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| Cedric Robinson |
Robin D.G.Kelley, Counter Punch
Just
as Thucydides believed that historical consciousness of a people in crisis
provided the possibility of more virtuous action, more informed and rational
choices, so do I.
–Cedric
J. Robinson, 1999
On
Sunday, June 5, we lost an intellectual giant. Cedric Robinson was a wholly
original thinker whose five books and dozens of essays challenged liberal and
Marxist theories of political change, exposed the racial character of
capitalism, unearthed a Black Radical Tradition and examined its social,
political, cultural, and intellectual bases, interrogated the role of theater
and film in forming ideologies of race and class, and overturned standard
historical interpretations of the last millennia. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel
Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, and Edward Said, Robinson was that rare polymath
capable of seeing the whole—its genesis as well as its possible future. No
discipline could contain him. No geography or era was beyond his reach. He was
equally adept at discussing Ancient Greece, England’s Middle Ages, plantations
in Cyprus or South Carolina, anticolonial rebellions in Africa or Asia, as well
as contemporary politics of Iran and Vietnam, El Salvador and the Philippines.
No thinker—not Hegel, not Hannah Arendt, not even Frantz Fanon—was above
criticism. We can seed why academia basically ignored his writings until
recently: he threw down the gauntlet before the alter of “Social Sciences,” and
challenged Black Studies to embrace its radical mission, which he once
described as “a critique of Western Civilization.”
Oakland
born and bred, Robinson came into the world on November 5, 1940, as Cedric
James Hill, child of Clara Whiteside and Frederick Hill. A local nightclub
owner nearly twenty years Clara’s senior, Hill and Clara never married and soon
parted ways. Cedric’s named changed after Clara wed Dwight Robinson, though
their marriage was short-lived. Like so
many Black working-class families, Cedric was raised largely by his extended
family. When “Ricky” was not with his
mother, he stayed with his aunt Wilma Roundtree and his cousins, briefly lived
with his father, Frederick Hill, and spent considerable time with his grandparents,
Cecilia (“Mama Do”) and Winston “Cap” Whiteside, at their home on Adeline
Street in Oakland. Cedric grew particularly close to “Cap,” whom he
consistently identified as one of the most important influences on his
intellectual and political outlook.
Born
in Mobile, Alabama, on June 7, 1894, Winston Wilmer Whiteside embodied the
personal dignity, discipline, quiet intelligence, spiritual grounding, courage,
and commitment to family and community that characterized what Cedric called
the Black Radical Tradition. Although he had little formal education and worked
principally as a porter or janitor, Cap owned his Adeline Street home and was
respected in his community. Unlike most Black residents in West Oakland who
came during the war-time boom; Cap arrived in the late 1920s . . . fleeing for
his life. The story, as Cedric heard it, goes something like this: Cecilia was
working as a housekeeper at the Battle House, Mobile’s renowned luxury hotel.
When Cap learned that a white manager attempted to sexually assault Cecilia, he
headed straight to the Battle House, beat the manager unconscious and left him
hanging on a hook in the hotel’s cold storage room. A few days later, he headed west, first to
Chicago and then to Oakland. Once settled, he sent for Cecilia and his three
daughters, Clara, Lillian, and Wilma. In his book, Black Movements, Robinson
wryly delivers the denouement: “Chastened, the manager gained a reputation as
one of the best friends of the Negro in Mobile.”
Cedric
grew up during the height of the Second Great Migration, as Black and white
Southern migrants arrived in droves. He attended public schools where he
learned from Black women and men who held advanced degrees but could not break
the professional color bar. He took great pride in his teachers and the
challenging intellectual environment they created. He was able to use his
mother’s address in order to attend Berkeley High, a school with a reputation
for academic excellence, political radicalism and racism. In the 1950s, Black
students at Berkeley were often steered away from college prep courses toward
metal shop, and an unspoken color bar separated student activities.
