My Comments on the Religion of White Rage Panel at LSU
If people read, perhaps they wouldn’t be in such a tizzy.
I haven’t been on here in a while. Sorry for that. Three books, a few articles, and, well, this world makes it difficult to write to and for the public.
But it’s early, and I have a little bit of time. I have nasty insomnia, so my sleep schedule is always off. I go to bed late; I get up early; and I sleep throughout the day. It’s not ideal. But that’s how my body is operating at the moment.
Anyway, on this sleepless morning, I awoke to more hate mail — mail like this:
I’m not that important of a figure to get hate mail on the regular, so I looked to find the source. And, lo and behold, another article had been written about me — one that plastered my image all over the page and siphoned a clause, a clause, from words that I had written. The piece, if you’re interested, is from Campus Reform — that good ol’ fashioned propaganda machine organized around “exposing liberal bias” in university campuses.
Anyway, the article is largely, well, about me. Little ol’ me. Well, not really me; it’s about one clause I stated in an hour-and-a-half long panel discussion at LSU about a book I co-edited. The book is entitled The Religion of White Rage, and — get this — the introduction is available for free on the publisher’s website.
I bring this up because a local congressperson from Louisiana expressed “concerns” about the talk without having read the book — or even having read its introduction. Before we even had the event, this congressperson warned that LSU could lose funding for the talk; he said the talk wasn’t “balanced,” and that it needed a “conservative voice” to be represented.
That wasn’t going to happen.
But, to be fair, we weren’t going to have a liberal voice at the event, either. To do work in black studies is to deny the categories of liberal and conservative; I guess you could call me a leftist, but even that doesn’t really track. I’m a black ethicist. Being black and doing ethics isn’t reducible to a position on a spectrum; it’s irreducible to the shallow, narrow, and wildly unsophisticated political categories with which this country works. To be about life, about black life — which, for me, means being about ethics — is to be largely uninterested in given political identities.
In fact, blackness might even be said to sidestep politics — not because it is apolitical, but instead because it is the condition for anything like modern politics anyway. I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say that everything in American political life — from the two-party system to the electoral college — is steeped in and birthed out of the brutality of the slave trade and its legacies. Whether it comes in the form of liberal sentiment or conservative “concerns,” both parties — Democrats and Republicans — share a historical and contemporary commitment to antiblackness. They refuse to engage abolitionist work; they are unwilling to abandon their commitment to capitalism; they are quite happy to have their contract killers continue on killing us — and some of them are willing to do it in the name of “racial justice.”
This isn’t a new insight. It’s to be expected. Enslaving and killing black people is central to the development of this democracy: simply put, without slavery, there is no “America.” There is no two-party system; the birth of this very country — as referenced by people like Frederick Douglass and Lemuel Haynes — is steeped in the contradiction between freedom and enslavement. Except that it isn’t a contradiction; slavery founds freedom. “The slave is the foundation of the national order,” Saidiya Hartman once said, and she’s right. Without slavery (which is to say, without blackness) this country would have never come into being — there would be no “liberal” or “conservative.”
I had to take that detour because Campus Reform is so unethical — or inept — in its “reporting” that it has no way of understanding the depths of my and my co-editors’ words. I suspect the authors of that piece know this, which is why they opted not to report on the totality of what I said. Instead, they went the typically antiblack route, finding what they thought were the most salacious comments in order to weaponize their readership against me. Hence, the hate mail.
It happens. It’s brutal and brutally violent, but it happens.
From a certain perspective, I don’t blame them. Ideologically bound to a rather unsophisticated concept of conservatism, those “kids” are regurgitating old ideas in new digital formats. We’ve been here before. It’s no surprise that we’re here now.
But I also want to say that those “kids” aren’t idiots. They know what they’re doing. Picking and plucking what they know are the most “controversial” words from my comments, they knew that article would incense the fools of the world who do not know how to critically think. Those authors, and others like them, have made an art out of throwing rocks and hiding their hands. As a result, I receive threatening and vile messages.
But, call me naive, I think it’s important to set the record straight. I’d rather you — whoever you are — to judge for yourself. If you deem me divisive — and I’m certain some of you will — then that’s fine. I’m not here to make friends. I’ve got love, and a lot of it.
