, of the elite capitalist class, what we call corporate America in this society, and they can manufacture your values. Now, when we start talking about intersectionality, I want to make sure Shawn that I don't come off of this interview without emphasizing that when we start talking about African-American studies, when we start talking about critical race studies, we're grappling with a racialization of gender, a racialization of sexuality, a racialization of class. It's the racialization of these other aspects of our identity, what the [inaudible] collective call identity politics, it's the racialization, nobody is just man in any kind of general or universal sense, unless you in a white supremacist society, then, of course, if you say, man, people think of white men. If you say woman, people think of white women. Most people actually there's some kind of cultural, there's some kind of other descriptor attached. Some people are going to say that somebody was Asian man or Asian woman. They're going to put something, that's the racialization part of it, in the context of a larger white supremacist superstructure, they're going to make you racialize everybody except white people. In fact Shawn, what is the last time you even hear people say white people? It's very rare, it's very rare to racialize, to name whiteness, to name it, and as a radical humanist, how do I name whiteness and disrupt white supremacy in ways that do not demonize white people? There's nobody more thoroughly entrenched in white folk and white culture than you and I if we're involved, we're teaching it, working it, and involved it. It's really interesting. There's no question of the openness, if you will, to European contributions to human culture and civilization. The problem is that, if you want to superimpose those over everybody else's contributions to human culture and civilization, if whiteness means basically coopting and colonizing everybody else's contributions and claiming them as their own. That's the problem though. I have no problem if I'm able to explore the culture on my own terms, that's different, and I'm willing to do that and you know I have done that. But if you're going to force it on people, give us no other options, whiteness is the only option every time, that's a real problem. That's not fair and free and that's not open. For me Shawn, at the end of the day, we're actually talking about a racialization of gender. What else is black feminism? The black connotes the racialization, feminism is your grappling with, gender with respect to women and girls, and so on and so forth. What else are we talking about when we see black queer studies, racialization of sexuality? Without understanding the centrality of race and racialization, now, if you're going to grapple with race and racialization at some point, you have to grapple with the elephant in the room, which is racism. Race in some sense it could be a general new category. It doesn't need to be antagonistic. It's when you begin to put people down, when you begin to dominate and discriminate against people on the basis of their race, that's going to be racism. In America, if you can actually weave that thing into the basic institutions, into the superstructure of the society, then you're going to have institutional racism. It's actually embedded in the very institutions in which we live. Now, I'm paying my taxes, you paying your taxes, but these institutions are actually hitting us with a black tax. I mean, that's an extra tax based on your blackness. You get extra taxed and that's what's happening a lot of times when you see a lot of these issues that BLM is raising, you get a black. A lot of these conversations, we get marginalized, we get pushed to the side in Boulder, Colorado, we're going to get marginalized and pushed to the side. That's the black tax, that extra microaggression, the extra because again if white is considered, the top of the food chain is white is considered at the top of the pyramid. If whiteness is at the top of the hierarchy, then Sean it has a rhetorical question, what's the opposite of white. Black. That means then that those people who have been designated black, they may have some unique perspective on race and racism in the United States of America. That's why you can see, I mean, Sean is a rhetorical question. A lot of the struggles for racial justice in American history, have they not be laid co-laid by black folk or black folk, not central to most of the racial justice struggles in this country. I mean Sean if I'm correct, the signs during American apartheid, during the Jim Crow era, during the period of racial segregation, the sign said white and colored. Let me just say, it wasn't like a sign that said the white water fountain and then black water said white, that means that all non-white people all people of color were designated as a racial other, and black folk have been at the vanguard of breaking down a lot of these racial boundaries and racial barriers, but oftentimes, there's a growing resentment toward black folk for breaking them. People said, well all we do is talk about black people and race. It's not like everybody else is right. I'm completely with that. I agree, I'm again, I'm in critical ethnic studies. Nobody's more committed to this than I am, however, that's a real interesting resentment that people are going to resent the people that because of their lived experience, because of their racial trauma, they really are going to rise up and speak out. Again, onto very full throated fashion, they're going to speak out against racial injustice, they're going to speak out against institutional racism, they're going to speak out against racial biases, and so on and so forth. We don't have it. This is a life and death struggle, with other people, I don't know, but this is the way I see it. This is a life or death struggle that we're fighting. Why? Because of the systemic nature of racism, it is destroying black lives. It is devaluing black lives. It has been doing that since 1619 in the United States of America. The fact that we have to, in the 21st century, we have to say black lives matter. I think that obviously if you come to us and actually ask us with any relative consciousness, how we feel about this experience and about how we're being treated, you and I have talked, I mean Sean how do we feel that we keep seeing people that look like us get brutalized by the