Consequently, Cedric received no assistance or direction from his high school
counselors with the college admission process. Elizabeth Robinson recalls that
Cedric simply showed up at U.C. Berkeley’s campus in the Fall of 1959 and stood
in the registration line, falling in behind Shyamala Gopalan. Gopalan, an
incoming graduate student from India pursuing a PhD in nutrition and
endocrinology (and future mother to California Attorney General Kamala Harris),
would soon become one of Cedric’s close friends. Perhaps because he followed an
international student, was dark skinned, and projected a sense of entitlement
at a university with so few Black students, the registrar assumed he was an
African national and asked if his government planned to pay his fees!
Cedric
had no government to pay his fees, so he worked. He washed dishes at the Bear’s Lair (the
coffee shop in the student union), cleaned hotel rooms, and during the summer
worked in a cannery overseeing titration, stealing time to read whenever he
could. He majored in social anthropology and soon gained a reputation as an
activist. He and J. Herman Blake (a sociology doctoral student and future
university administrator who would ghost-write Huey P. Newton’s 1970 memoir,
Revolutionary Suicide) were principal leaders of the NAACP’s campus chapter. In
March 1961, they worked with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to bring Robert
F. Williams to speak at Berkeley High’s Little Theater. Former president of the
Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, Williams came to prominence after
the national leadership suspended him for advocating armed self-defense. In
1960, he traveled to Cuba with a delegation of Black artists and intellectuals
and returned home, hoisted a Cuban flag in his backyard and pledged his support
for Fidel Castro. (Just months after Berkeley visit, Williams and his family
took refuge in Cuba to escape trumped up kidnapping charges.) Blake and
Robinson had invited Williams in defiance of national leadership. As Cedric
explained to historian Donna Murch, they decided to break with Roy Wilkins and
the old guard: “We wanted a different kind of analysis, a politics that emerged
from an analysis of race in America and race in the globe. . . . [T]hese were [the] global as well as
international dynamics at the time.”
A
month later, the Kennedy administration launched the failed Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba. Cedric helped organize demonstrations on campus against the
invasion and U.S. policy toward Cuba, for which he received a one-semester
suspension. The University of California prohibited protests on campus without
official approval and forty-eight hours notice. In his defense, Cedric
countered that the U.S. government did not give them forty-eight hours warning
before launching the invasion. Since he
had to finish out the spring term, he continued to agitate. He and Blake had
invited Malcolm X to speak on campus in May, only to be rebuffed by the
administration. (They eventually moved the event off campus to the local YMCA,
also known as Stiles Hall.)
That
summer, Cedric delivered a paper on “Campus Civil Rights Groups and the
Administration” at a conference organized by the left-leaning campus group
SLATE. Barely twenty-one, the deliberate and soft-spoken Robinson forcefully
described the administration’s unremitting hostility toward civil rights
organizations, namely Students for Racial Equality and the NAACP. He pointed to
three instances in which the administration banned students from peacefully
picketing racism on campus or banned speakers such as Malcolm X. In response to
the administration’s claim that the state constitution prohibited the
university from using its facilities “for religious purposes,” Cedric simply
disclosed “the fact that such speakers as Rev. Roy Nichols, Billy Graham, Rabbi
Fine and Bishop Pike had previously spoken on campus. Indeed, the last-named
churchman spoke on campus the very afternoon that Malcolm X had originally been
scheduled. It only needs to be added that Malcolm X thereupon continued his
speaking tour, a tour which had already taken him to such institutions as
Harvard, Boston, and Columbia Universities.” He closed with a parting shot at
Berkeley’s ineffectual student government “with its ever-present, if always
impotent, motion of censure of the administration.”
Cedric
served his six months of exile in Mexico (his second choice after Cuba). He
wandered the country, lived among the people, became fluent in Spanish, studied
the culture and politics, and read. He returned to campus at the beginning of
1962, just as several of his political comrades were joining Black study
groups. Donald Warden, Leslie and Jim Lacy, J. Herman Blake, Nebby Lou
Crawford, Ernest Allen, Jr., Margot Dashiell, Welton Smith, Shyamala Gopalan,
Donald Hopkins, Frederick Douglas Lewis and Mary Agnes Lewis, began meeting
regularly to discuss Black identity, African decolonization, historical and
contemporary racism, and to read works by Ralph Ellison, Du Bois, E. Franklin
Frazier, Melville Herskovits and others. This loose gathering coalesced in the
Afro-American Association, led by Donald Warden, a law student at Boalt Hall.
