[ The author revisits his newly expanded influential work
‘Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,’ and talks
solidarity, reciprocity, and expansive visions of emancipation.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

RADICAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AS LOVE LETTERS: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBIN
D.G. KELLEY  
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Norman Stockwell
August 22, 2022
The Progressive
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_ The author revisits his newly expanded influential work ‘Freedom
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,’ and talks solidarity,
reciprocity, and expansive visions of emancipation. _

Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA Newsroom // The Progressive

 

Robin D.G. Kelley is a distinguished professor and the Gary B. Nash
endowed chair in U.S. history at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He is the author of more than seven books, including _Yo’
Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America
[[link removed]]_ (Beacon
Press, 1997). The revised and expanded edition of his 2002
book, _Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
[[link removed]]_, was released by
Beacon Press on August 22. We spoke by telephone on June 28.

Q: IN THE FOREWORD TO THE NEW TWENTIETH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF YOUR
BOOK _FREEDOM DREAMS_, POET AJA MONET WRITES, “TWENTY YEARS LATER,
THE TRUTHS REVEALED REMAIN RELEVANT AND NECESSARY ESPECIALLY IN THE
THICK PARALYZING DESPAIR OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC.” WHERE DO YOU SEE THE
TRUTHS OF TODAY?

ROBIN D.G. KELLEY: You and I are talking shortly after the
overturning of _Roe v. Wade_, in what looks like the beginning of a
rightwing, Christian-fundamentalist-driven agenda.

If there’s a main lesson in the book, it’s that many of these dark
moments of repression are actually responses to rebellion, opposition,
[and] resistance to other kinds of possibilities.

In other words, what we’re witnessing now from the Supreme Court is
its rightwing turn in response to the opening of democratic
possibilities going back to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In many ways,
it’s almost as if the right was simply able to outmaneuver a lot of
us. They were trying to shut down something.

Clarence Thomas has been on the court for a very long time, and this
is probably the most active he’s ever been. He’s been waiting for
this moment. But keep in mind, when we use terms like rollback, [it]
means that we made some progress someplace. Something had to happen
for them to roll it back. What we’re witnessing now is a rollback .
. . .

[Here] in the United States, no one really could [have] imagined
twenty-six million people on the street around the killing of a Black
man, who himself was a formerly incarcerated person. That was
unimaginable.

What I always remind myself, and my students and comrades, is that
what’s possible now is far more visionary and expansive than what we
thought was possible. That’s what _Freedom Dreams_ is all about:
trying to imagine something beyond that, rather than trying to go back
to the status quo.

Q: YOU REFERRED TO THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY AS THE ONE MODEL OF A
SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATION THAT YOUR STUDENTS FOCUS ON. BUT THAT REALLY
WAS ABOUT A RESPONSE TO CONDITIONS. I THINK THAT WHAT YOU’RE TALKING
ABOUT IN _FREEDOM DREAMS_ IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT. WHAT DOES
EMANCIPATION LOOK LIKE BEYOND THE NOTION OF NOT BEING ENSLAVED?

KELLEY: It is about perspective. I’m a historian; that’s what I
do. Sometimes we tend to look at history from the present backward: We
figure out “How did we get here?” And when we ask that question,
we tend to use tunnel vision, because what we’re trying to do is
follow the path, and it almost presumes the path is inevitable.

What_ Freedom Dreams_ tries to do is ask the question “What does
emancipation mean?” from the perspective of the moment, whether
it’s the 1870s and 1880s, when Black people are searching for land,
or the 1930s, when communists actually think they can win state power
and create a revolution on a global scale, or whether it’s the 1960s
or 1970s. In other words, when you’re standing in the moment and
looking forward, what’s in front of you is this wide horizon of
possibility—not the inevitable ending, which is not inevitable at
all.

When we talk about “What does emancipation mean?” there are
certain themes that come back over and over again. Those themes are a
more expansive sense of what freedom means—that freedom is bodily
autonomy, freedom is land, freedom is being able to not be policed and
surveilled. It’s not just negative freedoms, but positive ones—to
create a new commons, to take back the commons from which whole groups
of people have been dispossessed. Freedom is decolonization. And that
requires an imagination.

We have such a limited imagination in terms of what democracy means.
So there’s lots of ways that we have to imagine this future, but the
only way to do it is not through think tanks, blogs, and Twitter, but
through actually being together and working together, and through
struggle.

If there’s a major theme in _Freedom Dreams_, it’s that none of
these visions of emancipation were like lightbulbs going off. They
really were people in trenches, people trying to build movements,
people trying to escape from forms of oppression to create the new
world, the new land.

Q: YOU SAY IN THE BOOK THAT YOU CAN’T DIVORCE CRITICAL ANALYSIS FROM
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND THE NOTION OF MOVEMENTS AS NOT JUST BEING ABOUT
ACCOMPLISHING A PARTICULAR GOAL.

KELLEY: I had to throw that critique in there, because one of the
strange ironies about twenty years past is that we actually have more
organizations than probably ever. We have more progressive
organizations and more progressive language. But the problem is that
almost all of them are funded by foundations that have a corporate
mentality.