police? They get shot down by the police, even if they're unarmed if they have a cell phone, Amadou Diallo. On your wedding day, Sean Bell, you can be murdered. I mean what is psychologically, emotionally, what does that do to us? I don't know about you, but I've cried a lot of salty tears. It hurts me, I'm a very sensitive soul. It hurts me on that some of these folks have their whole lives ahead of them, and just because of this racism thing that they could snuff your life out without just regard to anything else, you are gone. I mean that for me, that's why this course that you're doing is so important, and I'm so incredibly proud of you. Thank you, really appreciate everything you've said and have always said to me Dr. Rabaka, just working with you over the last several years has just been illuminating to myself, but not even myself, but the people around me who have never even met you, and don't even know you because of the way I speak about you and the way I speak about your teachings, and your knowledge, and the teachings, and knowledge you've given me. I can't thank you enough, everyone, again, Dr. Reiland Rabaka, CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies, also professor of intro to Hip Hop Studies, Professor of Black Lives Matter, Professor of Harlem Renaissance, so on and so forth. The reason I did this, as I may have mentioned earlier, is because so many people don't get the opportunity to be educated by someone like this. This is a very important piece of what we do on a regular basis and hopefully, all of you will get something out of it. Don't want to keep you I know you're very, very busy man, you've got a lot going on, but I really, really appreciate you giving me some time and we will be riffing and exchanging ideas again very soon. Absolutely. Hi man, appreciate you, keep the conversation going. Shawn, I think one of the most powerful things about what you're doing is creating the conversation. I think that a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of miseducation can be disrupted by actually us just being able to speak truthfully and vulnerably about our misconceptions of race, missteps we perhaps have made about race and racism, and so on and so forth. For me, this is a key component of that solution, creating forms, creating spaces where we can speak freely, honestly, openly about race and racism and its impact on us. I think it's important and again, I would not be me if I did not close out by saying that I welcome white allies. We need white allies to really commit to being anti-racist. We need white allies. We absolutely need as you know black folk only constitute 10-12 percent of United States population. We're not going to be able to just do this by ourselves, which is one of the reasons I'm here in Boulder, Colorado, because I want to help to raise consciousness. They can reach folks. White anti-racist can reach people, you and I Shawn, will never have access to them. Please accept your responsibility in this struggle, you have a special contribution to make, I welcome it, we welcome it, but even more than that, even more than being a white ally, we need for you all to be advocates. We've got to have advocacy, not just saying, "Oh, I support that cause." No, if we go out in the street and match, you better be right along next to me. I get hit with the rubber bullet, you should get hit with it too. Dog bite me dog better bite you. If you're really an advocate, if we're really in this together, people are sitting on the sidelines spectating. We need people to get into the game. If I call your number, are you ready to get into the game, and right now we're calling you all number? Let's go. It's time to stop riding the pine, it's time to get off the bench and get into the game. We trying to win this Shawn. We took them a lot of L's over the years, it's a lot of losses. I'm trying to get some W's. We going to have to win this, and I think there's a whole generation, their whole framing of race and racism is fundamentally change, after having a black president for eight years, it is fundamentally change because of how electrifying the Black Lives Matter movement has been, really getting out there educating, Shawn, what we need to do is give people racial education. Absolutely. Some people are making so many mistakes because they never have any serious training, critical race training. They haven't really been exposed to it, and that's what I'm trying to help you achieve that PhD to do. We need a division of labor. We need cadres of folks that can go out there and provide critical race studies. Absolutely. We want them to be fluid and the discourse on race, and we also need to remind people that we're all going to make some mistakes. We're all going to have some missteps, but let me say to you humbly, you've heard me say this a great deal to my students Shawn, for me, I try to learn lessons from every loss. I try to learn lessons from every mistake that I make. That's all, if people sincerely are trying, striving to transform themselves and to transform the world, you would be amazed at how many of us can be incredibly patient, and patient in this kind of thing, when we start talking about racial justice, patients is an act of love. Patience is an ethic. For me, I'm trying to work with people. Now, of course, if you make that mistake again, two or three times, then I'm impatient. The conversation is over, but what lessons do we learn from the mistakes that we make? What lessons can we learn, and how do we really commit to transforming ourselves? For me, that's what this is about, raising consciousness every day, my own, and helping other people raise their consciousness and not just about race, as I've said before. As you know, I'm very committed to black feminism, I'm very committed to black queer studies, I'm very committed to the critique of racial capitalism and racial colonialism, and so on and so forth. It's an intersectional analysis really, that I believe is the ultimate solution to the problem of race and racism. All right man. Take care of yourself, Shawn. Take care. Thank you. This is a great interview and I just want to encourage you, keep doing what you're doing. Keep this conversation going, and the fact that you have so many people that you are sharing this knowledge with, I think is powerful and I think is very beautiful. Thank you, Dr. Rabaka. Yes sir. Okay now. Take care. Peace bro. Peace now.