Cedric was a part of the original group, which subsequently attracted future
Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton.
After
graduating in 1963, Cedric took a job at the Alameda County Probation
Department, although he continued to be active in Bay Area Civil Rights
activities. He participated in direct-action protests in San Francisco over the
racist hiring practices at the city’s luxury hotels and along Auto Row on Van
Ness, where the major car dealerships refused to hire Black sales people. But
even more than the mass protests, his experience working for the Probation
Department put him in direct contact with the sort of kids he grew up with in
Oakland—kids with limited education and few skills forced to navigate a
racially segmented job market. He found the work challenging yet important,
knowing fully well that he was employed by a criminal justice system hostile to
Black people.
But
before he could complete his training, he was drafted and assigned to the
Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, since he had a college degree.
Ironically, his activism saved him from being deployed to Vietnam. The military
held up his security clearance because of his political history and his
friendship with fellow Berkeley student Douglas Wachter, a prominent member of
the Communist Party who had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities
Committee in 1961. By the time security clearance was granted, he only had six
months left of his tour.
Upon
discharge, Robinson returned to his job at the Alameda Probation Department.
There he met and helped train a new employee named Elizabeth Peters. The
product of a middle-class Lebanese-American family, she also matriculated at
Berkeley, but entered in the fall of 1961 while Cedric was in Mexico. With a
degree in criminology and a genuine concern for the fate of kids under the
California Youth Authority, she became a counselor in child protective services
while Cedric worked with teens in the senior boys camp. Prefiguring the
language of restorative justice, they embraced effective, transactional methods
to reach young people. But the rise of
the Black Panthers, the antiwar movement, radical prison organizing, and urban
rebellions made clear that the existing criminal justice system was incapable
of real reform. Cedric and Elizabeth saw no future in probation.
In
August of 1967, they were married. Cedric enrolled in San Francisco State
University to pursue an M.A. degree in Political Science, arriving just as the
Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) was fighting for an Ethnic Studies College.
He also taught at San Francisco City College. Before he could complete his
thesis, however, Stanford University’s Political Science Department recruited
him for their PhD program in political theory. He accepted their offer but
alerted his prospective mentors that he aimed to challenge the discipline’s
most basic premises. They failed to heed his warning.
Cedric
found Stanford cold and isolating. He worked hard, attended seminars, read
voraciously, but never succumbed to the prevailing culture of academic elitism.
Elizabeth recalls one of his professors arguing that he should not “advance to
candidacy since he’s not been properly socialized.” None of this prevented him
from writing. A Leverhulme fellowship enabled he and Elizabeth to spend 1970-71
at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, where he completed his
dissertation, “Leadership: A Mythic Paradigm.”
In 370 pages, Robinson demolished the Western presumption that mass
movements reflect social order and are maintained and rationalized by the authority
of leadership. Challenging the conceits of liberal and Marxist theories of
political change, Robinson argued that leadership—the idea that effective
social action is determined by a leader who is separate from or above the
masses of people—and political order, are essentially fictions that even
Western anarchist traditions could not shake. After taking on virtually the
whole of Western political theory, he presented examples from Siberia,
Switzerland, the French countryside, and Southern Africa of social formations
that represent an epistemological break from dominant paradigm of order. He
used the Tonga people of Zambia and Zimbabwe as his principal case study,
largely because he wanted to illuminate non-Western examples of radical
democracy in order to break with Eurocentric models of Greco-Roman diffusion.
He told an interviewer nearly three decades later that one of the main
contributions of The Terms of Order and, later, Black Marxism, was to identify
in African traditions a commitment to “a social order in which no voice was
greater than another.” At the core of this democratic culture was a moral
philosophy that values “our historical and immediate interdependence,” our
relations with each other, with ancestors, with future generations, with life
itself.