In this world of social media, you can pretty much be what you want to
be [and] say what you want to say, and it has no consequences on the
political landscape . . . . But now we have the criminalization of
schoolteachers. So here I’m saying something quite different, which
is to say that we’ve actually moved to an even more reactionary
position, the kind of attacks on so-called critical race
theory—which is not really that, but those kinds of attacks on
curriculum. We’re in a place where people could be criminalized,
could actually lose their jobs, if not be prosecuted.

What it means to be a revolutionary is to fight for those who may not
fight for you. It’s about learning to fight for others.

The power of the state is being deployed in the culture wars in a way
that I didn’t see in the 1990s. I didn’t imagine it would be this
bad, and the tragedy in all of this is that despite the proliferation
of media, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the search for controversy
all the time, there seems to be less engagement among the American
populace than there was, say, thirty years ago. And maybe that’s
because it all exists on social media, but if it exists on social
media, it’s not really having an impact . . . . It’s almost as if
these explosive moments are more like Snapchat. You have this picture,
this protest, [and] then it disappears. And everyone goes back to the
mall.

[We should] think of culture wars not just in terms of the
retrenchment of rightwing values, but rather, as literally the
cultural ground where we fight for life, for people’s needs, for a
new world. If the cultural ground is social media, television, [and]
film—if that’s it, then we’re losing more now than I think we
lost in the 1990s.

Q: IN _YO’ MAMA’S DISFUNKTIONAL!_, YOU WRITE, “AS THE GLOBAL
ECONOMY GROWS, THE TERRAIN OF CULTURE BECOMES EVEN MORE CRUCIAL AS A
TERRAIN OF STRUGGLE.” I WANT TO TAKE THIS IDEA OF A GLOBAL CULTURE
WAR BACK TO _FREEDOM DREAMS_ AND ASK YOU TO TALK ABOUT THE NOTION OF
“FREEDOM DREAMS” BEING TRANSFORMED FROM AN ADJECTIVE AND A NOUN TO
A NOUN AND A VERB. HOW DO WE MAKE OUR FREEDOM DREAMS GO FROM BEING A
NOUN TO A VERB?

KELLEY: I talk about various photographers, filmmakers, and artists,
and the way in which the street and public art they’re doing is not
just a critique of the horrible conditions we’re facing, it’s also
a new map to a different future. Collective freedom dreaming—these
are the terms that have been taken up by various artists and musicians
as well.

I give the example in the epilogue of how it appears in practice,
especially in the cities of Jackson [Mississippi] and Detroit
[Michigan], where you see artists, high school students, and community
activists working together to create new forms of social life.
There’s all these efforts in which artists and community people come
together in a fight. They fight to create . . . to enact, I should
say, this world of what “freedom dreams” would look like, these
kinds of spaces, liberated zones.

Q: TALKING MORE ABOUT THIS IDEA OF POETRY, CULTURE, AND IMAGINATION
ALL BEING PART OF A REVOLUTIONARY PRACTICE, PEOPLE TEND TO THINK OF
REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS AS JUST CONTENDING FOR SPACE IN POLITICAL
ARENAS. BUT YOU SAY IT’S REALLY THE “DREAMS” PART OF IT THAT
MAKES THAT REVOLUTIONARY PROJECT A REALITY.

KELLEY: That is exactly the point, because it’s the dreams part of
it that I contend is not a new thing. It’s always been the glue that
sustains movements. I try to demonstrate that if we measure movements
in terms of victories and losses, in terms of concrete gains versus
defeats, then we’re going to miss the dream part of it. And we’re
also going to miss the way in which the dream part, the vision, is not
a fixed thing. It’s always dynamic, always in motion, always
shifting, as movements shift, as people move in and out and try to
figure out where we’re going. So trying to capture that dynamic is
incredibly important.

Q: YOU CLOSE THE INTRODUCTION TO THE NEWLY REVISED AND EXPANDED
EDITION OF _FREEDOM DREAMS_ WITH A QUOTE FROM YOUR DAUGHTER ELIZA:
“THE POWER OF THE LOVE LETTER IS THAT IT IS WRITTEN WITHOUT THE
GUARANTEE OF A RESPONSE.” TALK ABOUT RADICAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AS
LOVE LETTERS.

KELLEY: The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. To love
truly, to love a people, to love a movement, to love freedom, is to
love without the expectation that there’s reciprocity.

We are living in a political age where everything is based on
exchange—solidarity is somehow supposed to be like a market economy.
What it means to be a revolutionary is to fight for those who may not
fight for you. It’s about learning to fight for others. And I know
that’s a hard thing to do in this age of pessimism, but we have a
long history, and, hopefully, the book demonstrates this, that we have
a long history of fighting for others—even people we’ve never seen
before. If we could learn to do that, then we could actually learn to
love. Politics should be based on that, not on reciprocity.

_[Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.]_
 

* African Americans
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* Racial Justice
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* Emancipation
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* Solidarity
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* radical politics
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* Social Movements
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* Imagination
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* Revolutionary Thought
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* revolutionary ideology
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