But I would encourage you to harass me on the merits of my words and not the rather vile “reporting” of people who have never taken a class with me or, it would seem, ever read a book in black studies.
In that spirit, I’ve decided to reproduce my words from that talk in full. Judge for yourself; come to your own conclusions. I’ll live with that.
And, sadly, I have to live with just a bit more hate mail for the moment.
Anyway, here are my remarks:
I hadn’t planned to write out my remarks. After all, this was supposed to be more of an interview, a way for people to understand the book, its arguments, and its potential contributions to public and academic discourse. I was excited to share our work with the public. I knew it would be deemed controversial, but there’s nothing new about that.
What was new was an Advocate article that came out last night. According to the article’s author, some people — and who those “people” are remains curiously vague — were upset with this talk. Well, with one notable exception: Louisiana state rep Ray Garofalo Junior, who claimed that a nebulous constellation of politicians and citizens are “concerned” with whether or not this talk reflects LSU. He “also received some questions regarding this series… In particular, what ‘system [should be] dismantled, [and] why does this system requires dismantling.”
I would usually refrain from dwelling on the curious lack of reading skills from the accomplished congressman — “Racism: dismantling the system” is about as clear as one can get about what system should be dismantled and why — but Representative Garofalo’s lack of careful attention to detail exposes a critical dimension of the religion of white rage: namely, that rage rarely engages rationally or deliberately.
We argue in the text that white rage is a religious affect, one that is not governed necessarily by reason or cognition, but instead by a set of discursive and mythical structures that have hardened over time. White rage shows itself in everything from the constitution to “Make America Great Again” claims, from NFL protests against Kaepernick’s protest to the figuration of angry white women. It shows itself in liberal and conservative garb, too; white rage pay no allegiance to party or partisanship.
We say much of this, albeit in a more detailed fashion, in the introduction, which is available on the website for the book. And yet, it seems that those who are “concerned” have yet to take the time to look through the pages, to skim the text and make sense of our claims.
Perhaps this lack of consideration was an oversight on Garofalo’s part. And I’m sure there are members of the public who are upset with this talk — as the videos show, white supremacy has been rampant and blatant under the trump administration. But no matter the circumstances, the more pertinent question for me is, why would there be concerns about a talk about antiblackness and racism? Garofalo implies that this talk impugns conservatives, so maybe that’s the reason. Maybe “conservatism” is just a euphemism for white supremacy and its affective variant, white rage.
After all, the level of “concern” expressed by the good congressman seems exorbitant to the task we’ve been brought here to execute. This is a talk about a book. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. And yet, the very title of the text — not its argument nor its scholarly merits — incites “concern.” Universities put on book talks all the time. And yet, a state legislator is concerned because a university is doing what it’s supposed to do. For all of the discourses of free speech, this seems, to me anyway, to be a profound attempt to police the speech of researchers and scholars. I guess free speech is only free when it is uttered by those who have freedom. And, in this country, that would track.
But perhaps what is most befuddling to me, what boggles my mind, is that none of us — not one of us on this panel, including the moderator — explicitly identify as liberal. In fact, if the good representative had read the introduction to the book before taking and talking to the press, he would know that we are just as critical of liberalism as we are of conservatism. It turns out that we’re already balanced.
But more to the point, and here’s where I’ll end my little comments, it’s striking to me that conservatives would be “concerned” about a text that is trying to analyze, and then push against, racism. the philosopher in me reads this logically: the negation of a negation is a positive — which is to say, if you’re concerned about those who are against racism, then perhaps you’re proving the existence of racism in and through your opposition. Maybe the good representative’s “concern” isn’t about “balance,” but instead about preserving a system of antiblack and white supremacist violence. And if this is the case, then maybe that’s what conservatism is all about.
“why does this system need dismantling?” Garofalo asks.
As I sat with his words, I recognized: Garofalo and his supporters/colleagues feign ignorance because they do not want things to change.
I guess conservatism really is about maintaining violence — antiblack racist violence — against others.
Read. Think. Assess.
And then write the hate mail.
That way, we are all on the same page.