When
Cedric submitted his dissertation for approval, the faculty did not know what
to make of it. One by one, individual members resigned from his committee
citing an inability to understand the work. No one could reasonably reject a
thesis so sound, elegant, and erudite, but few were willing to sign off. Only
after Cedric threatened legal action was his thesis finally accepted—nearly
four years later. Finding a publisher proved equally frustrating. When SUNY
Press finally released the book, now titled The Terms of Order: Political
Science and the Myth of Leadership in 1980, it was thoroughly ignored and soon
disappeared. (Fortunately, the University of North Carolina Press brought it
back into print with a brilliant Foreword by Erica Edwards, giving the book a
new life and the attention it deserved thirty-five years ago.)
As
they awaited Stanford’s decision, Cedric accepted a position as Lecturer in
Political Science and Black Studies at the University of Michigan from 1971 to
1973. His appointment was partly the product of student struggles waged by the
Black Action Movement the previous year. Cedric and Elizabeth joined a
community of radical and progressive blackmarxismintellectuals, including
Harold Cruse, anthropologist Mick Taussig, Africanist historian Joel Samoff,
cultural critic Marshall Sahlins, and Archie Singham, noted scholar of
Caribbean and African politics. Elizabeth returned to school, earning an M.A.
in Anthropology from U of M. Together they devoted much of their energy to the graduate
students, hosting regular seminars and workshops in their home, feeding and
nurturing a generation who would reshape Black Studies. Darryl Thomas, then a
first-year grad student in Political Science, found these gatherings
invaluable: “That community remained a source of strength and survival long
after the Robinsons’ departure from the university in 1973. The workshop
exemplified how to pursue the type of interdisciplinary research and
scholarship originally imagined by the students and faculty members who led the
insurrections that created Black studies.”
In
1973, Cedric accepted his first tenure-track job at Binghamton University –
State University of New York. Still technically without a doctorate, he briefly
joined the Political Science Department until Terrence Hopkins persuaded him to
move to Sociology. He was also appointed Chair of the Department Afro-American
and African Studies. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was admitted to the PhD program in
Anthropology and worked as a graduate assistant in Sociology during the
founding of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical
Systems, and Civilizations. Although it is never said, Cedric doubtless left an
imprint on the Braudel Center’s intellectual formation. The Robinsons five short
years in Binghamton proved consequential in other ways, as well. It was there
that their daughter, Najda, was born. And it was there, traversing the worlds
of Black Studies, historical sociology, and world systems analysis that the
seeds of Cedric’s magnum opus, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition, were planted. But it was in the U.K., and Santa Barbara, California,
that those seeds bore fruit.
In
1978, Cedric became director of the Center for Black Studies Research and
joined the Political Science Department at the University of California, Santa
Barbara (UCSB). Before completely settling into his new position, however, he,
Elizabeth and Najda spent a year in the English village of Radwinter, just
southeast of Cambridge. Cedric began a life-long association with London’s
Institute of Race Relations, writing for its journal Race and Class, and
hanging out with the likes of A. Sivanandan, Colin Prescod, Hazel Waters, Paul
Gilroy, and C. L. R. James. He was soon invited to join the Editorial Working
Committee. He conducted research at Cambridge University, and published
articles at a furious pace—on Richard Wright, Du Bois, Amilcar Cabral, filmmaker
and novelist Sembene Ousmane; on the limits of European radicalism, the
formation of the black petit-bourgeoisie, and the Eurocentric character of
historical theory. His 1980 essay in
the Braudel Center’s journal, Review, rehearses his chief arguments in Black
Marxism by way of a critique of the liberal Scottish historian George
Shepperson’s treatment of John Chilembwe’s 1915 anticolonial uprising in
Malawi. Titled “Notes Toward a ‘Native’ Theory of History,” Robinson
respectfully takes Shepperson to task for ignoring the African cultural and
ontological bases for the rebellion and imposing a European (specifically a
Scottish nationalist) lens masquerading as universal. “He has sought to dignify
Chilembwe,” wrote Robinson, “by forcing his peculiar and particular movement
into a style quite alien to it: European political revolution. Chilembwe was
not a Cromwell; he never could be. But most importantly he never had to be. His
movement had its own quite special and remarkable integrity.” It was a critical
intervention, for Shepperson was one of the “good guys,” a careful,
sympathetic, deeply anti-imperialist scholar noted for his attention African
agency. Indeed, Robinson’s essay elicited a polite eight-page defense from
Shepperson that appeared in a subsequent issue of Review.
When
Zed Press, an obscure left-leaning London publishing house, released Robinson’s
monumental Black Marxism in 1983, it was largely ignored, treated as a
curiosity, or grossly misunderstood. For a the few radical thinkers willing to
wrestle with the text, it inspired a generation to rethink Marxism and attend
more carefully to historical materials. Robinson took Marxism to task for its
inability to comprehend the racial character of capitalism or radical movements
outside of the West. He essentially re-wrote the history of the rise of the
West from Ancient times to the mid-20th century, scrutinizing the very idea
that capitalism could impose universal categories of class on the entire world.
Tracing the roots of black radical thought to a shared epistemology among
diverse African people, he shows that the first waves of African New World
revolts were not governed by a critique structured by Western conceptions of
freedom but a total rejection of enslavement and racism as it was experienced.
Revolts, Robinson emphasized, which were often led by women. However, with the advent of formal
colonialism and the incorporation of black labor into a more fully governed
social structure, emerges the native bourgeoisie, more intimate with European life
and thought, assigned to help rule. Their contradictory role as victims of
racial domination and tools of empire, compelled some of these men and women to
revolt, thus producing the radical black intelligentsia. And it is that
intelligentsia which occupies the last section of the book. He reveals how W.
E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright, by confronting Black mass
movements, revised their positions on Western Marxism or broke with it
altogether. The way they came to the Black Radical Tradition was more of an act
of recognition than invention; they did not create the theory of black
radicalism as much as found it in the movements of “ordinary” Black people.
Much like The Terms of Order, Black Marxism would enjoy a renaissance after it
was re-issued in 2000.
The
Robinsons made Santa Barbara their permanent home. In 1980, Cedric and a UCSB
student named Corey Dubin, launched Third World News Review (TWNR), a radio
program and later a public access television show that, in Elizabeth Robinson’s
words, served as “a small corrective gloss on what the Pentagon, White House or
State Department proffered for public consumption.” For three decades, Cedric
and Elizabeth co-hosted TWNR, providing in-depth reporting and political
analysis on a variety of global crises, from the Iranian Revolution and U.S.
“dirty wars” in Argentina and Central America, the anti-apartheid struggle in
South Africa the invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Lebanon, the contested
elections in the Philippines, the machinations of Mobutu in the Congo, to the
ongoing struggles in Palestine. Most importantly, consistent with Cedric’s
history of political activism and his commitment to meet people where they are,
TWNR attracted a significant following beyond the academy.
Over
the next thirty-six years, Cedric Robinson enjoyed a distinguished academic
career. He rose through the ranks, served as Chair of Political Science,
trained a brilliant group of graduate students who have transformed the fields
of Cultural and Ethnic Studies, History, Politics, and Social Theory. He
published three more books, numerous articles, delivered lectures all over the
world, earned honors and accolades for his scholarship and teaching, and
continued to write and mentor after his retirement in 2010. Festschrifts have
been put together in his honor; key academic journals have dedicated special
issues to his scholarship; major conferences have been held to critically
engage his ideas—most recently, the extraordinarily successful “Confronting
Racial Capitalism: The Black Radical Tradition and Cultures of Liberation,”
organized by Ruth Wilson Gilmore at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2014.
But
this is not the whole story. Cedric never settled down, never grew complacent.
He continued to be his quiet, funny, eloquent, dangerous self; an intellectual
deeply committed to community and struggle.
In 1987, as Chair of Political Science he publicly exposed a CIA agent
appointed as a lecturer in his department and severely downgraded his position.
In 1989, he joined a hunger strike in support of student demands for an Ethnic
Studies requirement at UCSB. In 1994, he organized a student team to document
the history of Santa Barbara’s Black community. And in 1997, he published Black
Movements in America.
A
small, immensely readable narrative covering four centuries, Black Movements
was more than a synthesis pitched to undergraduates. Robinson makes an original
argument that Black movements have been guided by two distinct political
cultures–an individualistic culture that sought acceptance, recognition, and
assimilation, and a “communitarian” culture that sought autonomy and embraced
democratic principles, Afro-Christian ethics, and “a political culture that
distinguished between the inferior world of the political and the transcendent
universe of moral goods.” The latter, he suggested, was more widespread, more
inventive, held more promise, and was driven largely by Black women.
Regrettably,
Robinson’s 2001 text, An Anthropology of Marxism, fell entirely beneath the
radar. An brilliant exegesis on the history and roots of socialism in Europe,
prefaced by an equally brilliant essay by sociologist Avery Gordon, Robinson
demonstrates that most streams of socialist thought were not only distinct from
Marxism but preceded his era by centuries. The book directly challenges Perry
Anderson’s various attempts at historicizing Marxism by reminding us that
varieties of socialism predate capitalism—they, too, were responses to the
stagnation of the feudal order. He opens up the discussion about what socialism
is, and what kind of futures various socialisms might have imagined.
On
first glance, his last book, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the
Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II (2007), may
appear to mark a significant departure from his previous work. This is partly true, given the book’s
prodigious archival research into the sources of early film and theater. It is
a stunning achievement. On the other hand, Cedric has been writing about film
since the 1970s. More importantly, Forgeries bears a resemblance to Black
Marxism in that it is much more than what is advertised in the title. It is not
simply a study of film and race; it is a history of the reconstitution and
reconstruction of racial regimes in the modern era, the consolidation of modern
whiteness, and resistance to these regimes in the U.S. Cedric takes us back to Elizabethan England
and the reconstruction of The Moor in Othello, to early modern science, to the
incredible convergence of motion picture technology, the consolidation of
finance capital, and the rise of Jim Crow. In a magnificent chapter on D. W.
Griffiths “Birth of a Nation,” he reveals 1915 as a crucial turning point in
the formation of a new racial regime, and Griffith’s purported “masterpiece”
played the critical role in consolidating and circulating old racial
fabulations and new fictions in the process of capitalist expansion. But the
scramble to prove black inferiority and buttress white racial democracy was no
cakewalk. As Forgeries consistently reminds us, racial ideology must be
constantly manufactured and therefore always rests on shaky grounds. This is the power of film: it “educates” the
public through forgeries and fraudulent histories, through representations that
erase more than reveal. But like all class tools, it can be a weapon of
revision and restoration. Forgeries was conceived as the first of two
volumes—the second slated to cover the second half of the 20th century.
Tragically, aside from a few scattered articles, this part of the work shall
remain unfinished.
In
2013, Cedric addressed the Critical Ethnic Studies conference in Chicago. He
only spoke for ten minutes, mostly extemporaneously. Choosing his words
carefully, he spoke in his customary slow and deliberate style, expertly
pausing to allow his subtle humor to catch hold of the audience. He was as
dangerous as ever. “Critical Ethnic Studies is not really about the academy,”
he intoned. It was about the people who demanded we be here, the dispossessed,
the incarcerated, the underhoused, underemployed, undocumented, the people who
sacrificed for us and who the state sacrifices for capital. He warned of the
moral catastrophe we face if we succeed in the academy while those who demanded
that we be here suffer premature death, in the streets or behind bars. Racial
capitalism must be dismantled.
But
then he pivoted, perhaps channeling his grandfather, Mr. Winston Whitehead. He
began to speak wistfully about the spiritual and communitarian traditions in which
he was raised. “One of the things I was exposed to was this immense notion of
the possible through the construction of the notion of faith. So Christian
faith trained me to be able to believe in, to anticipate, something coming into
being that was not in being. That’s called by the Greek word, ‘Utopia,’ which
means the good society. It also means no society, no such place. That gave me a
framework for looking at what others, before me, had imagined was possible in
their lifetime. And that’s why it was so important for me to look at the notion
of radicalism from the vantage point of slaves. . . . According to some
scholars, the slaves. . . [had] no ambitions, except to perhaps live or perhaps
to die. They had experienced social death. Well that’s nonsense. Because they were something more than was
what was expected of them, they could invent, manufacture, conspire, and
organize way beyond the possibilities.”
